My Visit to the Jazz Station--July 29

I'm on the tail end of the a three week vacation--er--trip to Washington State. Back up with the family now and we're in Spokane Washington. Spokane is just about 15 miles east of Cheney, the home of Eastern Washington University.

I got both my bachelors and masters degree at EWU. And since it had been awhile since I visited out there, I was glad that my wife told me on our first day here that while the kids were sleeping I should go on out there and look around.

So, of course the first place I went to was the RTV Department, where I spent so much of my time during my time at EWU. I got my bachelors in RTV Management and Sales--with all the classes here in this building. When I got my masters in Communications, I was a graduate teaching assistant--teaching Intro to Production classes.

Here's a picture of the building, which looks just the same except the parking lot has finally been paved. For years and years it was a dusty gravel mess.

The Department has taken itself in a new curricular direction, now focusing much more on film-style production. Much of that has to do with the strengths of the faculty, including the chair Marvin Smith (the guy who really pushed me to pursue my doctorate if I wanted to continue in the world of academe), Tom Mullins (someone who they hired just before I left for IU), and the late David Terwische. Here's another link about David.

This new direction seems to be working well for them, too.

About the only thing that remains which is at all familiar to me is KEWU, the jazz radio station that originates a 10K watt signal from a studio in the first floor. I was actually the first announcer voice on the station--on a night sometime in 1986, I suppose. I was called in by Marvin and told that the station had to begin broadcasting. He gave me a long computer print out of the CD catalog and pretty much set me loose. Pretty unfamiliar territory for a kid who had never even thought about jazz in his life--I wanted to be a CHR dj! So, I remember looking for names I recognized and was disappointed that the only two were Sade and Stevie Ray Vaughn!!

Anyway, maybe I'll share some funny stories about my first broadcast on KEWU some other time. But, during my visit I found one lone person sitting behind a desk in an office.

Turns out that this person was the program director, Elizabeth Farriss. After loitering around for long enough, I finally got up the nerve to ask her if I could take a picture of her and her office. We had a very nice time talking about jazz (although she obviously knows a lot more about it than I do) and she allowed me to reminisce about my days at the jazz station (although I did not remember to tell her that the original on-air moniker was "Cityscape.")

She even allowed me to take a picture of the studio, which now is turned 90-degrees to the left from where I used to sit. In the picture you can see

a tape player in the bottom right hand of the screen (behind the stack of CDs). It was one of three that were in the original station--and really the only piece of equipment I recognized from the old studio. . . except the board, which was purchased new at the time.

The station has grown tremendously in its reputation, and was recently awarded

the Small Market Station of the Year from Jazz Week.

Congratulations to them, and thanks to Beth for her hospitality. Beth, by the way, won the Jazz Week award for Small Market PD of the year.

I encourage those of you who want to hear some great jazz, check out KEWU online (congrats to Marvin and Beth and whomever else was responsible for getting the stream online)!

Check the station out here.

Family care and Research Magnetism

Vacation is now about half over for me.
I'm in Richland Washington, and have been separated from my immediate family (wife and kids) while I visit my mom in a rehab facility here in the Tri-Cities. Mom broke a few vertebrae about a month ago--and it took awhile for them to diagnose it. So, she was in bed for a long time and all her muscles atrophied pretty badly.

Now, she's in rehab learning to walk again.
Long process, but she's made good progress for the days I've been here.

But, much of my days are going to the rehab center giving her encouragement.
I've also been setting her up with a cell phone plan.
The rehab facility doesn't have phones in each room---only a cordless at the nurse's station.
So, getting her a cell was important--and difficult to do as there are three companies in town, all have different plans, I wonder which one will fit mom, etc. etc. etc.

Then, after that I go back to where I'm staying--which is at my dad & stepmom's house. I spend the evening catching up with them. When they go to bed, then I start to do work.
Made for some late nights this week, but I know I need to get at least some things done before I'm reunited with Pam and the kids tomorrow!

So, this blog posting has been mostly personal. But, for those of you interested in research, check out this picture of the new fMRI magnet being delivered to IU's Dept. of Psych.

I sent an email to my research buddy, Paul Bolls, who is all about moving the field of communication research into brain imaging and such. He told me that he's drooling! Ha!

Off to dad's.

NAB letter for XM

Just yesterday, Eddie Fritts from the NAB sent a letter to national politicians telling them to peak in on the practice of satellite radio's XM and Sirius. Read the letter and you'll see that he is worried about their creeping into the local market by devoting some of their national channels to local weather and traffic updates. Now, XM has recently purchased spectrum from a wireless company that, in effect is the spectrum directly adjacent to the current XM transmissions. The guess is that XM will use this to add even more local possibilities to their programming mix.

