Lots to say today, hopefully I get to it all. I'd hate to not have my brain purged completely. [appropriate icon]

Woke up way too late to accomplish anything before having to go to work. Again. This makes 3 days running. Woo!

Went to work, and I read some more of Ishmael. It's not the world's best-written book, but I like it a lot, anyway. It's given me plenty to mull over, and while I won't get into it all now, I'll simply summarize with this. Fuck god, and fuck farmers.

At work, Matt and Scott were playing with Homestarrunner.com. We're all very busy down there. [rolleyes]
I saw the Halloween movie, which I'd never seen before, and it was very funny.

Around 6:20, I called the Jury Duty number, and discovered that I don't have to go down there tomorrow, and that completes my being called. [shrug] I still get paid for the one day I did go down, so sometime in the next ten days or so I'll go collect my 7 bucks. Yay seven bucks!!
I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get "chosen", but what can I do? Go down and demand to be inconvienenced? Heh. Anywhat, I'm off the hook for at least two more years, which means that I will never be selected for Jury Duty in Nevada, since we'll be moving next June. Perhaps the Oregon justice system will be more rewarding.

Also at work, I watched Restless which was all edited wrong. [grrr] They put a commercial break in the middle of Xander's dream. Whuh?
Other than smiling at some of the funny lines and scenes, Restless seemed kinda...not as nifty. Maybe my mind was just elsewhere. I dunno. It seemed like they were hinting at much more (or perhaps my flights of fanficy were searching for more?) than what wound up being shown during the series. [shrug] I'm down to the final four, I think. They are The Body, Forever, Never Kill a Boy on the First Date and Once More, With Feeling.

At 8:30, I let Mike go home early. I believe my words were something to the effect of, "I've got things covered."

At about 9:03, everything went to hell.

[begin long boring work related story. Feel free to skip ahead.]
Yolonda was working in KFBT (ironically, her last day before a two week vacation), when she came over and asked if Mike was here. I told her that he wasn't feeling good (not true. He was actually going to a concert. The "not feeling well" story was conconcted by us both as a cover for him in case anyone asked. [sigh]) and that I let him leave early.
"Why? What's wrong?"
She told me that her board was flashing and she couldn't get anything to come up on the preset screen.
Not liking the sounds of this, I followed her into KFBT's control room to take a look.
She was in the midst of a paid program, which meant that she didn't really need to switch for another 20 minutes. Sure enough, her board had the program button and the preset button flashing, and attempting to select anything for the preset resulted in nothing happening.
Testing all aspects of the board, she hit the transition button - hoping, I guess, to see if it even worked, and then would switch back into the program. The board did switch to the preset (which was just dead air), but did not switch back to the program. Oops.
It was at this time that we called Greg (the chief engineer).
To cut a very long story a little bit shorter, Greg talked me through some functions to restore power to the board (basically, turning off the power source, waiting, and turning it back on). That didn't work. He told me he was going to call Bryan (the main engineer for KFBT) and have him call me back.
Meanwhile, KFBT was broadcasting dead air.
Around 9:15, we realized that we were stuck on what had been the last thing Yo had switched to (the commercial server) and that that could still be on the air. In a bout of brilliance, I decided that I would dub the segments of her next program onto tape, and load them into the commercial server, so that even though the 9pm paid program was shot, at least the 9:30 program could air (along with all of it's spots). Her 9:30 show was supposed to be MASH. I took the tape, went into KVWB's control room and got out a blank tape to transfer the segments onto. And then discovered that I couldn't. It seems that the power source for KFBT's switcher is also connected to the tunnel that allows dubbing. Doh.
At about 9:26, Bryan called, and had me do the same thing that Greg was doing (the power down, power back up trick). But!! This worked. Because there were two power sources to switch off. Doh. Again.
KFBT was back on the air at 9:30, just in time for MASH to air.

Yay.

Except. The board didn't stay operational. It worked for one transition, then "froze" again. At that time, I knew the two power source trick, and we did that, resulting in dead air for one minute. (As opposed to the nearly 30 minutes prior.) After that, KFBT's board was up and running and stayed good until 10:40.
At 10:45, I called Bryan back, and told him that the board was obviously dying, and that the CPR-method was not working. Or, rather, that it was working, but only for a limited time. And that I doubted the overnight crew wanted to spend all night turning off the power and turning it back on in order to stay on the air. He said to pass the "trick" along to the guys coming in at 11pm, and that he'd be down there "sometime tonight". (Cuz, you know, maintaining on-air product isn't a priority or anything)
I showed the trick to the overnighters, who didn't seem too happy to be inheriting the shitstorm I'd left them with. But the trick, as I said, was losing it's effectiveness each time it was done, and by 11pm, we were back in black. (Heh.)
I stuck around, trying to get KFBT into some reasonable state of normalcy. Bryan was called one more time, and he was en route by the time I left at 11:20.
It was semi-amusing (in the not really amusing way) that Yo and I were stressing out, trying to get back on the air, while the engineers were taking a very laissez-faire attitude toward the whole thing. I'm sure there's a message there, but I ain't gonna figure it out right now.
[/end boring work related story]

Once I got home, I saw that starshine had sent Saren and Harper some porcelian fairies!! Woohoo! The girls were very excited about them, and I must say that it was a very nice surprise, and a much better way to end the day. [up] Thank you, Cindy.

It's now 1:12 in the morning, and we're going to attempt to wake up early again tomorrow, so um...