Month: October 2007

Four things conspired to make Monday a great day for me.

1. I’m a complete space freak. Anything space or NASA, I’m all over it. I check on the Mars Rover status at least once a week and I’ve read Steve Squyres’ book. I keep up with shuttle orbiter processing. I’m a member of the Planetary Society and listen to Planetary Radio (an obscenely nerdy weekly radio show, carried on WREK on Sunday mornings). I’ve been running the SETI@Home screensaver number cruncher since the day they launched 8+ years ago (yes I believe in little green men). As a teenager, instead of posters of bikini-clad models and rock bands, I had glossy blowups of Saturn and Earth from space, and a big fat copy of the “Shuttle Operators Manual”. Oh, and I got an aerospace engineering degree from Georgia Tech many years ago, although that didn’t turn out to be much use, just enough to get me some money so I could go back and get a more useful degree.

Sooooanyway, there’s a space shuttle mission about to go up that launched Tuesday. And I’d been dutifully following NASA’s prep for that launch for 2 months: orbiter processing, rollover to VAB, stacking with the tank and SRBs, roll to pad, FRRs and press conferences, all of it. Most of it though the fine folks over at nasaspaceflight.com.

So on Friday night I recalled that I’d heard earlier this year (at a NASA presentation) that they were going to try to feed launch video in HD during the October launch. Hmmm, I wonder what happened to that? Some quick hunting around and …

Omigodomigodomigodomigodomigodomigodomigod NASA has launched their HD signal! It’s still an engineering test, and so they haven’t made a public announcement really, but there it is! It’s on the same satellite that carries the existing NASA TV to cable companies. This isn’t the direct-to-home satellite like Dish or DirecTV, this is a backend distribution sat like networks use; it’s C-band and requires a Big Ugly Dish. And sorry, not even close to being available on the net.

So that was Friday night. My immediate thought was of course “I need to see this ASAP” and of course I work for a very well known cable news network, so I knew I had access to the satellite infrastructure that could make it happen. Two days of blackberry emails later, and there I was working into work on a Sunday night to set it up. And it worked! The shuttle launchpad in HD!

So THEN some of the newsroom jocks get wind of this and now suddenly they went live with it on Tuesday morning. The HD version of this very well known cable news network launched a month and a half ago, and this is exactly the kind of material that is completely compelling in HD. So for the late morning launch, they fired up an HD control room, staffed it, etc, just to take advantage of what essentially popped into my head on Friday night. The freaking president of the company knows my name right now, and it is a very big company.

2. The Dalai Lama has been in Atlanta for a week, as part of festivities related to the launching of his official relationship with Emory. The concluding event for “The Visit” was a big gathering at Centennial Olympic Park today, with a stage full of dignitaries and many thousands in the park there to here him speak. It was quite remarkable. I’ve heard him speak before (never in person though) and he really should not be missed. If I find a transcript of the speech I will update this post. It’s truly powerful stuff.

3. We finally have some rain, and forecasts for rain all week. I’m not obsessed with my lawn, but I have put a reasonable amount of effort into it for the past 10 years and it’s painful to watch it die. I’ve promoted healthy root growth through regular elbow grease (and no chemicals) so it can withstand typical drought conditions, but this has pushed it too far. Hopefully even drizzling rain for a few days will help it survive until the drought breaks.

4. How to properly hug a baby*

* I am not a breeder, but I do love playing with other people’s young kids, and this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

WREK was named critical favorite radio station by Creative Loafing in their Best Of Atlanta issue this week. Congratulations to WREK! But …

This is utterly fascinating to me, having been a WREK insider for most of the past 20 years (note: I have been out of WREK pretty much since 2002). WREK today, to me, is a mess. Just utterly painful to listen to. A world-class institution like Georgia Tech, supposedly with a world-class student body, should be producing a student radio station that absolutely blows the doors off of anything in town. Things that WREK did beautifully in the past aren’t even a thought now. Those things that they are still doing are purely on the basis of inertia.

Back in 2000-2001 or so, when there was first serious talk about the WREK studio moving from its location in a remote corner of campus to a location that was in the dead center of campus, I was a loud (and lonely) protesting voice. WREK would A) die during the move, and B) have its musical mission diluted to pointlessness.

I had predicted that the move would kill WREK, because there was literally nobody around besides me who was making a serious effort to engineer the place, and completely ripping up a studio and rebuilding it at a new location is the most violent thing that you can do to any engineered facility like that. However, they did in fact pull off the move in 2004, and it is wholy due to the fact that two people (Thomas Hildebrandt and Jim Evans) came to WREK in the 2001-2002 timeframe and took over for me. Thomas was the first active, productive student Chief Engineer that WREK had had in nearly a DECADE. Without Thomas and Jim, there is no doubt in my mind that, at best, what WREK would have become is a couple of folding tables with an iPod and some microphones. No joke, that is what some college radio stations basically run on.

As for my 2nd prediction, that of devolution into musical and cultural irrelevance, I do think that is in fact happening. It was already happening years ago. WREK is now little different from any other 100-1500 watt college station that you will find in any US city, with virtually nothing left to make it truly unique. There are simply forces greater than WREK (that’s a whole other screed that I’ll post some day, yay!) that are working to make WREK a hollow shell of what it once was. So what you get now are average students, uninspired and uncreative, slouching their way through the day feebly crapping out something they call a radio station, and the listenership that used to be there is now on the internet. It’s a complete joke. The upside is that with WREK going more mainstream and having the more visible campus profile, they are in a better position to weather the attacks from the Georgia Tech administration, whether in the form of the Athletic Association’s desire to bring “professional” commentary to sports events, or in the form of the President’s office desire to satisfy a wealthy donor and muscle professional public radio into WREK’s powerful signal. I think WREK is going to beat both of those threats back, because more and more people know what WREK is and appreciate the principled stance that they take on their programming.

Which leads back to the CL accolade. Every year as far back as I can remember, CL routinely declares that WRAS is the best station. For the average reader of (and worker at) CL, I’m in complete agreement that WRAS’s tired corporate-wannabe college-fluff pop rotation programming is perfect, and WRAS runs an incredible tight ship. Occasionally CL would break things up and throw the award to WRFG. But this year CL was aware of the threats to WREK, having done two or three brief article s over the past year about them. So I think they decided to throw a bone to WREK, because I am certain that WREK could make great use of a “Best Of Atlanta” accolade right now to fend off the attacks, and CL probably knew that.

Props to WREK student management in running their defense. They’ve been doing exactly what I would be doing in that regard, namely getting the word out by raising their profile with the student body, exercising their alumni base, and engaging the press. I’ve said many times that the only way that WREK will win this is in the court of public opinion.

And godspeed to them in that.