However, I can’t carry these things around all the time. It isn’t practical for me to have boxes of mildly-heavy things with me all the time. But I can carry things around in my pockets…

Since Jeff Atwood is doing it, I thought I’ll share with you what I carry around all the time on my keyring, and in my pockets.

The most obvious thing to have on your keyring is keys. And I have a few of those, plus some other bits and pieces I find handy:

• My house key
• An Electrical Key – typically this lock is fitted to Distribution Boards in Australian schools (at least the ones I have anything to do with!)
• A “60180″ key (a.k.a. Generic 19″ Rack Key – this work on all but one rack I have ever encountered. I also discovered recently that it works on certain NSW DET Alarms, if you have the associated PIN number)
• LED flashlight – very small, vitally important!
• A key for a Kensington security lock
• Sharpie (mini) – I don’t always carry this, but it is defiantly on my keyring when I know I have any work coming up
• Moulded power point tester, which checks for earth leakage and a missing earth. I tell you – it’s very handy for checking if there is something wrong with your gear, or with the power source.
• USB Flash Drive. Mine cost $9, and boasts 1GB of storage! I know, that isn’t much at all. However, I’m not one to carry large amounts of data around with me. I only transfer a few handy apps, as well as documents related to whatever projects I am working on at the time.

Other things I tend to carry around with me (but not keyring related):

• Analogue watch – a cool Boeing one found at a Salvos Stores by my wonder Grandfather (this one has a picture of a plane spinning around the outside, in place of a traditional second hand!)
• Mobile phone – I hardly take this to school, but I clutch onto it for dear life any other time
• Wallet with plenty of plastic cards, and assorted business cards
• When I am at an event, I also keep a roll of while electrical tape in my pockets, plus my trusty side cutters

I don’t travel light – but I do try and be practical!

I’ve been working on the show backstage for three years, but now in my fourth year I was promoted to Lighting Tech. This years show was the first in our new school hall (not built under the BER, but actually built before that started), and it was the first time I was running tech along with Nicholas and Tim, so we siezed the opportunity to be different in the way we did things.

The fact that we didn’t need to build a stage, had ample three-phase power available and already had two dimmers, some built in lighting bars and twenty four par cans made a world of difference. Building a border of truss around the stage wasn’t necessary, which in itself saves heaps of time and money. Instead we only ran 12m of truss across the back of the stage and winched that up with VMB lifters.

The typical FAME show included stack of par cans (48 or so) and a couple of profiles. There was always a need for a scissor lift to get to the ceiling to attach and focus some of these lights. The scissor had the potential to be the biggest pain, and was starting to wear out its welcome. As we had enough par cans permanently installed, there was no need for a scissor this year.

Heres a pic of a typical FAME setup in our old hall. Everything you see had to be built from scratch each year, including the stage. Normally that is a normal PE hall.

Saving money on extra rigging, multipin LX cable and three-phase extension leads, we were able to afford to throw four Martin Mac250 Entour Profiles into the order. These were fixed on the rear truss, making it dead simple to get them in the air.

Twenty four par cans were also attached on the truss, in four vertical bars of four lights, and two horizontal bars of four. Heres a photo of the basic setup:

Everything was setup on Saturday morning with about a dozen people, including Daniel from Lots of Watts (the rental company – by the way, they provided terrific gear this year, and had overall great support!).

I think overall the show went great this year. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and the things people have said to me have been great, considering this was really the first time for each of us techs at running a show like this.

Theres a few things which I think really helped:

• Preparation - we got the order in quite early, and were all very comfortable with the gear we had ordered
• Project Management – I dragged out a copy of Microsoft Project 98 and put in all the tasks we needed to do leading up to the show, so we all had a list of tasks to follow
• People – everyone was really supportive and encouraging. There was minimal negativity, and this really helped the mood which we were all in
• Power – we had a reliable power supply, with probably double the capacity than what we used. This was so valuable to us, knowing we won’t have a problem with tripping circuits! My one complaint on this is the bad locations of some of the GPOs
• Documentation – audio patching, power distribution, and lighting patching was all pre-planned and clearly documented to make sure there were no unexpected surprises, and so we all knew what went where

That being said, there was one big issue which the three of us techs suffered from: tiredness. We’ve all done this show a few times before, but this year we spent a lot more time on it. I was getting to school in the morning at 6:40am in order to get stuff done before the cast rocked up and got in the way. By the day after when we were just tidying up things before going back to class, we were really struggling to do anything at all. There was simply no energy left in our systems. To make it worse for me, I had a really bad cold starting just after the first show.

