Westendorf.US » Television/HDTV

Best dvd warning label ever

Ryan Westendorf — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:51:30 +0000

Do not expose disk to direct sunlight. Do not place near magnetic field. Do not use as Frisbee or pet toy. Do not use as drink coaster. Reflective surface is not to be used as vanity mirror. Failure to comply will result in a severe spanking by the brotherhood of Delta Force.

Bad Taste?

Ryan Westendorf — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:26:33 +0000

I’m all for new media. In fact, it’s one of my favorite things to talk and think about. If I could choose something different to do at work it would be to work on and develop new ways of delivering the news to our viewers. Blogs actually are a very good way of getting information to people. It’s not just because I can express my viewpoint, but also syndicating blogs is incredibly easier and allows readers/viewers simple access to updated content. Personally, I use Google Reader for all of my blog-type readings.

Anyway, today I caught a blog from WCNC-TV from Charlotte, North Carolina. They’re covering a funeral for two firefighters from Salisbury. I’m all for covering events like this if it’s in good taste. However, there’s something about doing a minute by minute blog of the events. It just seems a little odd. Maybe not quite bad taste, but just seems like a little much to me.

GAHHHAHHH!!!

Ryan Westendorf — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:44:11 +0000

I’m over this caucus crap… I’m just sayin’. So far we’ve got 7 remotes scheduled for tomorrow night with probably more to get scheduled in at the last minute. I’ll try to take pics of the madness if I manage, but don’t hold your breath.

My Summer is over before it began

Ryan Westendorf — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 05:23:21 +0000

BBUK 2007

Originally uploaded by rwest

I’m not going to say this is the sole reason for the lack of posts lately, but it is a pretty good one. I’m already into day 12 of Big Brother UK 2007. What I’ve always said about the UK and the US versions still holds true… the UK version just knows how to make its program more marketable. Not only do they produce at least 2 shows per day, but they also forbid the housemates from discussion nominations, something the US version doesn’t do. This allows the housemates to interect more candidly rather than blatantly trying to manipulate the nominations. Sure, manipulation does play a part, but it isn’t as blatant and annoying as the US version.

Supposedly the US version this year has some “changes”, but I doubt they will be on the level of getting the program back to its roots and being more like the UK version.

Goodnight Mr. Mediacom

Ryan Westendorf — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:31:13 +0000

Hmm, that title sounds familiar… Goodnight Mr. Sinclair (January 7, 2007) Oh yeah, I remember now. I was on Mediacom’s side for the whole Sinclair ordeal and said I wasn’t going to change just because KDSM had disappeared from the lineup. Now, however, I’m jumping ship. Actually, running from a flaming car might be more like it. After a $3/mo increase in my internet last month, beginning next month the cost of TV will be going up $4/mo. That’s $7/mo more on my bill in just 3 months. I don’t even have that complicated of a plan: 2-78 analog and the lowest internet price. Suffice to say I am on my way to Dish Network and Qwest. See ya Mediacom, don’t let the price increases hit you on the way out.

A spring in your clock’s step

Ryan Westendorf — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:15:29 +0000

Remember last fall when I was at work waiting for the clocks to fall backwards in time? I’ll be doing it again this weekend, only according to some computers it’s happening 3 weeks earlier than it should. The other difference is that I’m training people this weekend so that should be….fun… As far as I know we’ve upgraded as many of the systems and programs that need it, but I totally have this feeling that one or two things were completely forgotten and will be quite confused about what time it is come Sunday morning. If the power goes out..don’t blame me. If the TV goes out…don’t blame me either, I’ll probably just be swearing at the equipment.

Excuse the mess

Ryan Westendorf — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:54:49 +0000

I had a server upgrade this past week and it sort of broke the website. So that’s why it was unavailable. If you actually had power and were trying to see radars, I apologize.

On the electricity front, I got a hold of Mom & Dad. They lost power Saturday at 11am and are still without power. Luckily, the generator is still hooked up from when we had chickens. I believe that Calvin & Connie brought over a tractor so now home is the new emergency shelter for the neighborhood.

At work, I had a 1.30p-1.30a scheduled shift on Saturday. Since stuff started going down around 11pm, I didn’t get to leave there until about 3.30am and then still worked a bit on stuff from home after that. On the plus side, I now know which computers throughout the whole building that need to be rebooted for things to work again. Fun!

