Well, That Was Fun....

     Except it wasn't fun.  I was watching the Sunday morning political shows, mostly, and dozing, a little, and eventually decided to make some brunch.

     It was going to be pretty good brunch, too -- roast beef hash with canned mild chilies, a little onion, a dab or more of Chicago-style Giardiniera, a bread-crumb crust and eggs cooked on top, served with cheese.  But it wasn't to be.  I turned on the kitchen TV and the channel I wanted wasn't there.  It was one of the ones I'm responsible for, though not one of the big ones.

     So much for breakfast!  After a little more checking, I fired up my computer and started troubleshooting remotely, texting my boss at the same time.  He was aware of the problem, but busy with other things.

     I didn't find anything easy, so I brushed my teeth, got dressed, packed some snacks and went to the transmitter.  A redundant communications link had half-failed, which should be a minor problem, something that makes no impact and you solve during regular business hours.

     Yes, it's no problem -- unless the automatic switch that makes it redundant happens to have been hooked up backwards.  I looked and looked, and it didn't occur to me for a long time, until I was peering at the back of the conglomeration, seeing green lights where there should have been red lights, and red lights where they should have been green!

     You see, if you have two identical widgets, call them A and B, and a smart switch that selects between them, it's all well and good; if A is running and it conks out, the switch goes to B, and vice versa.  But if it was connected backwards?  A keels over, and the switch, automatically, selects what it thinks is B -- but is in fact A, and A, being dead, does nothing.  And the switch, while it is pretty smart as such things go but not quite as smart as one might hope, assumes it is not being lied to, and B must be as defunct as A.  So it does nothing.

     We have backups on our backups, and that kicked in -- losing a few minor channels in the process.

    I moved the connections to where they should have been all along, the two ends did a complicated handshake, and hey, presto! Everything was working, with the failed part safely sidelined for later.  And it only took three hours.  Well, four.

Oyster Stew

     I haven't lost the knack of making oyster stew.  There's not much to it, and the big brand name in condensed soups has their own mild version, though I haven't found it in stores around here for some time.  But there's a knack to it, and multiple places to go wrong.

     Canned oysters were scarce for a long while, too.  They're back now, at least some of the time (months with R in them?)  So I was determined to give it a try.

     You start by making a thickener of flour, water, a little salt,* a dash of hot sauce or Worcestershire sauce and a glob of butter.  stir that up to a smooth paste and add it to the contents of a couple of 8-ounce cans of oysters, liquid and all.  Simmer over low heat until the oysters start to curl and set aside.  Scald four cups of milk and a little butter, or three cups of milk and one of cream, then add the oysters and let it sit a spell, over very low heat if you like (but keep an eye on it!).

     Serve with a dash of paprika, parsley or chives, hot sauce and pepper on the table, and crusty bread or crackers.

     Variations: add cooked potato and/or sauteed onion and/or celery, cut small.

     It's warm and filling on a chilly evening.  Oysters aren't for everyone; if you're curious but unsure, look for a ready-made version and give it a try.  The scratch version is strong and has more zing, with big, meaty oysters.

     The gotchas: blend the thickener smooth, not lumpy.  That means cold, cold water and plenty of stirring before you add it to the oysters and their liquid (and then turn on the heat).  Don't overcook the oysters -- and really, really don't overcook the milk.  It's done when it's bubbly around the edges and steam is rising from it.  You can cook both at the same time, and old recipes assume you will, but that means dividing your attention.

     Depression-era bread and milk can be this recipe without the oysters -- and you can still find people who were happy to get even that much.
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* One and a half tablespoons of flour, two tablespoons of cold water, a teaspoon or so of salt -- old recipes have even more salt, but even a teaspoon was plenty for me.  It does need a little, but you can always add more to your bowl.

Oh, Noooooes!