And yet, while the NAB is worried (and I think they should be) it is still not sinking in at the local level. I remember when I had a guest speak come to my programming class from the Emmis stations in Indy. This person was a great guest, but when asked if they were worried about the impact of Stern's departure from broadcasting to satellite, they said no. It could be that this person was just stating the company line heard from Emmis owner. And, while you can't deny Smulyan's point that podcasting (and cell phones, and mp3 players, and audible, and. . . ) are going to significantly threaten broadcast radio. . . the lack of willingness to acknowledge the threat of satellite is surprising to me.

Sunset in Eastern Washington is beautiful.

Hopefully more tomorrow.

Hello from Washington State

I am officially 'on vacation.' Or, more accurately, as close to on vacation as I ever seem to get. ONe of the things that is so weird (and good) about my job is that I love what I do so much that I can't ever seem to let it alone completely.

I was thinking the other day, what a great profession this is, to earn a living for being able to satisfy your curiosities about something that fascinates you. IN my case, about media and radio.

So, I'm back in my home town of the Tri-Cities WA.

Actually, I grew up in Richland (one of the. . .uh. . .tri-cities).

All the radio stations have changed since I was growing up. All in all, though, the market sounds pretty good. There's at least a couple of country stations in town. . . and one of them today had their afternoon guy back announce a song and say "on the station that actually tells you the name of the song and who's singing it. . ." as an obvious swipe to computer controlled juke boxes that pass for stations.

Weird thing is, that the station saying it was a Clear Channel station. Which is notorious for piping in voice tracks from states away. However, looking at that station compared to the other country competitor in town and you'd have to say that they do have more of a live/local on-air personality. Sad to say it still seems to be only the three daytime dayparts, though, with Lia doing nights from who the heck knows where.

Off we go!

One of the great things about the academic schedule is that it allows for travel.
Today the fam and I go off for a three week trip to see our relatives in Washington State.
I know that I haven't been very consistent in postings, and I will tyr to do better once I return.
But, expect even more sporadic postings for the next 20 days or so.

Evil, Evil, Evil Computer Ad Ware

I'm in the middle of trying to get ready to go on the three week trip to Washington. Time is always short and the number of ducks to get in a row always high. This year we are having B.W. house-sit for us. And, I know that one of the things he's interested in was working at the house--writing up research and such on our computer.

So, a couple of days ago I went to some website or other and downloaded a very persistent set of adware, and that kept generating awful popups! Because we have a porn/violence block program running, and it's set to require the user to reboot if too many blocked sites are visited, the computer would need to be restarted every 20 minutes or so.

What was more maddening was:
1. These popups would happen even when I wasn't the internet, and
2. They would continue even after I had scanned using AdAware and Popup Search and Destroy.

So, I finally went to Smart Computing and tried to search for answers (by the way $17 for an annual on-line subscription is a huge bargin).

So, that took me to the Spy Ware Warrior site. Man, what a lifesaver. . .and in my opinion a wonderful example of how the web should be. I was able to find out exactly how to purge our home computer of the crap.

I was amazed at how terrible the spy ware "industry" has become.
If you are as naive about it as I am. . . I encourage you to go visit and try to educate yourseslf.

Making a Music Video (aka 'Welcome Kirk')

So the other thing I've been working on these days is a 'music video' that I agreed to do for my upcoming high school reunion.

It's kinda hard to claim ignorance in doing such a thing when you work in a Department of Telecommunications. . .and even your work mail is delivered to Room 305 of the Radio-TV Center!

So, I've been scanning pictures out of yearbooks and trying to edit them to the song "Let the Good Times Roll" by The Cars.

Anyway, so with the reunion approaching, I got an email from my best friend in the whole world--Kirk Gasper. He's stationed in Italy, and won't be able to make it to the reunion. But, he wanted my phone number and said he'd call.

Well he did! We talked for about 40 minutes today catching up and all. It was so nice to hear from him. He was interested in my blog, and thought it sounded like a wayhe could stay up to date on what was happening in my life.

If you ever make it to the blog, Kirk, drop me an email comment using the link below.

In the meantime, for the rest of you, here's a picture of me and Kirk at something in High School.
I have no idea what it is. . .but don't we look snazzy!

Training Days

I've had to take a few days off, mostly because I've been busy getting ready for my family's annual trip back to Washington State. We're usually gone for about a month--this time it will be 3 weeks. And so, I'm trying to get as much work done in the lab as I can.

But, taking lots of time is a type of formal training that Annie and I have instituted in the lab this summer. Any grad student that is receiving funding from her grants, Annie is requiring to take this training. It's actually a great idea, because that way everyone learns to do things from the same source (Annie and me), rather than learning from other grad students (who in turn learned it from the grads before them. . .who learned it from Annie).

So, we actually developed a syllabus (wait! isn't this summer?!) and have been working twice a week.


This week we focused on attaching electrodes (catchup from last week!), data collection and data cleaning. So, above you've got a shot of SK learning how to attach corrugator electrodes to JA.







The second shot is DD checking the impedence level on one of the EMG measures for AS-J in Lab C.









Finally, here's one of the whole gaggle of them listening in on Annie giving a lesson on something.
I truly don't think they're as bored as they look!