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# Location: Home
# Input Device: Apple Dictate
# Audio: Small fan in the background
# Visual: Fast food cup and some clutter
# Energy: High kind of antsy
# Mental: Tired lots of thinking
# Emotional: Anxious
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OK let's try this again. I'm going to try dictating a phlog post.
Yesterday the dictation software deleted about two or three
longer paragraphs and so I deleted the text and just left the
header.Today I want to share my experience from yesterday
October 11, 2022.
For about a month now I've been reading and researching the
Austin Public organization. Austin Public runs the Public access
television station in town. What's amazing is they have funding
from the local cable providers so they have a lot of cool and
high-quality equipment that's available to the public.
Sidenote, the deletion thing kind of happened again but instead
of getting angry and just deleting everything I pressed enter a
few times and then sat calmly. About 20 to 30 seconds later most
of my text reappeared. This leads me to believe that I am
experiencing latency or just slow response times from Siri or
whatever service is doing the dictation from the audio files that
I'm streaming. I think that's pretty neat so just sharing that.
Back to public access. The way that the producer program works,
which is the program you must enroll in to gain access to the
resources of the public access channel, is that you must pay a
monthly fee of $12 or annually pay $120. Once you pay the fee
you must complete classes to gain access to certain resources.
Without taking any classes you can check out equipment from the
equipment room and you may use the editing room which is like a
computer lab. The training classes supplement the funding for the
studio in the space and they provide instruction on how to use
sound mixing boards, TV equipment, video mixers the kind of
professional equipment that you might see if you were working in
a TV studio. There is a scholarship program available for those
who may not have the resources to pay the fee. And I forgot to
mention you do have to pay $35 for the standards course that
you're required to take prior to joining. This course is short
and covers who the Austin public organization is and also covers
what you can and cannot put it on TV. This is important because
ostensibly what you're doing is generating content for the public
access channel. The beautiful part is that you only need to
provide some content to the studio. Because of this you're not
actually Required to provide can't provide all the content that
you generate. Additionally you own exclusively on all the content
you generate. What you do agree to though is any content you
give to them they are going to aerate at least three times but
they'll keep a copy and they can share it whenever they would
like. Talking with people who are involved with the program it
seems that if you make some thing that's exceptionally good it
will stay in rotation for many years, but if it's not something
that on its own and artistically valuable work or meaningful to
a broader audience then it may not see the light of day for years
afterwards.
This is much longer than I thought it would be but the word the
line length is shorter than I'm used to also. What I did was I
used nano to be my editor because it has a hard wrap word wrap
feature and then I could also set a few different functions
automatically. I'm finding it to be easier to edit this kind of
input then but the other options like VI or VI improved. Anyhow
thanks for reading so far I'll go ahead and try and briefly
summarize the class I took yesterday.
I arrived at 5:55 PM for a 6 PM class. It was a bright day very
clear in and not too hot there were two cars in the parking lot
when I pulled in on my motorcycle. I parked under a tree and a
street lamp because a motorcycle under a street light looks
pretty good and hopefully is less attractive to thieves.I walked
up to the door and it was clear due to the signage I was in the
right place, but there was not anything or anyone to indicate
what I was supposed to do once I arrived other than a sign in
sheet besides a computer at a desk that no one was sitting at. I
signed in and after signing in I saw a man sitting on a couch
tapping his foot and he had a large jug of water at least a liter
probably two might have been a whole gallon. I saw a woman
walking up and down the hallway and there was me. The actual
space itself is mostly light blue in color and temperature was
cooler than outside and fortunately it was not warm as a lot of
city buildings and government buildings are you sure are usually.
He came and got us about five minutes after the 6 o'clock start
time and brought us back to the studio. We walked down a narrow
hall decorated with Austin public and movie poster posters we
passed it toward labeled studio one and another one that didn't
have a label it was clearly full of blinking lights and hummed
like a server room I was entranced really. We continue down and
around the corner to the end of the hall where we went into a
smaller room. It's about the size of a small dorm room maybe
smaller it could fit a desk and a small futon couch. One of the
things you learn when you live in a small space like I did for a
number of years was that the walls in the ceiling are your
friends and also useful storage space. This room made ample use
of its friends. There were three LED light boxes light fixtures
on the wall there were one set of fix track lights to the back
of the room there was there were three "dumb" lights that are
just on and off lights, and they were all color matched to about
55 K or so.
We arrived in the room and sat next to each other and a bit of a
semi circle all facing towards the desk pushed to the back of the
room. We were shown the soundboard and the switcher for video
and some basic computer operations and camera operations. One of
the things that was surprising is that in college you would need
to bring your own floppy disk to record your documents if you
weren't printing them out right there in the labs. Here you need
to bring your own2 1/2 inch solid-state drive that can write at
least 500 Mb per second. I found this to be almost funny in
contrast but it makes sense the compression format available to
us in the recorder are denoted by gigabytes per hour of video
recorded. Ultimately the T300 or one terabyte of disk space if
you can. The expected gigabytes per hour can be 300 GB per hour
of video for uncompressed so three hours or so is a terabyte and
you can check out a room or a studio up to four hours at a time
so that's the math. It's hard to convey the mixer and video board
training to text but these all seem to be simple computers with
clever interfaces. I'm excited to learn more.
