Category Archives: Personal History

A brief chat with Keith Povall

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This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts featuring brief interviews with some of the friends I have made online.

Keith Povall and I have never met but I know more about him (and he about me) than most of the people that live on our street. It’s a rare day that we do not exchange a few words.

Keith is a curry chef; raises carnivorous  plants and, of course, a blogger. He is also the curator of a cringe-inducing (for me) archive of photos of people wearing sandals and sox. Yes, he was a dry, biting sense of humor.

You also need to know that I am a shameless anglophile. I love all things British. The way they talk, their food, and their weather. So, my plan to to touch base with Keith every week or so and get his take on things happening in the world.

And when we run out of things to talk about, I’ll introduce you to some other lovely people.

AUDIO: Interview with Keith Povall (13 min)

Covering election returns

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Election night was a big night for radio station news departments. Or, they were back in the 70’s in the little town where I worked.

The candidates would crowd into the county clerk’s office and watch as the votes were written on a big chalk board. The radio station news guy would setup a small transmitter and send back updates that were broadcast live. You were either there… listened to us… or heard the results the next morning at the local coffee shop.

When I started working with The Missourinet (a statewide radio network) in the mid-80’s, it wasn’t that different. One of our reporters would set up at the Secretary of State’s office with a dedicated land-line (before cell phones). Maybe they used one of the state’s phones, I don’t recall. But the reporter would phone in regular updates to the network newsroom where they’d go out to affiliate stations around the state.

Sometime in the 90’s technology improved to the point where we could Telnet into the the state computers (via very slow modem’s) and access the numbers directly. And then report them over the network.

Fast forward to the Web. No more Telnet but those early websites were very glitchy. And slow. But they got better every election. It was a wonderful thing. Anyone with internet access could see the returns as they were tabulated. But it was still easier for radio stations (and their listeners) to take our reports than produce their own.

Last week one of our news directors stopped by my office to talk about what we would do online for the upcoming election. Missouri’s Senate race is the Main Event and we’ll have reporters at both candidates venue. They’ll do interviews and feed those back to the network where reporters will be working the Secretary of State’s website.

One the other end of the information pipe, people will still be listening to the radio and watching TV but I expect Twitter and Facbook to be where many get their first information. (Does the Secretary of State have a Twitter feed?). And most of it will be mobile.

Eventually we’ll all vote electronically, without standing in line. And we’ll see the results in near real time.

Will this elections more susceptible to fraud? Girl, please! Is the TSA making flying safer?

Living in the cloud

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I’m no longer on the company computer network. My iMac is one of only a half dozen or so Macs in the building and I made very little use of the network anyway. And it’s something of an experiment.

I had one of the first personal computers in our company. I bought a Zenith back in the late 80’s and used it for word processing and for tracking affiliate stuff. It was connected to no thing and nobody (except my little dot matrix printer)

The first “network” in the company –as far as I can recall– was a peer-to-peer lash-up in the Missourinet newsroom. No network server, just individual PC’s (Compaq’s with 20 MEG hard-drives) talking to each other.

I don’t remember the exact evolution after that but before long the building was networked and as we added offices throughout the country, they came online. And we now have two full-time network administrators and the network has become critical to the operation of our company.

So why did I cut the cord?

As one of the “web guys,” most of my work has been taking place “in the cloud” for some time. I access company email from a web browser and can do just about everything I need to do, without being on the company grid.

Plus, anytime there was a software upgrade, I had to ask someone with admin privileges to do it for me. Sort of like having your mom come unzip your pants so you could pee. Unpleasant for everyone.

When coworkers need to send me a file that is too large to attach to an email, they drop it on one of the network drives I can no longer access from my iMac. I’m working around that and will eventually get them to put it up on my iDisk, Dropbox or drip.io. Which works in the other direction, too.

For me the Net has become the network. Lots of storage, nearly ubiquitous access, great tools. I feel like a dog that chewed through his leash. Woof!

Attachments

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My pal Keith pinged me this morning to let me know there was a problem with this website. I raised the hood to discover that all content (posts, pages, media, etc) was gone. Eight years of posts. About 5,000. I have a back-up from about 3 weeks ago, but still…

Not so long ago this would have sent me to DEFCON 5. But I’ve been reading about ego and how we become attached to and identify with things and ideas, and I found I was eerily calm. What if all my clever posts and the rest vanished forever?

I spent a few minutes considering this and realized they were/are nothing more than footnotes on a past that no longer exists (except in my head). What’s happening this moment is more important (and real).

What have we learned, grasshopper? That we are not our thoughts, OR our blog posts.

Facebook. One more time.

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Yesterday I created a Facebook account. This is the third, possibly the fourth, time I have attempted Facebook. I say “attempted” because I have never quite “gotten” Facebook. I think I understand social networks as well as the next person but this platform has just never been a good fit for me. So why give it another shot?

A couple of reasons. One, I’d like to better understand why FB is home to half a billion people around the world. Two, social networking has become a bigger part of my job and I can’t properly support clients without a feel for Facebook.

