necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2023-01-03 09:11 am

Oh, and...

I found an enormous feather by the side of the road on my way to WUMB this morning. It likely belonged to one of the two dozen or so wild turkeys I walked past that were making funny noises at one another near the fence separating Boston College High School from the Santander Bank/Bank of America compound. I will never cease to be amused by wild turkeys as urban wildlife, passing them on the sidewalk as if they were any other resident of the city.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2023-01-03 08:41 am

New month, new year

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).
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2022-10-22 03:40 pm

Bleh

This was a tiring week, with too much driving around. WTSN in Dover, NH is an AM radio station -- not one of ours -- with four towers that together make the signal stronger in some directions than in others in order to protect the signals of more distant stations on the same channel. The pattern is different at night than in the daytime, and the switch is made by firing seven relays: one at the base of each tower, plus three more in a box called a "phasor" in the transmitter building.

This station was built in 1957, and some of these relays are decades old. One of them refused to switch at dusk on Tuesday, and the station went off the air. So, I jumped in my car and drove an hour and a half to get there, and spent the next few hours groping around in the dark to identify the one that wasn't firing. It turned out to be at the tower farthest from the building, across a small creek I had to wade through. I had to make several trips back and forth for various tools and a ladder before I got it fixed. At one point coyotes started howling. Then when I got the thing back on the air, the transmitter wasn't putting out full power, so I spent the better part of another hour looking for what turned out to be a blown fuse. I got out of there well after midnight, getting home at 2 AM, at which point I decided to record the WSCS and WSRO morning news and WSRO weather before going to bed rather than wake up at the usual 5 AM to record them.

Then on Thursday I had to drive to Newport, NH, where another station was off the air. My brother had it back on at a measly 35 watts by the time I got there, but this problem couldn't easily be solved; this transmitter has seen better days and as soon as we fix one part, another part dies. The cell phone companies on the tower keep changing the load impedance, which doesn't help. We need to buy a new transmitter.

Yesterday WZBC at Boston College went off the air, so I went over there and waited for their faculty adviser to let me in to the transmitter room, which is on the second floor of a women's dorm. That problem turned out to be a battery backup that had died, so I bypassed it with an extension cord until we can install a new battery backup.

I spent most of today doing paperwork for our New Hampshire stations: political ad disclosures, which have to be posted to the FCC's Web site; orders for ads; and entering a large bank deposit into our database so our sales people will get paid next week. That bank deposit consisted of dozens of checks, most of them for $99 or some such, and a lot of them were pre-pays, which means I had to guess which stations they were for. The bank balance looks good right now, but it will drop dramatically next week when I have to pay rent on a bunch of sites on top of two big insurance bills and payroll.

The coyotes were probably the high point of the week.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2022-10-11 08:31 am

Can two weeks make such a difference?

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.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2022-10-10 06:15 am

Resurfacing

I was listening to myself reading the news on WNTK this morning when a voice in my head suggested I log in to Dreamwidth. It's been years, and I've been busy, busy, busy.

This morning I am in Medford (MA) waiting for a Comcast technician at a transmitter site used by one of my clients. The modem got zapped, probably by a lightning hit, and needs to be replaced.

We bought "99 Rock" from Dartmouth College last year. Dartmouth put it on the air in the 1970s as a student-operated commercial radio station similar to WHRB, but over the past few years there had been diminishing student interest in the station, and the last student DJs left at the beginning of the pandemic two years ago. Last spring, Dartmouth put it up for sale, so we bought it and added its only employee to our staff. It's still running its long time rock format and is currently the number three rated station in the market, behind Vermont Public Radio and WHDQ "Q-106", which is owned by our principal competitor.

Two weeks ago, I got Covid. I was one of the last people I know who hadn't yet got it, and I'm pretty sure I picked it up at an awards dinner I went to the previous Thursday. There were maybe 200 people there and we were sitting in a hotel ballroom for two hours. The people sitting next to me didn't get it, but both of them had already had it.

I ended up spending the next few days lying down and coughing my guts out. I did get the usual flu-like symptoms, but they were milder than the last flu I got. I still have a cough, but I am otherwise back to my old self.

Since my last post back in 2018, I am four years older and more friends and relatives have died. I hate death. I have never yet come to terms with my own mortality. At heart I am still a child; sometimes I think I have spent my whole life playing with toys.

Whenever something that has always been a constant in my life goes away, I have trouble accepting it. The Cold War has been over for thirty years, but I find myself getting nostalgic for it. But at the same time, I've come to realize that the boundless growth and perpetually rising standards of living that characterized the fifties and sixties, when I was a child, were an historical anomaly, and the past half century of American politics, with both parties pledging to bring back the old prosperity, has been an era of self delusion. Indeed, the whole history of the United States has been an anomaly, the consequence of settling a largely empty but resource-rich continent separated by thousands of miles of ocean from potential enemies.

