ERC as we have come to know them around here hired company wide to audit our utilities and find ways to save us (the company) some money. Well. All that they were able to find that they could save us on was an old cell phone that was no longer be used but still be charged to us. came up to about $75 buck a month.
Well now they are charging us $25 each month and appear to want to continue billing us for the next three years!
At least with the cell phone charge i was actually getting something for it.
At home i’m working on a project, i’m sure by now you’ve all see the “wizards of winter” video where the guy sync’s the christmas lights in his house to music. Well. I found the software and hardware the guy uses. Over the weekend i played around with the software. Tonight we’re going to add some more lights and change some of the cabeling. should be done by tonight.
What’s been going on the life of john? Last week just before i was heading out for the thanksgiving break, quite literally, i saw a package up front. It was the Audemat FMB80. I had been waiting for several years to get one of these and it finally arrived. And of course, i just had to go install it right then and their. So off i went to the KBFM transmitter and plugged this puppy in. it does so much more than the old inovonics 711 we had in their. If you have an RDS on your fm reciever, you can tune in KBFM and see the difference.
I also began working on a problem here at work. Well.. i don’t know about a problem, but a new project. I have a screen here where i can watch the call logs coming in and out of the station. I started monitoring the logs to trace traffic. what was being used, where, and how often. Mostly to help me size up the system and help me find what to get rid of and what to keep. Well after all those cost saving things have been implemented now i just watch to make sure no errors come up or any strange calls.
Well. After all this time i can look at them at a glance and i can recognize normal activity and ab-normal activity. This was strange.. 20 minute calls into one of the stations request lines. Which meant the person who called, called on the toll-free number.. meaning we were picking up the tab on that. and not just one call but several long calls. So began my quest for setting up a routing table to test the caller-id information and treat the call based on that. I think i got that problem nipped in the bud. I’ve taken it a step further and wanted to setup some pre-recorded announcements. But i wanted them to sound like the official “if you want to make a call.. please hang up and dial again” (why else would i have picked up the phone?) So i started looking around for some recordings and found this one i think i may have to employ during april fools on one of the station numbers.
This morning i went by the church office and Pastor was already their. I dropped off the proposal for the new DigiDesign console i’ve been working on. For about two years off and on i’ve been looking for a replacement console for the main building. Now i’ve found one that will do everything we need and no where near the price of all the other digital consoles i’ve been looking at. Now it’s in Pastor’s hands. I was able to briefly speak to him when i handed it to him. He didn’t squirm or knock any of it down. Now all we can do is wait and pray that he’ll say yes.
