Month: April 2008

Patti: In a few words

i’m not sure how i would be able to put it all in a few words, but here’s what Patti’s office had to say about her:

Organized, dedicated, leader……. are a few words that can be used to describe Patti Kohrt, Assistant Manager of the McAllen Branch Office. She devotes herself to knowing the A-Z’s about the title industry and the profession that she loves. According to Patti, her greatest passion is learning something new everyday, to bring people together for a common goal and to educate people about the title industry. Patti has represented Edwards Abstract at the 2007 Region VIII County Clerk’s Annual Conference and will be a presenter at the 2008 Annual County & District Clerk’s Continuing Education Seminar. She joined the Edwards Team in 2002 and has been a licensed escrow officer for over ten years. She has previous knowledge and experience in the real estate law, corporate law and municipal law. Patti has a very full life that includes volunteer work in her church and community organizations as well as guiding and sharing her life with her family.

back to my high school weight

or at least that’s my goal.  They say that you gain weight when your married for some reason.  i don’t see why.  i’m not any taller now then i was back then.  so i’ve worked on cutting out the sodas, and tacobell, and mcdonalds. 

i’m not sitting around watching tv all the time or anything but i’m not very active unless we’re out doing a show or something.  and that hasn’t been all that often anyway.  so last night patti and i went and got a bike.  hannah came with and she got one too.  i haven’t ridden in a while but they say it’s like ridding a horse, you just have to get right back on, wait no.. it’s like an elephant.. you never forget. 

after all that work

for years i’ve been working on getting RDS in the valley.  As long as i’ve been working here i think actually.  No one else in the valley’s doing it.  I love going to san antonio or Houston or any other town that has rds.  After years of trying to get them to buy the equipment for me, of begging other stations to give me their old stuff, i finally got a station in Albany to give up their old stuff to me.  I also got the equipment to interface with our network from ebay, and after some code changes finally got our system to talk to this vintage equipment. 

So now, if you listen to any of our stations you probably have noticed that your radio receivers have come to life all of a sudden with RDS text.  Typically it’s only the station ID, but it’s also sending PTY Codes, which tell your radio what type of station it is.  So for KTEX, it’s telling your radio it’s a country station and automatically set’s your eq for a country sounding eq.  Also if your receiver supports RadioText, you can push your Info button and get the Artist and Title of what’s playing. 

Yesterday the bosses came up to me asking, "if i’m listening on an analog radio, not an hd, what’s on the display?" so they finally noticed.  And as planed, questions like "why doesn’t it scroll like other markets"?  So i got to pitch, "If we had the new equipment, that stuff supports PS_SCROLL.  Then today i got an email from a guy in corporate basically asking "Can i replace your FMB-10’s with the FMB-80?" 

uh.. gee let me think about that…

Elaine, website, visitor pack, and projector network.

We’ve had Elaine at church since Saturday.  Tonight is finally the last night.  Not that it’s been bad, but i’ve missed being at home.  On top of Elaine, we’ve had a projector problem that actually revealed three problems.  overheating caused by clogged filters.  but can’t change the filters because when sonnie installed these, they didn’t use the right mount plates so the ones they used blocked access to the filters.  so Randall made a new mount interface so i could use the proper plate.  The overheating took it’s toll on the projector so that needs to be sent in for repair.  While the 2nd projector was removed from the video chain, i noticed the the other projector was acting funny.  the sync isn’t in balance anymore and that’s revealed a problem with our video distribution equipment.  that stuff is over 11 years old.  so that’s getting replaced.  On top of all that, pastor is still bugging for the new visitor pack dvd.  I’ve been spending most of my free time (ha!) rebuilding the church website.  you can see the Release Candidate or ABGRACE RC1.0 here.  The official launch is Saturday.  It’s built on wordpress and the podcast is linked to the iTunes store.  Hopefully everything will be functional and ready by saturday.  I can’t afford to wait on this anymore, i need to finish that dvd and not to mention make a master of the elaine hollar series.  Oh well.. next week will be back to normal.

The solution to all of my problems

it’s about time they come up with one of these.  Rane, one of the manufacture of audio tools and processors has come up with that one component that’s been missing from everyone’s audio rig.  It’s also the house engineers hardest job trying to keep the singers happy.  Musicians are not so bad.  singers are.  I could go as far as to say that i hate working with singers sometimes.  “I need more of this, or less of that”  well.. apparently i wasn’t the only one feeling this way.  Behold the PI 14.  I think i’m going to get three of these, one for each building.

Datasheet

saturday mornings

out at the island right now, patti is at her yearly TLTA conference so i’m at the condo watching saturday morning cartoons, funny thing is.  they are not the same as they used to be.  So brought up the interweb and started watching old garfield episoides on u-tube.  one of the episoides reminded me of an old sketch i saw once.  i wonder if it’s on here too.  low and behold… Video Pirates. 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k%26hl%3Den
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9jTM4ZOa69U%26hl%3Den

King of the Hill – Walker Style

A good friend of ours, John Walker, did this for a school project. I used to love watching King of the Hill, even thought it came on at 11:00 at night, i wouldn’t mind staying up past the news, and even married with children just to watch it. probably one of my all time favorites. My fav. character was boomhower.

Part 2

impasse

After talking with the wife we are pretty much in agreement that i’m not spending enough time at home. I mean, look at this week.

Sunday morning, church. after that uploaded the services, began preparing the radio show, setup the family life building for the evening service, left church for a while to go to Marc’s leadership meeting and lunch. a good break, but then after that back to church to repair the DVD which apparently recorded the entire worship service without any audio. (and no one in the control room bothered to tell me that they couldn’t hear anything until the announcements began) so had to rip the dvd, add the audio from the cd, then burn back to dvd. finally got home around 8
Continue reading impasse

as if i didnt’ have enough to do already

i have been bugging CC to get me RDS equipment for our stations ever since i’ve been able to ask. Every time it get’s knocked out of the budget. It’s been a pet project of mine for a while but it wasn’t until recently that i finally made a break through. with shoestrings, duck tape and paperclips i finally got Hotkiss on RDS. RDS is a method where newer receivers in most cars are able to display text information sent from the station on the receiver’s display. It doesn’t support PS_SCROLL where the artist and tile and stuff automatically “scroll” across the display but it works. If your receiver has an INFO button, you can push that and get all the extra data. So far there has been a good response on it. If i can prove to mgt that this is worth while, maybe they will get me decent equipment that does support PS_SCROLL. I was able to horde up two more encoders, give away from bigger markets upgrading to better equipment. I’m going to install these on KBFM and KTEX hopefully Thursday night when we do another shutdown.

I also got Wild’s website changed over to the new template 2.0 format. Now i’m going to work on KTEX and hopefully have that done alot sooner than i was able to get wild’s up. now that i know what i’m doing. In the midst of all that i’m also shooting to get the new church’s website done this week too.

Oh and the finely’s computer still chugging away on my bedroom floor. Almost done there.