Month: May 2009

Black river wind, limestone drips echo, in darkness, she is blind;
Coleco in the Patch, fabric clone disqueit; storefront shouts still Echo…
What riot may come, when all are undone, and all that remains is quiet?

Neo-Oread stare, forms silent and still, through cellophane and air;
Awiating for incumbent thrill, wrapped-morning

fishbowl as analogy for highschool
last-chance pre-prison correctional h/s
lead is smartass who is on last chance
runs with the “in crowd at new assignment – fishes and prey is how they determine hierarchy
framing device possibly later aquarium guy?
guy falls for girl, who is xgfof the class bully
they go through usual courtship dance, nearly lose each other over who goes down on who
makeup sex for that incident is caught by others, including xbf
sex her idea – “let’s hunt”
girl ges pregnant
last leg dude gets nailed with charges (maybe rape?) that get him sent away, while girl has kid alone
kid is named fish

well, it streamed – and died.
about 70 people connected, then we hit our host’s bandwidth cap.

i feel like i just wasted a week of my life.
now we’ll see if my boss uses me as a mobile speedbump to slow down the rammification bus heading his way.

Today, May 11th, 2009 is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, my full-time employer.

Starting at 10:30AM EST – there will be a performance commemorating this anniversary, broadcast live in several formats from Alice Tully Hall.

The web portion of this broadcast is my baby. You can watch it, free, in an embedded flash player at http://www.lincolncenter.org. The player is not yet linked to the site, so don’t bother going until 10:30 (unless you want to check out Lincoln Center), but, please, I ask you to take a look, and watch something historic – not just because I’ve given the last week of my life to this program, but because it truly commemorates a significant point of culture in our country, and our human society overall.

There was a great article in the New York Times recently about Lincoln Center, I invite you to check that out too, if you have the time. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/arts/music/10tomm.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=lincoln%20center&st=cse)

Thanks, and, as always, I appreciate whatever support/time you can offer in viewing the project.

Looking back over the last 80-odd hours, I’m pretty impressed with myself that I’m still standing.

It is 11:48 on a Friday night, and I’m still at work.

I’ve clocked almost as many hours this week as I did the week before Y2K. I’ve taught myself how to master not just several digital encoding suites, along with the wizardry that is the Digital Rapids encoding appliance, Aja HD-SDI encoders/repeaters, Enseo IP video streamers, the Sony Anycast mobile streaming device, and more about video/dvd/streaming authoring/hosting/troubleshooting than I thought there was to know on the subject.

I taught a guy who has more emmy’s than I have years in at the workforce how to use his Mac better.

I taught myself how to re-encode mpeg-2 and quicktime into dvd formats to get a press kit out in under two hours to all the major networks.

I’m lead on three forest fires, burning away from each other, instead of towards – somehow, I’m bottom guy on the totem pole on all three. My head will roll if it dies/fries/breaks. There are a half dozen people who will sell me out for the free cookies that come with a Happy Meal. Ironically, I’m also the one who knows everything technical that needs to come together for all these situations to come together over the next 72 48 hours.

I’ve come to the precipice of the chasm of professional burnout, and it has very _very_ sharp edges.

I need sleep, but every time I even start to doze, my cell goes off with a new email, or I imagine it does.

My mom has had a really bad week – she ended up back in the doctor’s twice, and the ER twice – apparently she has a viral pulmonary infection that caused her lung to collapse – she’s been stable for a day. I’ve been trying to call her, but I’m losing time at this point. I’ll have to send flowers Sunday. It is a splash of red in greyscale, when it comes to my general stress level at the moment, which is too high for my shot nerves to register anymore. My dad cancelled his annual fishing trip to get knee surgery, so he’ll (hopefully) be able to walk for my wedding. I’m six colors of conflicted about this – particularly in a conversation with him where the guilt was laid on, and the fact that my brother and I are going to have to alternate weekends to PA during his convelescense to mow the damn grass on his fantasy plantaiton.

34 more minutes of encoding, and then I’m done, until Sunday, when I do a 2500$ equipment pickup at Beards & Hats, then schlep it all back to work for a midnite load-in. I’m sure there will be emails and calls tomorrow, but maybe I can field them from home.

Maybe Tuesday I can begin to re-attune to the real world. I have only gotten the news important enough to reach me via txt alert. I’ve only been on the web on load pages off machines I just haven’t had the time to re-set defaults for. I haven’t had but two hours to myself, if that, all week.

When I hit the jitter point, when you can’t leave the thumbs on the spacebar – when you hit the outer suburbs of caffine gut, the city limits of Coffee having long since been passed, when you start to wonder,just a little bit, what is real and what you are making up, I play this song over and over, to make it through.


No Sleep ’till Brooklyn.