Another issue, although more minor to us (thankfully!), was a crashed lighting console. We were using a LSC Maxim with a PatPad. Sure, probably not the best desk anyway, but I’m comfortable with using it. We managed to crash it during a rehearsal. Here’s a picture of the console in a crashed state:

As you can see, the whole PatPad lit up, and obviously it was unusable in this state. A restart restored it, but then it crashed again shortly after. It turned out to be a hardware fault, with dodgy connectors on one of the circuit boards. Its a shame that with digital consoles, a single fault can render a whole console unusable. Thankfully, Lots of Watts sent out a service tech and had it fixed on site within an hour! Now, thats great service!!

The four shows went well, I learnt heaps about lighting, tech stuff in general, and how to work with other people. Overall, a great experience for me, and hopefully others, too.

While there has been no official word from the CBAA for a while (the manager of the community radio digital radio project), I’ve been hearing some mentions of digital radio from some of the metro-wide stations around here. In particular, Hope 103.2 has started saying that their new digital-only station, Inspire Digital, is expected to be launched on Sydney DAB+ radio in the next two months or so.

From what I’ve heard, the equipment is almost ready at the metro-wide stations, and now it’s just a matter of getting the connection happening between the studios and the transmission site.

(Incidentally, from today you can start listening to a ‘pilot’ of Inspire Digital via their website. I’ll tell you now: this particular station is sounding like its going to be really, really great!)

I’m particularly hoping that Community Radio will take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of more transmission capacity as a chance to be more innovative, and broadcast new and innovative content. If community stations put all they’ve got into this and do something interesting and appealing to audiences, it could really drive the sales of digital radio receivers, helping the entire Digital Radio project in Australia.

Community radio is in a very unique position to launch new services with minimal costs. There’s no management overheads, sales requirements, or shareholders to satisfy. It’s dirt cheap. Really, the hardest part is coming up with something that will be appealing, and then putting in the effort to see it happen.

If community radio dosen’t take this opportunity, then I’m afraid that commercial operators will. Last week, Austereo announced their newest digital-only station: “U2O Radio“. What’s the concept? “A Radio Station hosted by U for U”.

That’s right, ordinary people submitting programming, and then getting it played on air. It sounds a whole heap like the principal behind community radio, right? But wait, there’s more! U2O radio is an initiative of….. The Australian Government!

Austereo has the advantage over community radio here, because they have much more visibility through their national network. It’s also much more appealing to young people because they have the chance to be noticed by some of the big names in Australia’s media. The splash page of U2O radio says:

Who knows, you could be Australia’s next Hamish & Andy!

Getting your big break on radio has never been easier.

This is exciting and interesting times for Community Radio in Australia. Let’s hope that we take this as a chance to grow, expand and strengthen.

I entered in the Ideas (Student) category, not with any expectation to hear from them again. Of course, my expectations were inaccurate, and I ended up coming second place in that category, and winning $1500 for my school!

As a part of being a winner, I was invited to attend a fancy evening at the NSW Parliament House, last Wednesday. The evening consisted of talking to others in the government, as well as industry partners for the event.

It was interesting to talk to some others involved with the competition, and various other government projects, and to get their opinion on things.

Although the evening seemed a tad too political, it was enjoyable, and interesting to see the other entries. Many of these were transport orientated (including mine), which is not surprising considering that the RTA data is already readily available on the internet (although only as HTML, not in XML).

Now, the thing to watch for is if any of these projects will be taken on board by the government, and developed further. They claim a $50 000 pool is available for development, so I hope something good comes out of it.

Now, here’s a video of the competition which was played on the night. I’m not in this one, but there should be another coming out at a later date which will include a clip from me.

And they also have a Flickr photo gallery of the evening. Here’s a picture of me!

Why am I leaving? It all comes down to time, and a desire to focus on something different. After spending so long working at this one organisation, having everyone relying on my to keep things running, I feel that I need to do something else with the precious time I have. A change of scenery, so to speak.

With the somewhat sad (but yet exciting!) final day approaching, I have been pondering: What could I have done better? If I was to do it again, what would I do differently? Do I have any regrets?

