Snow and Stars

Snow and Stars was Originally Posted on October 27, 2008 by lavarock

Much of the state has been under a draught condition, although we seems to have been having reasonable rain here on the Big Island. Then again, we have 11 of the 13 world climate zones so our weather patterns are quite diverse. The island has microclimates and actually makes its own weather.

Speaking of varied weather, yesterday morning we had our first snowfall of the season. The inch of snow wasn’t there long, melting in a couple of hours. Still, they closed the road to the the summit of Mauna Kea for a while, to the dismay of the astronomers. Mauna Kea means White Mountain in Hawaiian.

You can always see the current weather on the summit at the following URL (http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/weather/). Many of the webcams have an animation feature where you can see a day’s worth of video compressed down to a minute. If you watch closely, oftentimes you can see stars during the nighttime sequences or the reflection of the moon on the top of another observatory.

Speaking of stars, I hear the Jefferson Starship is scheduled to appear on island. The group evolved from the Jefferson Airplane fame. In a way, I have a history (albeit small and fleeting) with the Airplane and Starship. When I was a DJ in Kentucky, I would trek to radio programming conferences where I met such artists as Roger Miller, Michael Nesbitt and Kris Kristopherson, among others.

At one conference I met Augie Blume who was promotion manager for the Airplane. He handed out records and promotional materials. Grunt was an offshoot of RCA and featured such artists as the Airplane, Pappa John Creech and Jack Bonus.

Augie was trying marketing the materials to radio stations but commercial and college venues. He also distributed a newsletter called the Grunt Newsletter, a couple pages of info about things happening in the industry. At the time it was not a really flashy publication, but was a fun read. He suggested I write something and submit it. Up until then, my biggest literary contribution to a publication was a few lines in the Jocks column in Billboard Magazine (primarily read by radio and television stations and some in the music field).

I still have a copy of the newsletters here in Hawaii. My contribution was a look at radio station automation and how stations could do away with disk jockeys and engineers and have the programming manager phone in his work. At the time I’m sure many people laughed about the notion. However, today many stations are automated. One station I visited was WOLD. WOLD may sould familiar to some as the basis for a song about an aging DJ. WOLD, the name of an actual station which used Schaefer Automation to control the empty studio.

My Dad was involved in a real estate deal and the company made automation equipment for radio stations. I interviewed there but for some reason did not impres the management. I don’t know why. I think I would have made a great addition to the company, having electronics and radio background. Nowadays you don’t need cart machines and turntales and giant equipment to automate a radio station. A simple small computer can do the job as everything is now done in software. I could write the software now myself with my skills from Hewlett Packard. With MP3’s and a bit of code, you could actially carry a complete station (minus the transmitter) in a very small package. MP3 plays are essentually the same technology minus some timing circuts and links to pull in news from external sources.

A year ago I played with an automation system called SAM that does all of this. The software worked fairly well except they seemed to lack a couple of important features. I found it difficult to jump into the middle of programming if starting fresh and trying to synch up with the current clock. Also stations often pad with instrumentals as they aproach the hour and then pull in a newscast. You might need 30 seconds of usic or a nimute or so. The software didn’t seem tohave a way to fill periods like that as easily as I would liked. Still there was a programming language available and I’m sure if I had hacked away for a while I could have made it work. I just thought it should have been built in. Then again, I only played with it for a wek or two.

So there you have have it, snow and stars, all tied together in a neat package.

Speaking of packages, I just had a birthday but it left a lot to be desired. My hosting company decided to move all the servers across the country with no warning (they had technical issues at the old site and needed to perform a “flash cut”). I spent most of the day fixing problems and SSL certificates. Also, I wanted to take Koa down for a run along the beach but he lost his collar that morning and I didn’t ahve a spare. Dogs must be on a leash at the National Park, so we just played in the yard awhile.

That is all for now, may your day be filled with Aloha and may all of your snow be at least a couple hours away, just like here!