Me in December 1994, at the Xmas lunch in Studio 2. When I had hair on top. Hmmm.

Wow, 51 days, but as I’ve said, this is nothing new for me. All it means is that I can’t (or shouldn’t) jump in the car and go somewhere, or have lunch at the shopping centre or have coffee/brekky with my photo mates. I miss that. But otherwise, I’m just spending more time at this PC – not wasting it but hacking (oops, wrong word) into stuff that I’ve been putting off for a long time.

One thing is that, as I own an ASUS laptop, they sent me an invitation to buy 1TB (yes, Terabyte) of space to back up my files for US$13.94 for one year. Obviously, once they’ve got me one time, then I’m probably going to repeat it next year but the price is low enough that I took the bait.

So for the past few nights I’ve been uploading files. It’s pretty slow as my upload speed is only 5Mb/s (only!). It seems very slow – I started a 58GB folder at around 10am this morning and it’s still uploading now at 5pm. It doesn’t matter, it’s a background process.

I’ve used about 62GB of my 1,024GB allowance. A Terabyte is a lot. I’ll see if this works and if it doesn’t, $21.78 is not a lot to consider wasted.

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I’ve been wasting an awful lot of time getting MusicBee into order and really enjoying it. I’ve found there’s another view that I didn’t show yesterday, Recently Added:

Since this is the first time I’ve built my Library, they’re all recently added. Here’s another view of just one composer/performer:

Yeah, 26 CDs of Mozart. It gives statistics too:

Hmm,  14,946 tracks. J.S. Bach 405 “tracks”; Most Played Quincy Jones; Most Played Genre, Classical; Most Played Album, The Best. The Best who? Maybe Quincy Jones but it could be Mozart The Best, I don’t know. I don’t really care.

This RIFFINFO is strange. It seems to be any track that it can’t find on the internet but I’m not sure. Time will tell. I’m enjoying this.

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I continue to be astounded at the stupidity of the USA. They are showing their absolute worst face to the world, especially personified by the Dump, the worst, most stupid president in the history of their country.

What’s set me off today is the reports of COVID Parties in Washington State. Young people, young but adults, are holding parties where people who have been tested as positive for the virus are encouraged to mix with uninfected people in the belief that these young people will catch the virus, but due to their age will be OK and recover and  become immune.

But what about the people they meet in the weeks after the parties? Can they be sure they won’t pass the virus on to strangers or their families?

It seems to me this may well be a test of natural selection in action. The smart people will survive and the dumb, stupid ones may die. Hooray. I approve. Unfortunately they will probably take the innocent elderly with them.

The US infection rate is essentially out of control and with over 73,000 deaths already and climbing at a rate of near 3,000 a day, they have no control. Yet Republican state governors (equivalent to our state premiers) are relaxing their stay-at-home orders and so people are out mixing, partying, going back to work. As I said, it’s an intelligence test. Let’s hope this sees a rise in the IQ of the country as the dumb ones die.

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Another suggested theme for a novel:

• In the panic of the pandemic, a vaccination success is announced. It’s made by a seemingly reputable lab and in the race to be first, is human tested but to minimum standards. It is widely distributed and injected and looks to be the answer.
  But a few months later, reports start up of side effects which were not found in the trials. In particular, personality changes. No, NOT ZOMBIES, I am not suggesting that, but changes like dementia and aggression. By this time millions of people worldwide have been vaccinated. Now read on …
• While the USA are incapacitated by their mishandling of the virus, a large Asian power decides to take the chance and annex Taiwan by force. Taiwan fights back bravely but are being overwhelmed and call for their treaty partners to come to their aid. This includes the USA but also Australia. The US Navy has been decimated by virus infections on nearly all their ships in the Pacific fleet and struggles to respond. Australia’s navy is largely at full strength and is forced into action against this powerful foe. Now read on … Tom Clancy, are you reading this from your grave? John Birmingham, are you there?

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This is where I used to work, the job I used to do in 1979 when I took this photo. That’s the lovable Scot, Tom Mitchell at the desk.

The main desk in the bottom centre was programmable (in the days before computers) with 12 events, where an event was an action such as rolling a film projector and switching it to the output 5 seconds later. Or playing a videotape and switching it to line 8 seconds later. Going into a program, that was all it had to do until the next break, be it a commercial or a slide and cassette or a change of machine or whatever

On the desk in front of Tom is the “log” a printed set of paper sheets telling us what to program into the desk, i.e. every film, videotape, commercial, promo, whatever, with their durations, key numbers etc. we marked this up with actual times switched to air (a legal requirement as well as for client billing). As the operator, we had to go through this when we started our shift and check everything, so that we knew where things were coming from and that they actually existed, and so on. This marked up log went back to the “Traffic” department for their records next day.

All this switching was supposed to be automatic, based on the times programmed in, but we found this wasn’t satisfactory so we had to do all the switching manually. That way we chose when to switch and I liked to keep things tight, not allowing much time before I hit the Take button for the next item. Otherwise we slipped time and it meant we had to drop something to get to the news on time at 6pm exactly. That was one of the hardest things, keeping to time and working out how late you were  and what you can cut to make up time.

Twelve events sounds a lot but in a busy period between programs it wasn’t enough and we had to program more events in while we were switching the short items. It took intense concentration!

The black monitor on the right showed what was coming out of the desk and being sent to the transmitters. It’s hard to see but there was a colour TV receiver in the gap to the right of it which showed the “off air” signal coming back from an antenna, i.e. just a normal TV receiver, so that we could be sure we were on air and things were OK.

Top left, lotsa buttons above and below the three meters which were the remote controls for the transmitters at Bickley, 13Km away. Microphones for talkback, i.e. talking to the machine operators in the adjacent area or the studio control rooms etc.

Beer o’clock. More another time.