One of things I would have done differently is to be more of a team player. The way things panned out was that I did the majority of the work, and then others around me try and catch up. I very rarely delegated tasks to others, even when they were capable to do them. At first, this didn’t pose many problems, but as the station grew and people changed, it became more and more of an issue.

I could always manage to find a way to get the technology working properly, and doing what I wanted, but as a manager of other people, I fell short. Through the recent circumstances, I’ve been made aware of this. If I was to do it all again, this I would be more conscious about, and I would defiantly act differently.

Another thing I would do differently is to have a clearer plan of where we are heading. Often, due to the chaos of the moment, we were stuck in the mindset of “okay, we need to fix this NOW”, not able to see ahead and plan anything for the future. The problem with this, especially when dealing with technology, is that you often end up duplicating yourself. There needs to be a plan as to what changes should be done in the next year, etc. in order not to replace things multiple times, or reconfigure something only to have it superseded by some other magical device.

Finally, I would make sure I say “I don’t know” more often. I got into this terrible habit of thinking I knew the answer to everything, and when I didn’t, I would lie until I could work out what the answer was. Sometimes this wasn’t such a big a deal; other times it was.

Even after listing these things I would change, I don’t think I have any regrets. What I did was always what I thought was the best action for the moment. I was thrown into the “deep end” at age 14, and now that I’m approaching 17, I’m much wiser. Still a long way to got, I admit, but this has probably been one of the best things I’ve been a part of. The learning is ongoing.

At Cumberland Community Radio, a sub-metro community radio station in Sydney, we had exactly that problem. We had become very reliant on our connection to the internet, and when it didn’t work, I found out pretty quickly and frequently. It just wasn’t acceptable to have your news feed, internet streams and VoIP fall over so frequently.

We needed a fix, and fast!

A second ADSL connection was sourced with a different provider, but to manage these two connections we needed some fancy piece of hardware. Something smart enough to work out what both connections were doing, fix any issues, and route the traffic in the right direction. We needed a router/firewall with dual-WAN ports.

I initially expected to spend quite a large sum of money on a piece of hardware like this. But thankfully I didn’t have to. The model we picked was a DrayTek Vigor 2910. This little box cost less than AU$280, from OzCableGuy. These guys were able to get the box to us in less than a week, and that was paying with Bank Transfer, too.

Setup was fairly simple. In fact, if you know the jargon of LANs, WANs, and all that jazz, it’s easy. If you don’t, then I suggest you learn that aspect of things before you buy this box. There’s defiantly an expectation that you aren’t a beginner when trying to set up this piece of hardware.

Configuration is via web interface, which can be a little buggy at times. There isn’t much validation of input, so it will sometimes accept invalid input you mistakenly gave it, and you then are left wondering why something isn’t happening as expected. It’s little things like that which tripped me up the most.

The first thing I did was get the two WAN links happening. For this to work, you need to turn each of your two modems into ‘dumb’ modems. This means that the box which interfaces your phone line with the network dosen’t handle any sort of router functionality. In fact, it shouldn’t even handle any PPPoE authentication. The term used to describe this is ‘bridge mode’.

The two cheap consumer modems I had were a little trickier than expected to get into bridge mode, but a quick look at the manual sorted that out. It’s always that one checkbox you miss that trips you up, right?

Once you’re modem is in bridge mode, the DrayTek Vigor2910 handles all of the PPPoE authentication. The beauty of this arrangement is that if your modem disconnects, the DrayTek picks up on it really quickly, and it’s reconnected before you know it. This would be one of the best parts we’ve experienced so far.

Setting up firewall rules and port forwarding was no-nonsense, and done in a similar fashion to ordinary modem/router devices, but with extra functionality. There is also load balancing policy, so you can choose certain services to go through certain WAN ports if that is desired. There are also features available such as URL-filtering, VPNs, and all that good stuff. I haven’t set all of that up yet on this particular box, but if there is a need in the future, we know it’s there, ready to go!

Overall, the DrayTek2910 has been a solid performer, and I would defiantly recommend it in the future for similar situations.

All of this work has found me increasingly tired with things. It’s not that I am not enjoying the work I am doing, but the combination and amount of it is just tiresome.

To combat this tiredness of day-to-day work, I have committed some of my time to work on what I have dubbed “Free Will” projects. This concept encompasses work I choose to do, and I have control of the overall direction of project.

