A COVID Christmas

 

So, it’s the night before Christmas, and down at the HEB
not a parking spot remains as far as the eye can see.
People are pretty jovial, in a gallows-humor kind of way,
They know there’s no such thing as Santa and his sleigh.

The bake shop is bustling, home-shoppers are hustling,
and the food samplers are holding sway;
‘Cause who doesn’t like free food while bumping elbows in the store on the night before Christmas Day?

This year’s Christmas is different in so many ways…
the anticipation of family together for a few days
has been shattered by diagnoses of COVID and such,
we’re not getting to spend that time together so much.

So, my wife swapped her kerchief for a face mask instead,
as she’s in quarantine--we must sleep in separate beds.
We watch separate TV’s, and sit five yards apart;  
this social distancing thing really is such a farce.

The stockings were hung from the mantle with care,
in hopes that our grand-kids soon would be there;
But COVID’s put a kabosh on our plans for family fare--
they’ve bugged out to Hempstead to spend their Christmas there.

We’re spending Christmas with each other and the nasty, ol' ‘VID;
watching holiday movies and swilling NyQuil, this illness to rid.
As for Fauci and the others who’ve politicized this craze--
We’ll have a Merry COVID Christmas in spite of you.

(With apologies to the estate of Clement Clarke Moore)

Adventures in Digital CRM Land

We have a new employee whose responsibilities include management of our social media accounts. In bringing her on-task and up to date, we discovered a need for updating permissions on some of these SM accounts, and I discovered, after spending three-fourths of an hour lost in the maze of the ethernet, that my own access to some of these accounts is no longer viable. 

You will understand why, after reading this treatise, O Theophilus, this revelation came as something of a relief. 

The new employee asked me to put the social media account snafu into our CRM/task management system (I’m not going to mention corporate names, but their logo is RedTail.)
I seldom use this “tool,” as I am not in the selling pool, and have no need to enter customer information. And besides, RedTail is clunky to me. 

But I digress; I opened up RedTail and commenced to begin to log-in. If you don’t regularly use some software applications—like all day, everyday—these things will forget you. Or at least they’ll forget your password…so I had to hunt that thing down. In my Evernote. 

I use Evernote everyday. I still can’t remember that password, which is scary because I use Evernote to securely store all my other passwords (and forget it, hackers--they're encrypted.) My smartphone, being smarter than me, is a safe go-to for accessing the inaccessible, or at least the less-memorable. Like passwords. 

So, I got the Redtail password, and of course, it didn’t work; gotta reset that. Reset code was sent to me, you guessed it, via company e-mail…into which I had to log-in. Logging-in to company email is not an efficient use of time. It not only requires that you remember your password…it also entails a secondary level of verification, usually in the form of a text message. 

Did that, got the pass code, did the entry, and gained access to my company e-mail so I could recover the RedTail password reset link they’d sent. The link is only good for 30-minutes. 15- of which had by now rapidly passed. 

Accessing RedTail, finally, I changed my password (and updated it in Evernote) and entered the digital world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which is primarily used for keeping up with folks you want to do business with. Not making assignments, so far as I can see. 

Anyway, by the time I'd accessed the CRM software through three password routines for Outlook, Evernote and RedTail, I think I forgot what I was originally trying to accomplish...oh, yeah--finding the password(s) to access some social media accounts. 

Ironic? You tell me. As a matter of fact…it probably took you less time to read to this point (thank you for your tenacity) than it did for me to negotiate all those passwords and passcodes. 

My father is 92-years old this year and eschews computers with a passion.
His life is pretty simple…and blissful.

Behind the Console: The Great Flood

 

Pre- and Post-show ruminations from Executive Producer, Brent Clanton

Houston recently went through a deep freeze of Biblical proportions: If there had been a 13^th Plague, the polar vortex that hit Texas in mid-February would have been it. The Big Chills—there were two cold-events--arrived just in time for my birthday, which was spent assembling pre-recorded “Blizzard Edition” shows. We knew that with the city’s freeway system iced over, Lance and I wouldn’t be able to get into the studio. The effort would have been moot, anyway, as the building we’re in lost power, and thus internet. The following week, with the Texas Thaw well underway, we looked forward to a mid-March vacation, thinking the worst of the elements was behind us.

But, no…

Four-days into “Spring Break,” I was awakened by a phone call from our building’s manager, who reported a burst water pipe on the 10^th floor had unleashed a flood of water, flowing two floors down, directly into our studio, and “could Lance or I maybe come down and take a look?” I was 20-miles east of Nashville, and Lance was getting his chill thrill on in the Utah Tundra. My wife and I cut our visit short, and immediately drove back to Texas to see what awaited us.

I wouldn’t say the studio was a total loss, but it was clear there would be no live shows originating from our besoddened room without a lot of quick action. The deluge had spilled directly on top of our audio console—a beautiful, 22-channel Audio Arts Engineering D-76 “hybrid” analog-digital beast that was the workhorse of our room. Also lost were microphones, cameras, switches, keyboards, power-supplies…the list was exhaustive—and fatal for the studio.

Our broadcast engineer, Chuck McLeod met me the next afternoon (Friday) and we began to assess the loss--and more importantly, determined what still worked that we could rebuild upon. The power supply to the console was sitting in a puddle of water on the bottom shelf of an equipment rack, 6-inches off the floor, a victim of the splash over from the torrent from above. Removal of some of the audio console busses revealed a hopelessly befouled mother board.

We removed the damaged gear and set about determining the minimum needed to put a show back on the air. McLeod and I spent the entire next day (Saturday) building connector cables and re-engineering our audio chain around a borrowed 8-channel Mackie club mixer. I sent a photo of the Mackie to Lance and said, “this is what happens when you rinse your console in cold water: shrinkage.”

I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch for Chuck and me, and we continued into the late afternoon, removing damaged equipment, tracing circuits, and re-routing and reconnecting what we could salvage.

On Sunday, we completed the work-arounds, contriving a make-shift monitor mute out of a spare headphone amp Chuck had sitting on a shelf. If there was a beauty to be found in all the mess, it was that our original design concept, utilizing analog match boxes for the console output, made it relatively easy to “patch” microphones, audio sources, and other essential gear into our replacement mixer.

We finished up around 7pm on Sunday evening, and I gave the water-stained console a once-over with countertop polish, confident we would be “live” the following morning. To reiterate the obvious, we could not have gone from water-logged to air-worthy in three days without the able assistance of Chuck McLeod!

This writing concludes our first week back from vacation, and our first week doing the show with duct-tape and baling wire. In the coming weeks, I will be reporting to you our repair and reconfiguration of the studio, our new gear installation, and perhaps, a sneak preview as we test the “new & improved” Real Investment Show Broadcast Center & Deli.