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If you work in a medium to large office you probably have several of those posters glamorizing “Teamwork”, “Courage” or “Fortitude” with a single, stirring image and a slogan to drive it all home like “Because it is in your destiny for greatness!”, “You are part of machine working for the greater good of mankind” or “Stay focused and productive or be replaced”.

I’ve always looked at those as rather simplistic surrogates for actual motivation that employees need to get from their co-workers and management. I’ve wondered if everyone else working at these places gets the same amount of humor, snickers and eye-rolling out of them that I do.

It also makes me wonder why (if a poster with a slogan can motivate the staff) did the company hire such apathetic, easily manipulated people? Surely the people these posters have an effect on must be Star Wars Stormtrooper candidates (”These are not the droids you’re looking for”).

Well, even if the management working at these companies doesn’t have a sense of humor, there is a company that does and you can make your own posters that will probably be more appreciated by your peers than the canned slogans “they” would order out of a catalog. The company is called Despair.com. They have a great sense of humor about the whole corporate poster shenanigans and you can even CREATE YOUR OWN! How cool is that?  Well, they aren’t poster sized, but it’s still pretty darn cool.

Wait! Before you jump there, check out a few custom examples…

I have heard of this custom, free firmware called DD-WRT for a while now, but I needed to purchase a compatible router that would accept the replacement software and the one that was recommended the most by others was the Linksys WRT54GL. It also was one of the most trivial to perform the upgrade.

Right out of the box the stock WRT54GL is a decent router so I ran it briefly to see what features it had and I felt there were just enough to make it worthwhile, but why settle for OK when I could install DD-WRT and wind up with so many additional features? The answer, of course, is ‘I won’t settle for OK’. Read more »

For several years I have been attending the NAB convention and this year I was asked to craft a report for my current employer: ION Media Networks.

>General Observations:

The last few years I have noticed a progressive thinning of broadcast television specific technology and a steady shift toward digital media primarily focusing on its creation, storage, automation and management.The attendees are less and less broadcast engineers and more production people (video editors, sound personnel, cameramen, etc.), a lot of whom are independents and small shops. Then there are the attendees of the RTNDA annexed into NAB which, since 2003, has been entertaining in that you get to see all the 22-year-old journalism majors dressed to the nines trying to impress some news director in the hall with their résumé. Good times.
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Today PaxTV (Paxson Communications - my current employer) begins to dig itself out of the ratings hole it has worked its way into over the years by implementing a new brand and programming outlook. PaxTV is now “i: Independent Television” or just “i”.

While the concept of providing “wholesome” entertainment primarily devoid of sex and violence was actually a pretty good one and an ambitious undertaking by Bud Paxson for a commercial television network (often called the “Seventh Network” after ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, The WB and Paramount), ultimately the shrinking minority of viewers that enjoyed the programming were not enough to keep the network profitable. Other networks also included “family friendly” programming at times during the week, so the competition from the larger networks eroded the novelty of what the PaxTV network was providing.

It also didn’t help that the popular public opinion of the network was that of heavy religious undertones and such strict moral filtering that this rather hilarious “Sopranos” skit by Mad TV helped to reinforce:

I am a fond proponent and avid ‘flag waver’ of local broadcasting and free HDTV and I would be happy to answer questions on the subject for anyone to the best of my ability. It is fun to show friends and neighbors what HDTV looks and sounds like when I invite them into my home theater to watch a live broadcast like Monday night football, prime-time programming or when I play back some of my HD recordings (yes, you can record HD broadcasts at home!) from my PC onto my 65” Widescreen HDTV set. For more technical information on HDTV please follow this link.

Free over-the-air HDTV is available to everyone in almost all markets through their local broadcast station. Since this is a service mandated by the FCC upon broadcast stations, I and others in the broadcast industry are puzzled why most broadcast station owners do not promote this service. Read more »

Since a new tower had been erected in 1997 with HDTV in mind, it already featured a broadband RFS panel antenna used to broadcast the analog channel 29 and was capable of accommodating the future DTV channel on UHF 15. The trick after expanding the building and installing the HDTV transmitter was to combine the output of the two transmitters into the common antenna. This may be very common in the top 10 markets, but it is not something common in this market, so we called in people smarter than me to help make it happen.
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For this facility (KHOG) the gain of the antenna was considerable so that only about 10kW TPO would be needed to meet the maximized ERP level, so the choice of a solid-state Diamond transmitter from Harris was made. The benefits of this choice were that the multiple modules and power supplies allowed for considerable redundancy and fault-tolerance.
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Here is a project I am justifiably proud of. Our corporate engineering management had determined that we were to use a Harris Flexicoder as the core of our HDTV encoding, but outside of that we were to determine what we needed to best integrate it into our facility. Initially, I was not pleased with the choice in encoders as I had seen better performance from the Harmonic encoding systems. However, after getting my hands on more thorough documentation and working with the encoder package that included an integrated ‘Master Control’ module I quickly began to see the potential for the system. I added to our DTV budget, not just the elements needed to encode our studio signal digitally and pass through the network HD signal, but also to monitor and perform simple localized troubleshooting of problems we may (and probably would) encounter in the future.
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A few grainy images of the Andrew side-mounted antenna we ordered for the KHBS DTV transmitter in Poteau, Oklahoma (which serves the Fort Smith, Arkansas market).

Because there was simply no room on the existing tower to place a DTV antenna that would be even marginally effective, I was successful in convincing the company of the need to build the tower and locate the new antenna on it. Read more »