     I'm still hearing a little freakout over New York City's Mayor-elect.  Thing is, he's not the first socialist to get himself elected mayor of an American city; he's not even the first one to win in NYC, and the city's still there.  Wikipedia's got a list, starting with John C. Chase in 1898.  There's a whole clutch of them in the early decades of the 20th Century, food for thought if you're pining for "the good old days."*

     Milwaukee had a nearly unbroken fifty-year run of them, from 1910 through 1960: that's two World Wars and a Great Depression.  I'm sure they all said and did things that I'd disagree with (not an unusual distinction among politicians) but the city survived and even thrived.  (It took heavy lifting to interrupt the string: a Democrat-Republican fusion candidate won and served from 1912 to 1916.)

     U. S. mayors do not serve in a vacuum.  They're working in concert with a legislative body and a court system; everybody in town knows where their office is and can look up their number, and all it takes is a faltering trash-collection system, faulty sewers or a botched response to a bad snowstorm to get them tossed out on their ear in the next election.  We vote mayors in, we vote mayors out, and when they lose, they hand over the keys and combination for the safe to the next officeholder in due order. 

     Mayors from one of the major parties are closely watched by their political opposition; Mayors who have expressed leanings towards the edges of one or the other big parties get even more scrutiny (this is where most of the recent socialists fall, being both Democrats and DSA members) and mayors affiliated only with a third party (or none at all) can expect to get it from both sides.

     So I'm not worried.  There are plenty of people and groups to do the watching and start yelling if he goes off the rails, and they're already on the job.
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* They weren't quite as halcyon as some people like to claim, and you can chop your own wood or shovel your own coal for a winter if you'd like to find out for yourself.  My parents grew up on the trailing edge of that technology, and even through the rosy-hued spectacles of childhood, it didn't look that great to them.  Even spending time in the disused attic of a house that had been heated by coal is a marked education -- pun intentional.  Coal soot takes considerable scrubbing!

They Won

     Democrats won resoundingly yesterday, from Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York to centrist Dems in New Jersey and Virginia. Down-ballot races also went Democrat; school board elections, largely nonpartisan, rejected book-banners and candidates endorsed by "Moms for Liberty," the conservative group that made headlines when their Noblesville, Indiana chapter approvingly quoted Hitler's opinions on education in their newsletter.

     Politicians (and pundits) tend to over-read election results and this will be no exception.  The common threads of the last two elections are the cost of living (rent, groceries, utilities) and the general unwillingness of  Americans to be bossed around; go too much deeper than that and you're on thin ice.

     Mamdani, for all that he's made out to be a boogeyman,* has more in common with Indiana's Eugene V. Debs than Karl Marx.  He has been sharply critical of the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, especially their dictatorial leaders.  As Mayor of New York City, he'll be working with a 51-member City Council.  Unsurprisingly, the Council membership is overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, Democrat.  But New York City being as assorted as it is, they're an unusually wide range of Democrats, so don't expect the new Mayor to make a bunch of drastic changes.  (At least one prominent online opinionator lamented that in NYC, "women will be forced to cover themselves from head to toe...and hot dogs will be replaced by goat meat."  I can only conclude he's never seen Mrs. Mamdani, and doesn't grasp that goat meat would be a significant -- and not inexpensive -- upgrade from the mysterious contents of lower-grade frankfurters.  And all that along with not understanding that the City Council makes NYC's laws, not the Mayor.)

     All of these newly elected officials will be operating in the same old framework, in which (despite what certain politicians appear to believe) we don't elect Czars or dictators who rule by fiat (or even Chevy), but politicians who must negotiate and compromise with their peers and whatever other branches or units of government their own interacts with, politicians who must answer to their constituents via direct contact, the press, and eventually the ballot box.  The truly awful ones will reveal themselves in due course, either by trying to enact lousy notions into law or via an inability to work and play well with others, and some of those will discover they are "one-term wonders" or laughingstocks consigned to the sidelines.  This is entirely normal, and the system has survived all manner of wild and crazy ideas and people.

