| Danley is holding the scissors with herhonor. |
Well, we did have that problem anyway. I'm not sure we do anymore. The Salem Seggliders location at the corner of Derby and Lafayette is about to be converted into a frozen yogurt shop, and everything inside the store is gone. They may or may not be back. Their old website now redirects to the Boston site, with no mention of Salem at all. I won't say I told you so, but ...
__________
The Salem News article that ran last week touting the "on course" nature of Blaney Street construction is at least a little bit of revisionist history. Construction on the next phase was supposed to begin at the beginning of November, as soon as the ferry season ended. The fact that it is just being put out to bid actually means that they are months behind plan.
Check out this from an earlier Salem News article. " In the late fall, after the ferry season ends, contractors will start building the first section of the T-shaped, 350-foot pier. Work on that phase is scheduled to be completed by the fall of 2012."
That was written by the same reporter who states that work starting in June, and not ending until 2013 is "on course." Um ... OK. The last time I dared to criticize something written by Tom Dalton I took a bunch of crap from some of you, so I'll just leave it at that.
I asked a city official why nothing was going on at Blaney back in early December. The response was that they had hoped to get things going, but MADOT hadn't yet signed off on the plans, which was required for some of the grants. That's the approval that finally came in, after a long wait.
_________
Happy new year, everyone! Tried to watch the Salem inauguration and state of the city address today on SATV, who stated they were broadcasting it live. Of course, they didn't. Fail. Would have been interesting to hear the mayor's take on the state of the city. I've sensed a lot of fail coming from SATV recently. It seems they only cover public meetings if they are specifically asked by the city. Why can't they get on the same email list I am on to get the agendas ahead of time. It's pretty easy to read that an agenda item is approving the hiring of a new school superintendent, and deciding that is worth covering. What am I getting for the franchise fee I pay to Comcast? Don't do it for me, I'm just too busy to get to a lot of these meetings. Do it for those who are physically incapable of attending.
__________
The Salem News article that ran last week touting the "on course" nature of Blaney Street construction is at least a little bit of revisionist history. Construction on the next phase was supposed to begin at the beginning of November, as soon as the ferry season ended. The fact that it is just being put out to bid actually means that they are months behind plan.
Check out this from an earlier Salem News article. " In the late fall, after the ferry season ends, contractors will start building the first section of the T-shaped, 350-foot pier. Work on that phase is scheduled to be completed by the fall of 2012."
That was written by the same reporter who states that work starting in June, and not ending until 2013 is "on course." Um ... OK. The last time I dared to criticize something written by Tom Dalton I took a bunch of crap from some of you, so I'll just leave it at that.
I asked a city official why nothing was going on at Blaney back in early December. The response was that they had hoped to get things going, but MADOT hadn't yet signed off on the plans, which was required for some of the grants. That's the approval that finally came in, after a long wait.
_________
Happy new year, everyone! Tried to watch the Salem inauguration and state of the city address today on SATV, who stated they were broadcasting it live. Of course, they didn't. Fail. Would have been interesting to hear the mayor's take on the state of the city. I've sensed a lot of fail coming from SATV recently. It seems they only cover public meetings if they are specifically asked by the city. Why can't they get on the same email list I am on to get the agendas ahead of time. It's pretty easy to read that an agenda item is approving the hiring of a new school superintendent, and deciding that is worth covering. What am I getting for the franchise fee I pay to Comcast? Don't do it for me, I'm just too busy to get to a lot of these meetings. Do it for those who are physically incapable of attending.
Regarding SATV, here's an update. I went through some of this in a private email, but just so your readers know this:
ReplyDeleteSometime late Sunday evening into Monday morning, the power went out in parts of downtown, including our part of Derby St. (285, near Haunted Alley and Dunks.)
According to my cell phone inbox, the power went out around 11:45 PM New Years Day; our computer systems have the ability to send email alerts to my cell phone when there is a problem, and one of our servers did so.
I was not awake for the initial alert, but I noted the problem around 7 the next morning. One of our machines had gone down and not come up. So far, so good, nothing serious, but I would have to come in.
National Grid trucks were outside Dunks when I came in around 8. I did some diagnosis and tinkering around, and left around 9. One of our servers handles program switching and playback.
At 9:10 AM, it was running along fine so far as I knew, so I left for the morning; Mondays are my day off from SATV. I knew the inauguration was at 10 and my policy is that I keep hands off the systems during live events unless something goes wrong.
From the logs I got from our systems afterwards, the server that does switching went down at 9:20 AM and never came back up as it was supposed to. Normally, I do everything possible to set up our network so that computers will reboot themselves and try to work, even if they're sick.
That did not happen. I was paged on my cellphone again. I would have only responded sooner if 1) my cellphone's batteries didn't die and 2) my cellphone didn't crash, which it likes to do when it gets too many SMS messages.
Around 10:45 AM Monday, I get the email on my laptop, the server's down, from my systems. Here we go again.
Around 11 AM, we are back on the air normally. We have been having hard-drive problems with that particular machine that handles switching, and that may have contributed to the problem.
This past summer, we paid some $2K to upgrade the backup power system in the room where we send programming out, in order to keep National Grid from putting us off the air again.
We have just placed the order for nearly $3K of replacement parts on that server, as nearly all of our programming runs through that machine.
We are also waiting for the vendor of this particular machine to send us a software upgrade that we have been told to expect for a year now.
On another note, we're aware that much of our on-demand programming is not accessible to tablets, and we are trying to fix that.
Unfortunately, no matter how much we spend, I'm afraid National Grid will disappoint us; there is only so much SATV can spend to get reliable power and communications.
Despite what some say on Facebook, we are not the Peabody Essex Museum, either. I have managed our computers at SATV for over 10 years and I am working as hard as I know how with all the professional expertise I have. I can't do more.
We can't do more than that.
David Moisan
IT Coordinator
Salem Access Television