December is typically the low point of my year, the time when I find it hardest to motivate myself. There always seem to be myriad things that need doing, and no motivation.

Well, December is now history. Tomorrow it will be two weeks past the solstice, two weeks past peak darkness, with two weeks still to go before we hit peak cold here in New England. I need to get WNTK on the air from the new Newport (NH, not RI) studio, and everything moved out of the New London (NH, not CT) studio so we can get out of there and stop paying rent and utilities. We've been paying upwards of $500 a month just for Internet service there. The previous owner had an air conditioner installed in the wall of the production studio that dumped its heat into the main studio, where another air conditioner would dump it outside. They'd be running these damned things all year, even while the heat was on.

Gradually we've been moving functionality out of there. The satellite receivers and the computers that run WNTK and WUVR are now in Randolph (VT, not NH, MA, or ME), with WCVR, in a building we own. They're still doing live shows out of New London, but by the end of this month they should be doing them out of Newport, and we can finally get out of there. That will reduce us to Newport, Springfield (VT, not NH or MA) and Randolph in the way of studio facilities.

Why do New Englanders like to re-use the same names so much? Springfield, VT is only twenty miles from Springfield, NH; and, believe it or not, there used to be two Yarmouths and two Falmouths in Massachusetts (the northern part of the Commonwealth broke away in 1820 to become the state of Maine, taking with it a Falmouth and a Yarmouth).

Today I'm at WUMB in Dorchester, MA. I always come here by T, and my walk to the station from JFK/UMass and climbing the usual three flights of stairs left me feeling weak and out of breath, which it didn't do before Covid. Evidently it took more out of me than I thought. I will take the train to Wellesley this afternooon and walk home from there instead of using the Needham train; the exercise will do me good, I think.

There were two wild turkeys strutting around on the grounds of Boston College High School, which I pass on my way to the station. I am always amused to see turkeys in the city; when I was a child in upstate New York you had to go way out into the hinterlands to see them, and they were extremely shy. They invaded the Boston suburbs in the late 1990s and have now joined Cooper's hawks and peregrine falcons as urban wildlife. People pass turkeys on the sidewalks of Cambridge as if they were just another denizen of the city. That's not bad for a forest-dwelling bird that was extirpated from the state by 1850, when almost all of Massachusetts was farm land.

I've been absent from here recently, dealing with work and helping a couple of sick friends. With each passing year, more people I know get sick or die. This year the chairman of the board of the nonprofit that runs my old college radio station was diagnosed with ALS, and another colleague of mine died of melanoma.

As much as people like to pretend otherwise, 50 is not the new 30 and 60 is not the new 40. Nor will the healthiest lifestyle necessarily postpone illness; my colleague who died was a regular runner who had run several Boston Marathons.

The broadcasting company my brother and I own is treading water at best; it's on track to lose a little bit of money this year because two the radio stations we bought were essentially basket cases, and we've had to put a lot of money into building them up. We were helped a little bit by political ads, mostly from Republicans, most of whom lost. Except for the governor, NH is now a blue state.

One of our accomplishments has been to get all six stations streaming on the Internet:

WCFR Springfield, Vermont (80's/90's)

WCNL Newport, New Hampshire (Country)

WCVR Randolph, Vermont (Country)

WNTK New London, New Hampshire (Talk)

WSCS New London, New Hampshire (Classical)

WUVR Lebanon, New Hampshire (Talk)

The talk stations are running programming that was chosen by the previous owner, which we have to keep running for the time being, alas.

Because I can't yet afford to pay myself, I am still working for all of my outside clients. This week has been a zoo; I've had to shuffle my schedule around to deal with two technical crises at one client's stations.

But I still love radio, and plan to do it until the day I drop dead.

Essentially, I've been immersed in the challenges of our radio station group, Sugar River Media.

We have finally got our Vermont country station, WCVR AM 1320 on FM 100.1 and streaming online (http://northcountry1320.com or http://natrix.sugarrivermedia.com:8000/wcvr). It has taken a great deal of work and we waited three months for Comcast to get its act together before taking matters into our own hands and setting up a temporary audio feed using Verizon mobile broadband. We are even starting to get advertisers interested; a local Ford dealership for which my brother and our GM produced a singing commercial last year is back, with the same spot. The FM coverage is comparable to the AM, but of course the sound quality is better.