     Truly transgressive behavior in American politics consists of trying to unduly expand the powers of an office, of ruling unilaterally, of not understanding that Americans are at heart a mob, and a mob with a very wide range of ideas and beliefs.  We can all agree that we don't agree on much, and we should all agree that we ought to give one another as much latitude as we can manage.  Our worst failings begin when we forget or ignore that.
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* He is, as has been pointed out by more insightful people, exactly what President Obama was accused of being: a socialist Muslim born in Africa.  I guess we'll all get to see how that goes.  Maybe he'll even read the newspaper funny pages on the radio!

"Running Board"

     I used a slang term the other day, one that might not be entirely clear outside of my line of work, "running board."  No, not those things along the bottom sides of an old car that make it easier to get in and out, where Doc Savage rides when he and his intrepid crew speed to the scene of another exotic crime in Depression-era NYC.

     "Running" as in "operating," and "board" as in "audio board," which is to say an audio mixer or audio console.  Nowadays, most people have seen a sound-mixing board, the kind of thing used at a concert or in a recording studio, often a vast and confusing array of controls, knobs and lights.  It's literally the heart of the effort, where all the microphones and other sound pick-ups connect, their levels are adjusted and mixed, and the end result goes out to the amplifiers, recorder, streaming box and/or broadcast transmitter.

     The technology grew up slowly, from a rack filled with amplifiers, volume controls, switches and maybe a jackfield like an old-time telephone operator's panel.  Eventually, the control arrangements became more or less standardized, first in homebuilt systems (some of which might be mounted through a single slab of wood or Bakelite, a "board," or built into a freestanding desk, a "console").  Those early efforts still had most of the electronics mounted in a row of tall equipment racks, with only the controls in front of the operator.  Western Electric and RCA, along with a little company in Quincy IL called Gates, were among the first to put the whole works into a large, desktop enclosure with a row of knobs along the front.

     Those early audio boards were the center of small radio stations: every audio signal that came and went would flow through it, and mastering the controls, in all their arcane variations, was an essential skill for the technicians -- "engineers" by convention if not degree -- and eventually the disc jockeys who replaced them and the studio announcers they'd worked with.  (Big stations and networks would have a "master control" setup, an audio switching system that selected among multiple studios and mixing consoles, but that was big-time stuff indeed.)

     As time went on and electronics got cheaper, stations might have a multitude of audio consoles -- one for the newsroom, one for recording commercials and local programs, one for on-air operations -- along with their associated equipment.

     And then a funny thing happened: audio went digital.  Digital audio works like any other big computer network: there are central computers that do the work, mixing, recording and playing back, and screen/keyboard/mouse or specialized hardware "control surfaces" where humans work the controls.  The big or small "audio board" of today still looks a lot like the old 1940s ones, if you'll allow for slide faders instead of rotary controls and push buttons instead of a fancy lever switches, but not a single note of audio passes through it.  Nope, that all happens in equipment mounted in tall racks down the hall; only the controls are in front of the operator.  Just like it was when the idea was first starting out.

Maybe People Elect Who They Want

     There will be fuming over the results of today's elections.  There always is.  National elections can be confounding -- the popular vote is often close, the Electoral College tends to amplify the margin of victory, and some bickering is inevitable.

     But regional elections, even statewide elections?  Look, the people of AOC and MTG's House districts knew what they were getting when they voted.  In New York City, the three frontrunners in the Mayor''s race had clear platforms and didn't do much hedging.  Nobody walked into a voting booth and rolled a three-sided dice.  Gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey were similarly forthright, and here's the thing: if the individual states are indeed "50 experiments in democracy," if the people of cities get to pick their own Mayors and so on, you're going to get an assorted collection.  Virginia isn't Ohio.  NYC isn't Dallas.  Get 'em into office and see what they do.

     Indiana's Micah Beckwith certainly lost no time showing who he is after Election Day.  Cruising into office on Governor Mike Braun's coattails, I think Hoosiers hoped for a safe, pro-business Republican* in the hot seat and didn't pay much attention to the malicious imp riding shotgun alongside him.  Said imp's latest has been to chortle that the interruption in SNAP benefits is "a great opportunity for the church."  --Most candidates come with a pretty clear label, but you can't be sure until you uncork 'em and get a good whiff.