Connecting and communicating with people you know seems to be at the core of Facebook. I send you a “Friend Request” and, if you accept it, I can see some for all of what you’re doing on Facebook, depending on how you have your privacy settings configured. If you don’t accept, I’m blocked.

I’ve had lots of conversations with Facebook users in an effort to understand it (without actually using it). A common theme goes something like this:

Jane is miffed that Bill refused to accept (or ignored?) her friend request. He doesn’t want her to be part of his online life and she’s not happy about it. She thought they were, well, friends.

In the next breath, Jane is explaining why she is getting creeped out by the co-worker who keeps sending her friend requests. The irony is completely lost on Jane.

Some Facebook users deal with this by just accepting all friend requests and ignoring the stuff from the not-really-friends. Others just ignore the requests.

I don’t plan on spending any more time on Facebook than is necessary to understand how it works. I’ll auto post from my blog, YouTube, Twitter and all the rest. So, there will be no shortage of stuff on my “wall,” but it all originates from somewhere else where anyone can see what I’m up to. But that’s clearly less convenient that seeing all within the Facebook compound.

How will I handle “friend” requests (assuming I get any)? I’ll probably ignore them unless we already have an online connection (and I probably won’t give you a kidney, either).

So I’m headed off to Facebook with the same enthusiasm as for my first boy-girl dance party mom made me attend (on Bill Wicker’s patio). I didn’t dance there either.

KBOA photos (high rez scans)

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One of my first attempts at a website was KBOA830.com. That was about 13 years ago and I’ve moved it around several times since then. The impetus for the site was a bunch of photos from the late ’40s, given to me by one of the original employees of the station.

When flickr came along, I uploaded the photos there but the scans were low rez because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve thought about rescanning but that’s one tedious chore.

A couple of months ago I boxed up 120 of the prints and sent them off to ScanCafe where they were “scanned by hand” for about 29 cents each. It took a while (I think the scanning is done in India) but the prints were safely returned along with a DVD of 300dpi images.

KBOA

Turns out I can’t delete the lorez images yet because I’ve linked to them from the KBOA site. Once I get that all sorted out I can get rid of the duplicates.

If you have a box of prints (or 35m slides or negatives), send them to ScanCafe (or one fo the similar services) and get them digitized. And then put them online, because that is the only hope you have of giving them a life beyond your own.

Footnote: I never tire of looking at these images. The tower and the transmitters and the studios… all of the expensive stuff it took to communicate in 1947. If you had something to say to your community (forget the world) you had to build/buy/go to work for one of these entities (radio station, TV, newspaper). All changed now. And changing. I love it.

Survey of radio newsrooms (1988)

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A big part of my job during my early days at Learfield was affiate relations. Periodically, I would survey the stations to learn more about how they used our news and sports. Here’s a snapshot from 1988.

  • 2/3 of stations had a full-time news person (I’ll bet it’s not 1/3 today)
  • I was insensitive or stupid or both in asking about sex. It was a different time.
  • Almost half had a wire service?! Amazing. Can’t be more than 10% now.
  • “Cassette recorders” – Ah, my favorite. A world before digital recording.

Back in those pre-web days, we also did a newsletter each month. One page, front and back. I typed it on a typewriter, made copies and put them in the mail. Example: Missourinet newsletter – Jan87

The whole process now seems … quaint. Typewriters and envelopes, once a month. But there was a simplicity that seems appealing in retrospect.

There is no 26 Year Pin

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Today marks the beginning of my 27th year at Learfield, the company I work for. There’s not much to say that I haven’t shared here already. On my drive to the Coffee Zone, I made a mental list of those who have been with the company longer: Clyde, Clarice, Joyce, Roger, Greg, Charlie, Bob… that’s about it.

The nature of our business has changed a good bit but the culture is –remarkably– still pretty much intact. No small feat, given that we now have hundreds of employees in offices scattered throughout the company. But our senior managers make a real effort at sharing the best of who we are as a company with new employees.

So this is one of those “If you’re happy and you know it, grab your ass!” posts. And if pushed to finish with a bit of wisdom, it might be that the company you work for and the people you work with are as important as the work you are doing.

The Log Cabin

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“The Log Cabin was famous for its barbecue sandwiches and curb-service beer. You simply pulled into the pot-holed parking lot surrounding the tiny building… tooted your horn… and a waitress could come out to the car and take your order. If it was dark enough or the waitress was in a good mood… it was possible to buy a beer before reaching legal drinking age. I have no idea what kind of license allowed them to do business this way.”
Wow. This is a rare find, indeed. I have never seen a photo of the Log Cabin. I’m not sure how someone got this one without getting a serious ass kicking. The Log Cabin parking lot was dark! If the Log Cabin fry cooks didn’t invent curly fries, they perfected them. [Photo courtesy of Dennis Dean]

The president and my First Lady

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Earlier this year, Barb attended an event for President Obama in St. Louis. I’m pretty sure you only got a hug if you wrote a check but it’s still a nice picture.

I’m not thrilled with everything our president has done (or not done) but if I were, someone else would be pissed, so…

I wish him well.