Brian's World

First Week Down

So I’ve finished my first week here at RPI.. only how many more to go, right?  It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought.  I can only hope the rest of the weeks this semester keep up like this.  The worst part about my schedule is having class at 8:00am everyday.  To deal with this I wake up between 6:10 and 6:15, to give myself plenty of time to wash up and eat breakfast in my room before leaving around 7:36 to walk on down.  Eating breakfast in my room has been that largest change, and I can’t say I’m a huge fan of it.  I certainly don’t mind eating here, but my selection of cereal bars, donuts, and oatmeal isn’t nearly as tasty as the bagels or waffles Commons has to offer.  To bad they don’t open earlier, like 7:00 or even 7:15 would be more workable.. 7:30 is just too late right now.

The church across the street had a picnic tonight which just finished up.  I don’t know anything about it except for that involved lots of loud music.  My closed window was unable to keep it out.  Luckily the musical wasn’t awful to listen to.

Today has been a wierd day.  I spent most of yesterday working on building a Ruby on Rails app, because I’ve yet to find a solid tutorial for Google’s App Engine that involves multiple code files and stuff.  I wouldn’t say I found rails any faster to cleaner to work in than PHP.  I’m pretty confident that I could have done the same stuff in PHP just as easily and probably just as cleanly.  We’ll see if I get the app together enought to publically release it as intended.  My main todo item is a design.. the part of making web things that I least like.  If there was only a resource for simple web designs with CSS to go along with them… I would like that.

I had some things I wanted to get done today but it was challenging.  Everyone at RPI has been going in different directions.  Now if those directions are just different from mine, or independly different I don’t know.. all I know is that I seem to know less and less until it conflicts with what I had been planning.  I know, I should be expressing what I think and stuff but thats it.. I have several times in the past and now that its time to move on something people object.  I am unsure what I need to improve on to fix this, but I shall think.

I’ve been very frustrated at RPI TV right now.. maybe more the MMS side of things.  MMS being the Multi Media Services department at RPI… they run the campus TV plant among other things.  Right now the process to airing something is fairly straightforward; I make a physical copy of the show, fill out some paperwork, and drop it off with someone in MMS to handle the rest.  A few days later I get an email telling me to login and program it when I want.  Its not a terribly bad situation when it works but as you can guess.. its not working.  I think I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: being the RPI TV Station Manager would be orders of magnitude better if there was actually a station to manage.  Right now I “manage” the filling out of paperwork and carrying of dvds… there’s not much to it.

People ask why I stay involved with my towns PEG station (SHCTV 15) and its pretty simple.. if something isn’t working right, I can climb right back behind the racks in the head end and fix it.  If the programing thing can not interface with the routing switcher I am allowed to actually go and fix it… there’s none of this waiting for someone else to get around to it or whatnot.  No, there isn’t any fancy 32×32 routing switcher, but does the RPI TV channel really need access to all of those devices?  I think not.

If it was up to me, which it clearly isn’t, RPI TV would be as seperate from the cable tv plant operation as possible.  It makes sense to be located in their head end room,  but not to be heavily integrated into their equiptment.  I would redesign it something like this… a 4×1 routing switcher controlled by RPI TV.  Inputs might be the MMS Bulliten board system, a campus location [output from 32×32], a deck, and a digital playout server.  The output could go into the MMS 32×32 corkboard, but would be the default route for the channel.  Therefore if there was an emergency it would be completely in their capabilities to override everything we were doing with whatever they wanted.  RPI TV would still have the control of day to day operations of everything, and a digital playout server would greatly enhance the amount, quality, and usefulness of content shown on the channel.

Technically speaking members of club and I could likely handle all of the technical aspects of the system with our eyes closed.  I would even settle for a significantly less advanced implementation, just the digital playout server would be nice…The only stopper to implementing any of this is policy and people. I’m good at dealing with neither.

That was a lot of talking about RPI TV and not so much about anything else.  Katie went to New York city today.  I’m unsure what she did, something about a cruise maybe?  I look forward to getting the scoop from her when she returns later this evening.

My brother moved into Siena yesteday.  He has a triple which is pretty unlucky, but he indicated neither of the roomates were terrible to interact with.

I think I am going to rent an iTunes movie… maybe.  I want to legally watch a rental movie if there is nothing better to do.  Of course stuff to do could arise at any point, and I would hate to waste the $4 on a movie I don’t see.