Good night Mr. Sinclair

Ryan Westendorf — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 07:46:29 +0000

A few mostly random updates for tonight. If you've been watching or reading the news at all lately, you already know about the ~~pissing match~~ battle going on between Mediacom and Sinclair. Well, Saturday morning at 12:00:34am (I was recording it for a story at work), Mediacom had to pull the plug on Sinclair owned stations across the country. It's really no biggie for me, since I prefer to watch the digital signals for the stations anyway, whether it's via antenna or cable. What did effect me, though, were the disconnects Mediacom was doing. My complex is fairly old and the port that my apartment is supposed to be plugged into has some problem. A few people in the complex dumped Mediacom in favor of dish and Mediacom sent out techs Saturday to disconnect them. The problem? I was also disconnected. I was able to catch the guy, but he argued it was because I was on the wrong port. He hooked me back up to my old port, but that one can only cause me problems. He said I'd have to make a service call to get it fixed. (I'll let you figure out why he couldn't do it, I honestly have no idea.) After an hour and a half trying to get to someone I finally got someone on the phone. The service call was scheduled… in a week and a half! Ryan entered not happy mood. I called back tonight at work, and was told someone had already gone out to fix it.

This is after I've already had problems for a couple weeks with my connection. Those problems, though, are related to my router. I think the hard drive in the computer I use has finally passed gas and creating the bottleneck. I've already change the modem ethernet card, now I have to change the local network card, and then finally the hard drive before giving up and curling up into a ball. This has effected a few services I offer such as the PepperCam & the live weather warning map. Hopefully I'll be able to get those back up and running soon.

In not-home-but-work news… I found pens!! Seriously, sometimes it takes so little to make me happy, and this week it is the discovery of my long-lost secret stash of pens. Now to hide them in my locker.

That's it for now… more later on how the moaning of Mediacom subscribers is getting on my nerves.

Just heard on a paid program

Ryan Westendorf — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:34:15 +0000

"If you have an intestinal tract, you're going to want to stick around and watch this program."

Um… Doesn't everybody have an intestinal tract? Maybe they were just trying to scare away The Blob. Although, I hear he farts…and to do that you need an intestinal tract.

When things go boom

Ryan Westendorf — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:07:59 +0000

We had a triple play of sorts last night at work. First, CBS sports went long so the 10pm news didn't start at 10. Then the news ran long, and with weather cutins for most of the night, my programming schedule kept getting bumped back. I spent a good chunk of the night rearranging commercial breaks by killing promos and PSAs. I also had to do some funky working with the late night replay of the news because I didn't want to freak people out into thinking there were still tornado warnings for places that shouldn't even have been seeing rain at 4:30 in the morning.

I actually killed enough spots at times to just have a 10 second promo in between segments of shows. And you know what? I LOVED it. Seriously… there's just something that I like about actually being able to use my brain and think while working. It was honestly probably one of my more enjoyable nights in master control.

So, from saving the world, I'm now off to sleep. There doesn't seem to be too much excitement on the horizon for tonight, so I'll probably be bored out of my mind once again.

Much better..and hey, there’s a (new) station on the air!

Ryan Westendorf — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 08:12:03 +0000

Today went much better than the rest of the week. Actually, every day has actually gone really well and been interesting, it's just frustrating to not really feel like you're getting anything accomplished. The past couple days have just had so much work crammed into them that even though we dubbed in hundreds of spots and oodles of programs, there were still just as many things missing.

Today (Friday), the station went off the air at midnight from the old studio and came back up around 5am from the new studio. This meant that for better or worse we had to figure out what some of the problems were and also to fill in holes in the programming schedule. When I got in around 2, I took over as the MC op for the new CW station, WKCF. Operation here is definitely still different than at home. For KCF we were mainly just watching to make sure things were running smoothly and to find and ingest missing content. They use the as-run logs as their actual logs..at least for that station.

I still got to see plenty of Jerry Springer episodes while prepping them and had plenty of "oh crap" moments when they were reconfiguring the plasma wall. It would go away for about a minute as it rebooted itself. Since the day was much calmer, I also allowed myself to observe a bit more of how they work stuff here as compared to home. I got some ideas that might be interesting to try…but then again change is bad.

I'm off to bed now as Saturday will be the last day at the station. Sunday's plans are a bit in flex… I have to be out of the room at 11, but then my flight doesn't leave until 3.15pm. Since I don't really have any idea how long it takes to get anywhere, I will probably just head to the airport and watch people again. If all goes well I should make it into Des Moines on Sunday night at about 9.55pm. Tomorrow night I'll post live flight tracking links again for my flights from Orlando and Houston.

Oh, and be sure to check out the full set of pictures on Flickr. I took quite a few tonight, mainly of the inside of the station. Tomorrow I'll try to make it early so I can get a picture of my car and the station during the daylight. Oh, the foggy ones are because my camera fogged over when I got out of the car…and I didn't think I even had the air on that much!