This is not a run-of-the-mill country station; we have a 3,000-song library that includes local artists, and we are actively inviting independent country artists to send us songs, which we will consider for airplay.

We've also done a lot of work on our classical music station, WSCS 90.9 FM, which serves the Lake Sunapee area of New Hampshire (beautiful countryside, if you've never been there). WSCS is also soliciting recordings from classical artists seeking airplay.

Our other stations... are still works in progress.

I'm driving myself batty dealing with all these radio stations, ours and other people's.

Springfield, Vermont, is not doing well. Once a prosperous industrial town whose factories produced machine tools, it is now depressed and decaying. The guy who formerly ran our radio station there was selling commercials for 17 cents apiece. Even if we sold out at that rate, we'd still be losing money. The guy running one of our other stations in a somewhat larger but still depressed town in New Hampshire said he can make a modest living at $3 per spot.

The Boston and Maine Railroad used to offer service between Boston and Montreal on three different routes; all three are abandoned today, with portions of each converted to bike paths. The Cheshire Branch, which ran from Fitchburg, a city in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, to Bellows Falls, Vermont, ran parallel to the roads I often use to drive to Springfield, Vermont or Newport, NH. It last saw a passenger train in 1958, and was abandoned in the late 1980's. I keep thinking how much more pleasant my trips up there would be if the trains still ran. Bellows Falls, Claremont, White River Junction, and Randolph still have passenger service, but only from New York not Boston. The Randolph, Vermont station is about half an hour's walk from our radio station in that town. In the old days, I could have taken a train directly there from Boston's North Station via Manchester NH, Concord, Lebanon, and White River Junction. That train seems to have stopped running in 1965, and the rails were pulled up between Concord and White River Junction shortly after the infamous Guilford Transportation Industries acquired the B&M in 1982. Guilford changed its name to Pan Am Railways several years ago, and now uses the former airline's logo, which you can see on boxcars and locomotives, where it looks singularly out of place.

Meanwhile, every minute I spend behind the wheel of a car is a minute of my life wasted. And The Man in the Tin Foil Hat wants to defund Amtrak. Asshole.

It was chilly and drizzling in Dover, NH, where I spent most of the day, but 66 (F) and sunny back home in Greater Boston.

I am angry at myself because once again I made a mistake running the payroll for our radio stations after I got home. The damn payroll service won't let me fix it, so I'll have to add $115 to the guy's paycheck next time.

Since I started doing these things in February, I have not been able to do a single payroll run without making at least one mistake. I hate looking like an idiot in the eyes of our employees.

There are so many loose ends when it comes to buying radio stations. Idiot utilities we don't know we're supposed to be paying will send invoices into a black hole every month and then cut us off for non-payment.

Today I was confronted with a long list of mostly useless domain names I have to transfer from the seller, and some blogs which appear to have expired because we haven't been paying the invoices they didn't send us.

In the immortal words of the great Joss Whedon: grrr, arrgh.

I've been spending way too much time behind the wheel of my car during the last couple weeks. There have been a number of scary situations: giant piles of snow making it impossible to see oncoming traffic; driving straight into the sun during afternoon rush hour; idiots appearing suddenly in my blind spot; and on one occasion, the car in front of me *stopping* at the end of a highway onramp, afraid to merge into traffic.

It occurs to me that autonomous vehicles, when they start to appear on the roads, are not likely to play well with Massachusetts drivers. The robot cars are surely going to get stuck in situations where they have to play chicken with human-driven cars in order to make certain turns or merge into crowded highways. When they fail, they'll back up everyone behind them, and the result will be a huge clusterfsck.

They're going to have to legislate manually driven cars off the road.

Tomorrow (Friday) my brother and I close on the purchase of all but one of the radio stations we're buying. The last was approved by the FCC later than the rest, and its forty day period of fasting and penitence doesn't end until later in February. We have to wait for the Final Order, which automatically happens forty days after the initial approval. In the interim, the FCC can change its mind (rare), or a third party can file an objection (more common). The other stations became Final this week, but the last one still has some time to go yet.

This is going to be a busy month.

D-O-N, A-L-D, T-R-U-M-P.

[Yes, his name actually fits the song, and even rhymes! Who knew?]

Come along and sing the song and join the G.O.P.

D-O-N, A-L-D, T-R-U-M-P.

