This break in posts brought to you by techknowledgy

Yeah, I'm a geek. I earn my living, such as it may be, editing the TV news, doing voice overs for radio commercials, but mainly fixing things. The past couple weeks I've seen just about everything that could quit working at the TV & radio station, do just that. Let's start with e-mail going down quite a bit. Then the whole website. Then there was the radio broadcast computer that quit. One network switch and also a router/firewall died. Not one, but two of the Macs used for editing video, leaving us with only one for a couple of weeks, talk about stress, what happens if the last Mac quits before the replacements show up? Well, it means we cant edit and air the nightly TV news broadcast. Luckly, that didn't happen but I was just getting the new ones configured when, guess what? Two days after we got the replacements in, the video card died on the only Mac that was working previously. Talk about a close call. And then to top it all off, I got a call the yesterday morning that the TV station was off the air and the TV broadcast system wouldn't turn back on. So I had to race in early and fix it. That same night, someone else messed up and aired the news from the previous night. So on my way home I get a call the the news from the night before is running. So I had to turn around and go back to work. Recapture all the news segments. Send them to the broadcast computer so at 8 and 11pm we would air the correct news. Then encode them for the website and replace what was on it.

So let's see if I covered everything that went down the last couple weeks. The local area network, our internet connection, our website and domain, our video editing computers, our radio broadcast computer and our TV broadcast computer. Oh yeah, almost forgot the computer that got a nasty virus and sent out 2 thousand emails after an employee opened and attachment with a 0 day virus. A 0 day virus is one that the anti virus software doesn't detect yet, which makes for a challenging clean up. And guess who had to fix all of it, in between my usual video editing, DVD production and TV show scheduling. Not to mention my own computer repair side jobs after work and on the weekends. Then throw in 3 days of the flu, just to make sure I have that much more work to catch up on.

The good news is, once I finish building a new audio/video production PC this week, I should be more or less caught up. At which point my job shouldn't be so exhausting and I'll have time to start posting here a lot more often. In fact, I promise to post something new in the next 24 hours.... As long as I don't get called in to work to fix something that has crashed. Hmmm, I should turn off my cell phone this weekend. Scratch that, I got 2 computer side jobs this weekend already...