This isn’t a new concept. It is a concept which I borrowed from Google, who allow employees to devote 20% of their time to do whatever they choose, in what is dubbed “Innovation Time Off”. It dosen’t have to be productive, but ironically, some of the best products offered by Google have been developed in this 20% time. Gmail, Google News, and AdSense were developed in this time.

I personally haven’t chosen to devote a fixed period of time to myself for my “Free Will Projects”. Also, the end result of this time dosen’t have to be saleable or submittable for marking. In fact, the end result isn’t as important. No, it is the journey taken and the things learned which is important.

While musing over this concept during the past week, I realised that the majority of my skills related to technology were developed while working on small projects for myself.

For example, I learnt the fundamentals of PHP & MySQL while working on a project several years ago called Playground Hunt. The original concept of Playground Hunt was to develop a wiki of all the nation’s playgrounds. I developed the code all by myself (with the help of online tutorials), launched it to the web, and then shut it down six months later.

This as a business venture was a complete failure. I was thirteen at the time. Thankfully, I didn’t really loose anything (except for $20 on domain registration). In fact, I gained so much! Every project since then has used the skills I gained while developing that little website.

One of the key features of “Free Will Projects” is calling the shots yourself. There’s no point embarking on a project if someone else is making all of the decisions – this defeats the whole purpose! You might as well be spending this time doing something else.

Also, for these projects to be useful they must be somewhat enjoyable. If it’s just going to make you stressed and tired, well, that’s not worth it. Go and do something else. This isn’t to say it has to be enjoyable 100% of the time – it’s perfectly natural for certain aspects of your project to get frustrating.

Finally, the project dosen’t have to be yourself. It could be for a not-for-profit which you are involved with, it could help a friend, it could be open-sourced in the future, or it could even be sold. This dosen’t necessarily matter.

I’m undertaking a project at the moment which is for a certain Christian radio station, but I have overall control of, and is helping me learn certain things as I go. I’m not getting paid for it, the project is a bit different, making it fun, I’m calling the shots (under the general direction of management, of course) and I am also getting valuable experience as I go! It’s a win-win situation.

The key point of this concept is to learn and grow as a person, while participating in something a bit enjoyable.

The trouble is, what happens when something breaks? How do you fix it if you’ve never touched it before? For example, I’ve never had to clean out the faders in our broadcast console before. I don’t know the best method to do it, and even now that I know the best method thanks to other experts in the industry, I still haven’t used their advice because I haven’t done it before and am a bit nervous about pulling faders apart.

So, what is the best way to learn about equipment before it breaks and now it is critical that it gets fixed? I’ve learnt that it is best to dive in and fiddle with things whenever there is a chance. Whatever equipment there is around you, just grab a screwdriver and pull the lit off it.

For example, a few weeks ago, I pulled our low powered backup FM transmitter out of the rack, opened the lid, and had a look around. I now know that to program the frequency of it, you need to switch the dip switches and use binary. I didn’t know that before I opened it up! I also got to see how all the different components of the transmitter connect together.

Another technique to learn about equipment is by reading the manual. And the manual for other pieces of equipment similar to it. Or even manuals for bits of equipment you don’t own.

I learn heaps about compressor/limiters by downloading some old manuals off a manufacturers website, and reading through all of the instructions and application examples contained within it’s pages. I now know a bit about how Axia Audio over IP networks operate thanks to the extensive manuals they provide on their website. I don’t regret spending time doing things like this.

It’s a combination of pulling stuff apart and reading through manuals which has helped me learn what I know, but I need to keep doing this to keep learning more and more. I’m only young, and I have my whole career ahead of me, so now is defiantly no time to stop learning!

I’ve wanted a VPS to do so many things. As I work in radio, one of the primary things I’ve wanted to do was setup my own streaming media server. However, as I don’t have much cash to spend, it has been hard to find a reliable VPS provider within my price range.

The key word is here is ‘reliable’. There are countless dirt-cheap VPS providers out there, but when it comes to their network latency, uptime, and other factors, well, that is another thing all together. Not to mention the tendency for providers in this area to be here one day, and gone the next!

There are entire websites setup to track this whole ‘low end hosting’ market. One such website which I’ve been following for some time is low end box. They track the very low end of the market. In fact, their criteria for listing is under US$7/month. Now, that’s pretty cheap by anyone’s standard!