I Am Here

Ryan Westendorf — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 08:06:00 +0000

Yo estoy aqui. I've determined that while this station has a huge staff, they have to have one of the most confusing workflow models in the world. Each person has an assigned position, but it still seems like everyone is doing everything. I'm sure it's just because they only have, well, 3 more hours until this new station goes live, but wow. I've now done a 14 and a 12 hour day there spending my whole time segmenting out shows that they need. My eyes hurt, and I've seen more episodes of Frasier in one day than any human should have to bear.

Long Day, Short Update

Ryan Westendorf — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 07:52:36 +0000

Well, Ernesto pretty much passed out and decided to weaken to tropical depression strength as it went over Florida. This meant not much in the way of winds for the Orlando area. Actually, I've seen stronger winds tonight on the back side of the system. According to weather sensors on local hospitals, the highest wind since midnight has been 30mph. The photos I uploaded tonight are of when we lost all the cable/sat channels as a heavy squall was moving through the area. I was talking to Mom at the time, so had to juggle the phone and the camera. After I hung up with her, the power actually went out for a few seconds, but then came back on.

Since the station pretty much cancelled their 24/7 coverage, they changed my assignment to help them bring a new station online. WESH will actually be broadcasting 2 channels (3 if you count Weather Plus+) from their studios. The trick? It goes live way early Friday morning…and there is NOTHING on the server yet. It took us at KCCI a little over 3 weeks to move commercial spots over to the server. We did it in one day today. I think in total we dubbed in about 250-300 commercial spots and I prepped about 40 shows. Granted, not all of the shows were for the new station, but they were for the Hearst Hub. I still have no idea how the crap it works, but basically WESH receives shows that other Hearst stations also air. Someone at WESH prepares the show for air and then sends that information along with the show file to the stations that air the show. Except to double check the information, the other station really doesn't have to do much of anything at all.

This also means…I potentially knocked stations off the air across the country today. Alright, I guess this didn't turn out to be so short, but still, after working a 14 hour day today, this is most definitely a short post. Time to crash in bed, The rest of the week should, hopefully, be 10-hour days starting at 3pm. I fly back home on Sunday starting at 3pm and should get back to Des Moines around 10pm if all goes well. I'll post links again to the live flight tracking sites for the flights that I'll be taking closer to Sunday.

That's all for now…Good night!

First trip to well, anywhere

Ryan Westendorf — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:28:34 +0000

12.30pm

I'm writing this in the Houston Airport as I wait for the next flight. I got in from Des Moines at about 11.50am. The next flight leaves @ 1.40…so I've got a bit of time to burn. The first trip on an airplane was great. No real big bumps, and once I was actually on the plane everything was all good. The TSA agent pulled my shoes aside to do whatever to them. Good thing I took a shower and washed my feed.

Now in Houston I'm doing more people watching than anything else. Right now I'm eavesdropping on a man talking to customer service in Spanish. Besides the fact that I think his boarding pass is somewhere horked up, he's also quite upset. But that's all I'm able to figure out. Rats..should have taken 4 full years of Spanish.

The schedule for the rest of the day should be arriving into Orlando around 5.17p et. From there I have to find the car rental place and get a car for the trip into downtown and find WESH-TV. They tell it's hard to miss and you almost can't not find it. This means I'll be hopelessly lost and driving around in circles for hours. In other news, since I haven't looked in my luggage yet for stuff, I only have one casualty of being left behind. I forgot the cable that plugs into my camera to download pictures. Since I'd hoped on uploading pictures as I go, I'm hoping that there will be an electronics store somewhere near the station or the hotel that I can go and grab an extra cable. I sort of need one anyway, I've always wanted a cable that's always attached to my desktop and one that just travels around with me and camera.

Hmm, this didn't waste near enough time, so now I've still got an hour of sitting in the termin

Tropical Storm Ernesto Links

Ryan Westendorf — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 04:50:09 +0000

Just a few links for myself and anyone who is interested.

Flight to Houston Live Tracking (Continental 2977)
Flight from Houston to Orlando Live Tracking (Continental 786)

Orlando Text Forecast
NHC Public Advisory
NHC Forecast Maps
WESH Live Radar
Orlando Radar
Florida Radar
Downtown Orlando LiveCam
WESH Weather Page w/LiveCams
WESH Streaming Radar (Windows Media Player)
WESH WeatherPlus+ Streaming Channel (Windows Media Player)
Westendorf.US Live Warning Map
Westendorf.US Radar Images (Radar) (Winds)

If you're lazy and want to load all of the images linked above at once, you can also go to my Tracking Ernesto page. It doesn't include the streaming movies and it also has rather large images, so chances are good that the formatting for it is broken.