Donald Trump (Mickey Mouse!)
Donald Trump (Mickey Mouse!)
Forever let us hold our banners high (high, high, high);

Now it's time to say good-bye to our democracy,

D-O-N...
N-you real soon!

A-L-D...
D? Because Americans are so gullible!

T-R-U-M-P!

I saw an article the other day that asked how we know we live in the real universe and not in an elaborate simulation, a Matrix-like virtual reality. To me, the answer is that every attempt at imagining a world, from the earliest novels to the newest movies and video games, has inconsistencies, discontinuities, or anachronisms. Every piece of software ever written has at least one bug. If we lived in a simulation, we'd see such things in every day life. Miracles, we'd call them. But there aren't any miracles, edges, seams, or limits in the real world. It goes on forever, seamlessly, and every attempt we make to get to the bottom of it reveals still more. Columbus's ships didn't go over the edge. The world is not hollow, and no one has touched the sky.

And the world works smoothly. It doesn't crash or run out of memory. It never needs rebooting; its batteries never need charging, and it doesn't have one of those switching power supplies whose capacitors eventually dry out. It won't catch an update from Microsoft that suddenly breaks some critical function, and its software never outgrows its hardware.

From an early age, I've been interested in technology. I watched on my parents' TV as John Glenn was launched into orbit. I followed the Gemini and Apollo programs with great interest, and Wernher von Braun was one of my heroes, even if he later turned out to be an SS-Sturmbannführer. I built my own Estes rockets and even competed in the National Association of Rocketry's NARAM-13. I became a ham radio operator. I discovered computers, in the form of an IBM 2741 Communications Terminal connected to an IBM 370 mainframe, at the age of 15.

I was a teenage computer hacker, back in the days when computers cost millions of dollars, required legions of white-coated attendants, and lived in giant air-conditioned rooms. I mastered FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, APL, and the IBM 029 card punch. In college, I stood amazed as I watched someone on a computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, connect to another computer in Berkeley, California, via something called ARPANET. I never imagined that some four decades later, the same network, now called the Internet, would be so important in our lives.

After college I began a career in radio. It was all analog in those days: vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape, and NAB tape cartridges that resembled 8-track tapes but had only two audio tracks and a cue track. Transmitters and even some audio equipment had vacuum tubes. One station where I work still has a transmitter with tubes, a venerable Gates BC-1J, built in 1955. But it's only a backup.

Analog technology had its frustrations, for there are myriad subtle ways in which analog technology can fail. "The sound has no balls"; "there's no low end"; "the horns sound like kazoos." But those frustrations were almost entirely for us technical types to cope with; the average user found analog technologies very easy to use.

Today I often find myself dealing with digital technologies and user interfaces that are anything but intuitive. How should I know I'm supposed to press F12 to bring up the screen that lets me record a new cut for airplay? It takes me ten minutes to figure out how to reset the clock in my car radio every spring and fall. I am repeatedly bombarded with questions by ordinary users who can't get through a simple Web site registration.

Why does Windows often require a reboot after the most trivial update? It's because of Windows file locking, designed to prevent one process from modifying or deleting a file in use by another process. Windows file locking is primitive, reflecting the fact that Windows evolved from DOS, which only allowed one user to do one thing at a time. Linux and MacOS, by contrast, evolved from UNIX, which was designed from the beginning to be multi-user, multi-tasking. In Linux, you can do anything to any file (if you have the right permissions), and the operating system will sort everything out.

Windows file locking used to take one of my clients' stations off the air. It happened during Boston Celtics basketball broadcasts: the network would signal for a commercial break, and the station's computer would play the commercials, after which the station went silent instead of going back to the game. It didn't do that all the time, only once a month or so, and I tore my hair out trying to figure out why this Thursday's game had a problem and last Thursday's didn't. It turned out that the station was trying to record ABC News headlines during the game, and if the news was already cued up and waiting to run when the record command came down, Windows wouldn't let the file be opened, and the software would crash. The software developers whom I contacted couldn't figure it out, and it took me a couple months to do so.

Right now I'm trying to figure out why a backup process that has been running every night for eight months is only backing up a few of the files. This isn't running under Windows, but under Linux. And while I'm watching it, it seems to be performing flawlessly. But when I check the backup repository, nothing is being written there.

In the immortal words of Joss Whedon: grrr, aaargh.