Cabling

I don’t often talk about my work here on Cruft. While I find professional television and computer technology a fascinating career, many are more interested in my adventures in my kitchen instead.
Here’s a little tidbit to show you how my somewhat irreverant style surfaces in my professional life.
One of the trade magazines I read is TV Technology, a fairly good source for news and opinions. My favorite column is by The Masked Engineer, a TV engineer that hides behind a psuedonym while he/she writes about the FCC, industry players, and other TV trends in a humorous way.
In a column last year, The Masked Engineer wrote about cabling in facility. His/her viewpoint was so far out of whack with reality that I was forced to reply. I sent in my rebuttal soon after and was suprised to find it in the current issue.
(Loyal Cruft readers might recognize the use of photos and humor to make my points)


Of course, the Masked Engineer and Belden are full of crap in their idea that reasonable tie-wraps can hurt the signal quality. Belden is the same company that once advocated running SDI video over Cat 5 cable. If anything would be bad for signal quality it woud be running CCIR 601 over unshielded cable designed for ethernet.
We’ve had a fully SDI plant for ten years now, with tie wraps, and without any troubles with cabling. By far our biggest signal troubles are with RS-232/422 cabling long lengths and patchbay jack failure, neither of which have anything to do with tie wraps.
Perhaps we’ll have an Indiana Jones style showdown at NAB…

More change to LA radio

This may be old news, but it looks like Arrow 93.1 ‘The Best Classic Rock’ is now gone, replaced with 93.1 Jack FM ‘Playing What We Want’.
More change to the LA radio scene is probably a good thing, but alas it is not a Top 40 station like Kiss-FM going away.
I’m listening now to it and it sounds like a mild rock station with 70s & 80s stuff.
There a few googleable articles on the Jack FM format here and here that shine some light on what to expect.
Taking a look at Yes.net will give up the details.
This morning, they’ve played:
SUPERTRAMP – Goodbye Stranger
MARCY PLAYGROUND – Sex And Candy
THE STEVE MILLER BAND – Abracadabra
WAR – Why Can’t We Be Friends?
BON JOVI – You Give Love A Bad Name
LONDONBEAT – I’ve Been Thinking About You
STYX – Too Much Time On My Hands
BONNIE TYLER – It’s A Heartache
DEF LEPPARD – Animal
THE BEATLES – Get Back
THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS – Heartbreak Beat
JOURNEY – Any Way You Want It
SHAWN MULLINS – Lullaby
TALKING HEADS – Once In A Lifetime
CARL DOUGLAS – Kung Fu Fighting
ZZ TOP – Legs
Well, that is some playlist. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether it is good or bad.

What to do at a party in Austin

The traditional end to SxSW Interactive was a party at Bruce Sterling’s house on Tuesday night. With Bruce living in Pasadena for a year, this presented a problem in 2005. Thanks to the marvels of corporate sponsorship, the party was still held at the American Legion Hall.
One of the sponsors was Wired magazine. On every table were tons of little postcards about their Nextfest conference. Martin made a video about what I did with the cards.
Check out Martin’s post and watch the House of Cards.

Where did your domain name come from?

I watched a panel today at SxSW and the moderator, Lynne Johnson, asked a great question of the panel. She asked each of them to explain where the name of their weblog came from. Hearing their answers was great and I think everyone should explain where the name of their weblog comes from.
So, I encourage you to explain the origins on your own weblog and use the tag ‘blognameorigin’ to help people find our post.
For those new to posting tags, basically a tag is a kind of flag to search engine on how they can sort your post. If you put this code in your post, it should work.
<a href=”https://technorati.com/tag/blognameorigin” rel=”tag”>blognameorigin</a>
And then you should see a link like this appear: on your post. If you click on that link, you should see the posts of all others that used that tag.
With that said, back to the main idea…
The Story of cruftbox.com
Back in 1997 I registered the domain name pusateri.org as a personal site for photos and stories. It served me well and in early 2000 I started using pusateri.org/cruft for my nascent weblog. The word cruft was a word I liked since I had first heard it in college.
To me the word represented exactly what my site was, random bits of unimportant crap.
In late 2001, I decided I wanted a site for the weblog alone, to keep the family stuff a little separate from my ranting weblog. I wanted cruft.com as my domain name, but alas, it was taken.
John Walker, founder of Autodesk, had already registered cruft.com, .net, and .org. I emailed him and asked about his plans. He said he wasn’t doing anything with them, but that he was saving them for something ‘good’. I apparently didn’t count as ‘good’ and he didn’t want to give me any of the domain names. (It’s four years later, and e still hasn’t done anything with those domain names…)
Back to the drawing board I went, trying to figure out what to do. After a bit, I came up with the idea that the site was realy a container for my cruft and not so much cruft itself. At that point, I started playing around with names like cruftcan, cruftstuff, and boxocruft. I finally settled on cruftbox, mainly because it was a easy to pronounce word and it ended with a X, the mark of all things high tech.
And so, cruftbox.com was born.
What’s your story?

Giveaway



Giveaway, originally uploaded by Argyle.

If you find me at SxSW and say hello, I’ll be happy to give you this fine, limited-edition Cruftbox can/bottle opener.

Michele made this for me and I’ve got a bagful to give away!

SxSW ]I[

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Austin sipping on a cup of coffee.
This is my 3rd SxSW conference. It’s starting to feel quite familiar.
Last night at Break Bread with Brad I talked with many people, drank beers, and even got into a discussion about metadata, nomenclature, taxonomy, and archival of assets with people that actually knew what I was talking about.
The conference shifts into high gear today with the Keynote kickoff.
If you’re at SxSw, say hello!

Ego Boost II

Yet another event is causing my already huge ego to swell to exceedingly large proportions.
I’ve been interviewed for an InformationWeek article on How five executives got blog religion. With a picture and everything. My mom will be proud…
I don’t think they quite get my point about lunch.
My point about seperating work from my blogging was this: If there is an issue at work that I couldn’t speak of openly at lunch with my staff like personal performance, my frustrations, future plans, it should not be on my personal blog.
Why? Because when I say something in a public realm, whether at work or on my blog, it affects my work relationships and the environment my staff have to operate in daily.
I cannot make my staff or co-workers uncomfortable or upset, just because I have the need to vent in my off-hours. There’s plenty of other stuff to write about and I have plenty of buddies to vent to over the phone when the need arises.
Other than that, an interesting bit on the various ways weblogs are finding roles inside the business world.