I still think Marx and Lenin were right, but they could not have anticipated the effects of new technologies on the course of capitalism, nor did they foresee the climate crisis or the effects of unsustainable population growth on the planet. There must now be a reckoning with nature; whenever an animal population outgrows the resources that sustain it, it must crash as predation, disease, and starvation take their toll. We are not so different than other animals, I think, and capitalism and the foolish faith in market forces have brought us to a tipping point.

In one of his more brilliant moments, JMS has Londo Mollari introduce his three wives as "pestilence, famine, and death". Unmentioned is the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, war, personified by Londo himself. And these are what we all face, if we cannot get our collective act together.

In my role as a broadcaster, I need to help get that message across, but I find myself hindered by the need to keep my bill collectors at bay. I find myself echoing Londo in Season 5, where he says he has all the power he ever wanted, but no choice at all. If I don't tell my listeners what they want to hear, instead of telling them what they need to know, they'll tune out, and I'll be unable to satisfy my advertisers, which will put me out of business. Capitalism is no freedom, even for the capitalist.

I'm still singing in the church choir. I've been doing it for 23 years now, and still consider myself a churchgoing agnostic. It occurred to me a while back that the question of whether or not God exists is the wrong one to ask; the more important ones are why did humanity invent religion, and why does it persist. I've come to believe that religion is best perceived as a tool, like science. But while science was invented to help us understand the nature of things, religion was created to help us cope with our mortality and our relative insignificance in a vast, scary universe. There is no real conflict between the two, as long as one uses each tool for the purpose it was designed. You don't want to drive nails with a sickle, nor cut hay with a hammer.

I've just got a text from Comcast; they will be arriving in a few minutes, so I'm signing off now. I hope they know how to get here.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2018-11-22 06:47 am

Checking in

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.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2018-05-19 11:45 pm

The Evolution of My Views

Don't listen to anyone who tells you liberals are the left.

Liberals are not the left; they are the center. When Limbaugh, Hannity et al. thunder against "the left", they are attacking the political center and fundamental values of democracy that both major parties once shared.

The left -- well, that would be a few isolated individuals such as I who believe liberalism is bankrupt, capitalism is ultimately incompatible with democracy, and socialism is the way forward.

I also believe our Constitution is fundamentally flawed and that we need to transition to a parliamentary system like that of Canada, where the head of state is not head of government and obsolete language cannot be used by a corrupt Supreme Court to create an inalienable right to buy political influence or to possess and use deadly weapons.

Perhaps the greatest flaw in the United States Constitution is the failure of its drafters to anticipate the rise of political parties based on ideology. The first success of one such, the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860, led directly to civil war. A fixed-term executive Presidency allows no removal of a government that has become intolerable; in other western democracies, the government falls if it loses a vote of no-confidence in parliament, leading to new elections. The need to secure a majority leads parties of different ideologies to form coalitions and therefore to compromise; the situation does not arise where a minority of voters can elect a President with a blank check to pursue for four years a political program that is generally obnoxious, as has happened in this country twice in as many decades.

I see the election of Donald Trump as a sign that the American political system is broken and that decades of subtle corruption have wrought a degree of dysfunction in our institutions that make change inevitable. We are at a turning point in our history.

This country is not "one nation under God, indivisible"; it is myriad communities, each with its own interests and aspirations, much like the pre-1918 Austro-Hungarian empire. For the country to hold together, each community must acknowledge the legitimate claims of the others and agree to pursue mutually acceptable goals.

For example, the gun problem admits of no one-size-fits-all solution in a country that includes cities and neighborhoods torn by gun violence, on the one hand, and communities where guns are a means of feeding one's family and an essential part of a traditional way of life, on the other. What works in Newport, New Hampshire does not work in Boston, and vice-versa.

Patriotism, the love of one's country, is laudable; but nationalism, the love of one's in-group, is evil. Nationalism destroyed the Habsburg empire, two of its successor states (Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia), and the Soviet Union, and it may well destroy our country too.

Nothing good has ever come from conservatism. The ancien-regime notion that nature or God has decreed a particular order to human society that must never be questioned, and that each of its members, from the king to the merest peasant, has his or her proper place and role, has done nothing but promote suffering, oppression, ignorance, and injustice. And yet it persists despite the best efforts of successive generations of progressives.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2018-05-19 11:11 pm

Back after a long hiatus

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.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-08-07 02:05 pm

Back again

See this list? Those are all the radio stations I am dealing with in one form or another. Some of them are listed multiple times, because each listing represents a particular machine and some stations have more than one.

I bring this up as a way to explain why I haven't been around much lately. Some of my recent challenges include:

1) A set of boxes that my predecessor installed to feed an FM radio station through the Internet have stopped working reliably. The FM station is so stuttery and broken up that it's not listenable, and my only recourse is to replace these boxes with a pair of Comrex BRIClinks, which are better able to handle Internet congestion.