     If people elected skunks or roses Tuesday, it'll be obvious soon enough.  Let's see how the latest crop does before freaking out.
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* Oh, well.  Like a lot of GOP Governors, he's trying to be a mini-Trump.  And like most of them, the act's not ready for Broadway.

It's Still The Economy, Stupid

     Governments have a pretty good history when it comes to screwing up economies.  Fixing them, that's another story.  Herbert Hoover (eventually) and Franklin Roosevelt expended enormous effort trying to claw their way out of the Great Depression, and only blunted the worst of it while the whole planet rode the roller-coaster.  Subsequent presidencies bobbed around like a cork on stormy seas as various economic troubles came and went, and frequently lost elections over them.  The government -- any government -- doesn't run the economy, but the economy sometimes runs government, and can run it right out of town.

     Viktor Orban's experiment in "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, which has looked a lot like a more-polite version of one-party autocracy with fancy trimmings to keep the EU from more than mild disapproval, may be about to relearn that lesson.

     Here at home -- how 'bout that promised prosperity?  Have groceries gotten any cheaper?  How about utility bills?  Has anyone's gazillionaire boss handed out big, fat raises, or are most of us fretting over our chances of being swept up in an Amazon-style massive layoff?

     Promises of pie in the sky only work until the pie fails to arrive.  And wow, is it ever failing.  When the AI/data center bubble pops -- which it will -- the fallout is liable to be messy.  Just ask SNAP beneficiaries, presently unbenefited thanks to the government shutdown. 

Not A Fan, But

     They pulled me in: I didn't watch the World Series, but by the fourth game, I was keeping track of how it was going.  Some of the greatest baseball players of all time were battling it out, and despite an early adulthood spent listening to Cincinnati Reds games with an ear only for upcoming commercial breaks,* even I can tell we will not see their like again soon.
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* "Running board" for a sporting event can be a great time to work on small engineering projects, but you have to spare half an ear for the game.  Baseball is especially good; basketball and football can slam to a sudden halt without much warning and you'd better not stray too far from the controls, but the end of an inning is telegraphed in advance.  Most play-by-play and "color"/stats teams sum up significant moments before the ads begin, leaving the board op plenty of time to stroll down the hall, push a button, flip a few switches, log the break and put the game back on.  And if you missed it?  In my 20s, alone in a big studio building, it was very convenient that the network amplifiers were in a rack just outside of the Engineering Shop/transmitter room, along the hallway back to the control room. The CBS and Reds amplifiers had great big knobs on them and if you had noticed the commercial cue at the last minute, you could knock the volume down to zero on your way past (so you didn't get network "filler" on the air), race down to the control room, hit the Start button for the commercial, turn off the network audio on the audio mixer, then walk back up the hall and return the amplifier volume setting to normal.  Those big knobs -- and the heavy-duty attenuators they controlled -- weren't stock; one of my predecessors had set it all up for exactly that situation.
     So if you're listening to the big game, and a local commercial starts a little late?  --I don't know; these days, the people doing the radio play-by-play can start their own commercial breaks, and like as not, there's no one minding the store back at the station.

Alas

     One of the problems with figurative language is that you set out to describe a regime composed of cranks, crooks and grifters, and instead find yourself insulting noxious, loathsome toads, a largely harmless class of amphibians who benefit us by consuming deleterious insects.

     Linguistic flights of fancy can be great fun, but bad and dangerous people are what they are; comparing them to other dislikeable things only obscures the evil acts they enable and commit.

     If prominent members of the Trump maladministration would commit themselves to consuming at least their own weight in harmful insects every year, I might grudgingly find they were of some use.  This, however, is unlikely; they are indeed useless excrescences at best, like warts or skin tags.

About That Economy

     Okay, it's just one set of hoofbeats.  Might be a horse, might be a zebra.  But it doesn't seem like a good sign when a major candy distributor files for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween.

