Daily Archives: March 8, 2010

My new favorite billboard in town

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In the past few months I’ve had several friends show up on billboards around town for various ad campaigns. Those were cool to see, and my little toddlers love pointing them out. This sign, however, is my new favorite! It points right toward the Federal Building on 3rd and Rosser, and I think it’s visible from Earl Pomeroy’s office windows! In many ways, the view from his Fortress of Solitude isn’t so lovely these days.

It’s still Christmas on east Divide Avenue

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This beautiful Christmas display is still providing a much-needed splash of color to the trees near Sleepy Hollow on east Divide Avenue in Bismarck. As I’ve said before, I put the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack in my truck’s minidisc player with the first snowfall and don’t remove it until the snow’s gone the following Spring. I will gladly take an extended Christmas season, and I notice that there are a few kindred spirits around Bismarck and Mandan.

As things begin to transition from white and gray to gray and brown, it’s nice to see some bold color breaking up the monotony. The melting snow is going to make things pretty dirty for a while, and green grass and leafy trees are still several weeks away. In the mean time, it’s sights like this that give the eye a break from all the dreary grays and browns.

“They’ve gone to plaid!”

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When you’ve got a toddler coughing every couple of minutes and went to bed VERY early due to a migraine, then you’ll find yourself up at 4am making quotes from the movie Spaceballs. I’m just sayin’.

I spent a chunk of time indoors this weekend, scanning slides and film negatives before returning our ultra-sweet Canon film & slide scanner to the office. While watching the Class B, I saw a bit of an epic transmission fail (pictured above). When I worked at KFYR I built an edit suite in my home office that blew away the setup I had at the TV station, including a quick “F7” macro to make a screen shot of whatever is piping through my house’s AV system. This is what I got Thursday night.

I only show this screen capture to make a point…no, not about KFYR. It’s about digital. Remember your old analog cell phone? Sometimes it got fuzzy but you could usually make out what was being said on the other end. Now it simply drops out. How about digital TV, if you don’t have cable? Instead of a fuzzy picture, you get gibberish or a frozen frame. Those are the pitfalls of replacing analog with digital.

The western North Dakota NBC stations ditched their analog microwave ICR (Inter City Relay) system a long time ago in favor of fiber optic digital. Well, when something goes wacky there, you can about imagine how much fun it is. No fuzzy image until the problem gets sorted out…no, you get to be a Spaceballs reference. Seeing this on the air made me glad I wasn’t in the truck or the control room for this one 🙂 I’ve had my share of those moments.

I didn’t get to watch the finals because I was working Saturday night, directing the internal feed for the WDA tournament. I haven’t directed anything in a while; I’ve only run cameras or replays this season. It was fun to get the captain’s seat for a little while, especially with camera operators and a replay guy that make the job easy. I like to think I started getting back into the swing of things by the end of the second half of the last game 😉