2) The satellite that most national radio networks, including the ones we use at our New Hampshire and Vermont stations, died at the end of June. The networks moved to a new satellite in a different position in the sky. We had to install a new dish at our central Vermont station because the old one couldn't get a signal from the new satellite. We pointed our New Hampshire dish at the new satellite, but it only receives Rush Limbaugh reliably. We keep getting dropouts during Boston Red Sox broadcasts, among others.

3) The microwave system that delivers programming to one of our transmitter sites from the local studio is working, but just barely; trees have grown up to the point where they're starting to block the signal.

4) An asshole performance rights organization wants us to pay a lot of money for the rights to stream music from three of our stations. These stations are not making money; they're being supported by our talk stations, and I'm sorely tempted not to stream them at all.

5) We had to spend the weekend before last disassembling the studio of our classical station and reassembling it in a new space. But it works and is reliable.

6) One of the most powerful AM stations in New Hampshire was running at 20% power when we took it over. We have it up to about 95% power now, but one of the other tenants at the site says it's intermodulating with their transmissions.

7) We have an AM station in Vermont and a construction permit for a translator that will allow it to broadcast also on FM. We have been trying to get our prospective landlord to agree to let us put in a telephone pole with an FM antenna and a small box at the base for the transmitter, but after agreeing in principle to the project and agreeing to the proposed rent amount, the landlord is nitpicking over the language of the proposed lease.

8) We don't have enough sales talent, especially in Vermont. One of the Vermont stations needs a General Manager.

9) McDonald's is changing ad agencies and refocusing on national rather than local advertising. They'll be dropping our stations, and we'll have to replace the lost business somehow.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-06-02 12:34 am

Checking in

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.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-05-05 11:23 pm

Holy cow!

We just got a $10,000 bill from the Boston Red Sox Radio Network.

I wonder if we get anything like that in ad revenue from the broadcasts, especially after commission.

Rush Limbaugh only charges $900 a quarter.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-05-02 10:02 pm

April gives way to May

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.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-04-26 10:08 pm

Update

I think this is the first evening in a very long time that I haven't had some sort of commitment. I'm still working full time at my consulting business while the radio stations we bought start to generate income.

We didn't buy the seller's accounts receivable, and radio clients often take 2 - 3 months to pay, so after almost three months of ownership, we're just starting to see money coming in. That means both of us have to hold on to our day jobs for now, making for some pretty long hours. Getting up at 3 AM yesterday to rescue a station 80 miles away didn't help.

There's very little room for anything else in my life right now. That's not good.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-02-22 12:40 pm

Driving myself to distraction

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.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-02-05 08:09 am

"And so, it begins"

The manager running our two Vermont stations sent us an email an hour after we closed on Friday, saying he doesn't want to work in broadcast media any more and, therefore, he was resigning immediately. We knew his stations had been underperforming for a couple years, and had intended to have a talk with him once the dust had settled. But I guess he had plans of his own. Good luck to him.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-02-02 11:53 pm

Closing time

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.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-01-23 07:29 am

God, I loathe bureaucrats

I wish I could get across to some people on one of my broadcast mailing lists that there is essentially no difference between someone who works for a company the size of Verizon and someone who works for, say, the Department of State. Neither has any incentive to give us ordinary mortals the time of day, and both can make our lives miserable with the stroke of a pen or the click of a mouse.

I have spent days trying to get Verizon Wireless to transfer seven telephone numbers from the seller's account to ours, so we can keep using them when we take over the radio stations next month. Verizon is contorting itself in spectacularly perverted ways in order not to cooperate. I have spent hours on the phone with them to no avail. Their latest suggestion is that I go personally to one of their stores. I will try that later today, after stopping by the post office to submit another passport application after the State Department summarily denied my last one on Saturday.

The Trump-loving curmudgeons on the mailing list were ranting the other day against DAB, the digital radio system that Norway has deployed to replace FM radio in that country, calling it "socialist" because it forces all radio stations in a local area to use the same transmitter, insuring they all have precisely the same coverage. This is, of course, "un-American", unlike, say, cable television, where all the TV stations have the same coverage because they all go where Comcast's cable goes, and not an inch farther. But while Comcast may be the most hated company in America, the Norwegian government is the GOVERNMENT. That's socialism!

Ironically, transferring the seller's Comcast accounts to our company has been quite painless so far.
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-01-18 06:36 pm

Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?

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!
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2017-01-11 11:26 pm

Таможня даёт добро

The FCC has granted its permission for my brother and me to assume control of the radio stations we're buying. February 3 is the date we've set to consummate the deal.

There is a lot to be done between now and then.

[The title, which translates as "customs has given the green light", is a line from the movie, "White Sun of the Desert", a "red western" traditionally shown to cosmonauts the night before launch.]
necturus: 2016-12-30 (Default)
2016-12-30 12:52 pm

Frustrating technologies

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.