     Sure, SNAP benefits have been shut off by the shutdown (there is, of course, a lawsuit.  Wonder if you can cook that up and eat it?  Nope).  Sure, ACA subsidies are expiring and there's no plan to bring 'em back; if you got your health insurance through the Feds or one of the state exchanges, the price is going up, and possibly by quite a lot.  And there's a whole big mess around Federally-subsidized flood insurance, too.  But candy at Halloween?  The people who usually couldn't afford it still can't; this is result of people who once could deciding they'd better not.

     Oops. 

Tool-Geekery

     It's expensive enough that I can't recommend it unless you really need one -- or have money to spare.  But it's as neat a combination of useful tools as I have encountered, and comes packaged in a carrier that keeps all of it together.

     I'd better start at the beginning: for a couple of decades, I have carried and used a Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company Mini-Ratchet set.  They use a proprietary 1/4" spline drive, and come packed in a neat little box with a wide array of bits, a screwdriver handle, extension, a couple of tiny spin handles and a clever small ratchet with 12° indexing.  It was a small company, and I think it changed hands a few years ago; their website shows most things as "out of stock" these days and there's no contact information now, but they keep the copyright up to date.  Their big set includes 44 bits and easily fits into a cargo-pants pocket.  It is also around $180.00 now.

     Or it would be, if it wasn't always listed as not being in stock.  And it is handy, with almost every driver bit you might need.  There was a time when you'd call up the order department and the nice people there would ship the stuff in advance of your check, if they remembered you from previous purchases.  (Yes, that was a long time ago.)

     Stumbling around on a big sales site, I discovered Wera Tools has the next best thing, their "Tool-Check" line.  Sorted out into Imperial and Metric sets, with a number of interesting variants, the basic versions have 37 bits, a small screwdriver handle, a short (locking) extension and a nice small ratchet with 6° indexing, packed into a neat little carrier with places for every piece.  They use standard 1/4" hex drive (with an adapter for the sockets).  Prices run about $100; a little more for the larger sets and a little less for the smaller ones.  It has most of the driver bits you might need, and since they use standard drive, you can add more.  (The set sensibly includes two #1 Philips and three #2 Philips, the most commonly use-worn types, and you can always stow the spares elsewhere and sub any added bits in their places.)

     Wera's even got a modular system that will let you add and expand the carrier with other small sets.  It's decent quality; give me a few years to stress-test my set and I'll give you a full report, but I don't expect any bad surprises.  You might know Wera from their Kraftform ergometric grip, one of the most widely-imitated driver handle designs in the world.  I'm not saying they've been watching some of you guys work, but their line includes screwdrivers that can be used as chisels without wrecking them, and beefed-up ratchet handles with striking surfaces intended for hammering.*
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* I have to admit that at my work, we've referred to linesman's pliers as an "electrician's hammer" for years.  A good set of Kleins will stand up to this kind of abuse, but the company doesn't encourage it.

Milestone

     I did something today I have done only four times before in 38 years of my job: I put a new transmitter on the air.

     In this case, it's new only to my immediate employer, having already served for five years elsewhere in the corporation.  But it's new to us.

     Depending on how you look at to, they have only had four or five different transmitters since the station first went on the air, and I am the only person who has worked on all of them.  I was the last person to operate their first transmitter, an all-tube 1950s behemoth that took a little coaxing to get working again (and every second of tuning it up was an adrenaline-heavy thrill ride).  Now I'm the first person to put their newest transmitter on the air, a device so rich in surface-mount components that there's no troubleshooting most of it down to the level of individual parts: most problems, you trace back to whatever subassembly has gone wrong, and order a new one.

     The previous transmitter, in analog and digital configurations, served for over 29 years, and it's still a backup.  The 1950s giant lasted for 32 years, counting backup service and that record will probably be broken by the one I just shut down.  Except for a few hours here and there -- the day we overloaded the big generator during a power outage was the longest, five or six hours -- it was on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly three decades.

     The transmitter I put on the air today will probably still be on the air when I retire, and that's a strange feeling.