"Friend me" not

While I have been fascinated to follow the development of social networks on the web, I have never warmed up to them in practice. The very name sounds oxymoronic--social sounds, well--sociable--and network sounds like work. So I might visit a FaceBook page for information, but I have not built one of my own, and rarely interact with the pages of others. My cell phone is not web connected and sits mostly idle--a text message has never passed its tiny little keypad. For a while I tracked old running buddies via Classmates, but with both ends needing to be paying customers to actually communicate, my skinflint genes kicked in and I let it lapse. The alternate reality site Second Life now moves on without me. I tried to create an avatar there that looked like me, but everything came out way more young and buff than sad reality, and I had no desire to present myself as a blue punk vampire with a face full of steel, or to build a zero-gravity domicile constructed entirely of virtual cornflakes.

So my social life operates in a way a cave man would recognize. I go to where people live and sit within earshot of quiet conversation. I share food, news, blarney and opinion in kitchens and coffeeshops. I like my music live and will pay for the privilege. I embrace my inner throwback. There is no end to the axes I enjoy the grinding of, and I guess social networking is one. Don't friend me, I'll friend you.

Dread air

It was 4:25 am when my phone rang and the voice of Radio Bob delivered the prerecorded message “Gee! It’s awfully quiet here at North Country Public Radio.”--the silence detector on the transmitter telling me that my hasty training as cub radio tech acolyte was about to be put to the test. My first reaction was “Good grief, don’t you realize you’ve reached an English major?” But I was soon engaged in remote viewing of the dimly-understood station automation system via my laptop at home. No joy. So I put on my coffee and drank some clothes and by 5 am was at the station, clueless, but proud to serve. First I woke Joel Hurd from his well-deserved rest to interrogate the transmitter, then I woke Radio Bob in mid-getaway at a downstate hotel room. Yelling “Help” real loud is within my skill set.

Soon Bob was talking to Joel in the studio on one cell phone, and to me—exiled to our Waterman Hill transmitter shack to read dials—on another cell phone. This made it hard for him to use his hand puppets. While Joel may be an engineer, he's a production engineer, and compared to a radio engineer, that’s about as relevant as being a choo-choo engineer. As for me, the web manager—that may sound techy, but web geeks think radio technology is made up of tyuubes and—things. Actually, with the online stream still working, I was thinking “Ha—so much for the legacy platform, it’s time for the true masters of cyberspace to rule. MWAA-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Some hours later Bob had distilled enough information from the mash of our ignorance to make a diagnosis, and Ellen Rocco and Sandy Demarest dispatched themselves south on a high-tech treasure hunt. They brought back a brand new stochastic deverbillator (or something like that) and a mere eleven hours after the dreaded call, we were back on the air. For those who take an interest in the technical specs; it was a metal box, sort of rectangular in shape. I think it may have contained both tyuubes—and things.