After umm-ing and err-ing for a while about singing up with one of these services, I finally decided last week to take the plunge. US$6/month and a few days waiting for PayPal to clear my money, I had signed up for Delimeter USA, which ironically, has their servers located in Germany.

For US$6/month, I got 256MB of RAM, 10GB of hard drive space, and a seemingly unlimited amount of data transfer (terms and conditions apply, of course). The data transfer was the deciding factor for me to choose this provider; I was happy when I found a provider which wouldn’t shut me down if I used a bit of extra data transfer.

As far as the stability of this service goes, I currently have no clue what to expect. They boast 99.9% uptime, but I’m not holding my breath. As long as they don’t go down for hours/days on end (as a previous Shoutcast host has done to me in the past), then I will be happy.

Right now, I have Icecast2 and Apache installed on my low end box, and it’s serving up 2CCR’s MP3 and AAC+ streams. I setup Apache as a reverse proxy, so I now have our station streaming on Port 80 (in addition to our legacy ports still working). I’ve also configured it to ‘pull’ the data from our encoder, rather than our encoder ‘pushing’ the stream out to the server constantly. The advantage of this is that if no one is listening, then we don’t use any bandwidth. So far, so good.

It’s great to finally have my own server running. Being able to do whatever Ubuntu supports is great. No longer am I restricted by what Plesk or cPanel wants me to do, or what my shared hosting provider dictates. I hope it stays up and running, and the provider doesn’t collapse. But if they do, there’s a whole world of other providers out there to choose from. To me, it’s a great adventure!

School Certificate

I’ll get rid of the boring one first. Since I am still in year 10 at school, I’ve got the school certificate coming up soon. These are a series of exams on the core subjects I have been taking at school over the last two years, including Maths, English, Science, History, and Geography. It’ll be held on the 9th and 10th of November. It’s kinds important, so I won’t be very active in other projects until these finish.

Radio Traffic Software in Access

Yes, I plan to write some software in Access! It’s something I haven’t done for ages (or ever?). Basically, I hope to make something which 2CCR can use instead of Excel. I haven’t really told anyone about it, and I don’t expect them to use it. I’m doing this for the fun of learning something new.

It’ll be real basic, basically allowing the addition of sponsorship messages, and manual scheduling of spots for each hour. It’ll also export a text file which can be imported into StationPlaylist Creator, as well as a printout of all of the spots so presenters can load them themselves.

Squid Proxy – Nicer looking error pages

At the moment, the Squid proxies I have setup display error messages wrapped in some HTML which used to replicate our station’s website. Of course, since I have changed the site so much since the proxy was setup, it’s kinda broken-looking. I want some standalone error pages (not linked to any website), which I can drop in any proxy I use and not have to worry about dependencies.

Fix the Headphone sockets in a studio

Studios experience wear and tear – this is a fact of life. One of the things I’ve been slack about recently has been replacing the headphone sockets in our main studio. I’ve got the bits ready, and the new amp has even been installed! I just need now to install the sockets on the table. This will require slightly larger holes in the desk than are already available, because naturally the new pots are larger than the old ones!

Install a new PABX

The board at 2CCR has approved the purchase of a new PABX. It’s a Talkswitch 488VS, with ten TS9133i handsets. In a desperate effort to save money, I’m doing all of the install myself. As it’s a software configurable system, it shouldn’t be too hard. Besides, I’ve already read quite a bit of the manual and it seems pretty reasonable.

You’ll certainly get a few blog posts out of this. I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve!

Work Experience, V2.0

That’s right, I’m going back for more work experience!! After a chat with my school’s careens adviser and constantly being in contact with Stephen Wilkinson, I’m organising a week of tech-oriented work experience from November 16 to 21st. I love that place… I can identify with the mission and I absolutely want to be a part of it, in whatever way I can! I’m sure I’ll also be spending a bit of my December holidays at that place.

Back to the 80s

That’s right, our school’s musical is coming up soon. And it’s set in the eighties! Back to the 80s is apparently a “totally awesome musical”, and the first rehearsal I was a part of was yesterday (but the cast have been rehearsing endlessly since August). It’ll be staged in our brand new hall this November. I’m on the tech crew, so I’m in for a fun week of getting everything happening in this brand new hall.

Blog more…

Over the last few weeks my blogging level has decreased, due to school commitments, etc. However, there’s been heaps of ideas buzzing around in my head which I now need to get written down. Hopefully it’ll start coming out soon.