[TWIAR] TWIAR Production Status Go!

[w2xbs]

Hello Everyone...

I thought I would take a moment to bring everyone up to
speed on what's been happening here at This Week in Amateur Radio
master control here in good ol' Albany, New York.

First off, my employer has seen fit to mess with everyones work
schedules. This has put a minor cramp in the TWIAR production
schedule, but nothing I can't deal with.

As you know, we have not had a new edition of International in
two weeks, and did not have a new ham service version out last week.

Here are the gory details.

I had edition 223 of International on the production system ready
to release, and edition 838 of the ham service on the system almost
completely edited. I shut down the system normally for a meal break,
and when I came back..

the mother board had failed. A "polling error" of some sort. The
system would not boot from any source. Okay fine. The system died,
I thought to myself, time to take the hard drive out and put it into
another older computer to see if I can at least recover the edited programs.

Put HD in another system, and it too is dead.

Well, we can't afford to buy a new system, so with limited funds available,
I headed down to a local computer recycler here in Albany to see if they
had anything that I could turn into a new audio production system.

They had a recent refurbished E-Machine. I know. This one is different.
They had replaced the standard power supply with something a little more
hefty. It is a P4, has a gig of ram, 180g HD, a decent video card, and all the
other things a system should have. Unfortunately, it came with Vista
installed. I thought about putting XP on it, but then figured I'd give
Vista a go and see how I like it. It's annoying.

Anyway, I spent all of my free time over the last three days reinstalling
all the apps on the new audio production system. I finished last night.
Everything works. With the exception of all my FTP and e-mail address books,
I lost minimal data except for last weeks programs.

So it looks like we're back in business and good to go. We will have a new
edition of International out this week for release to the world on Saturday
May 9th and air on WBCQ on Sunday May 11th.

We will have an EXPANDED edition of the ham services out for release on
Saturday May 9th. This will be edition 838, and will consist of current news,
and carry the news from last weeks lost edition.

Thanks for understanding. Computers do fail from time to time. I had hoped
to get a little more life out of the old system as it was only five years
old.

As a reminder our support fund is what made the new system possible.
Thank you.

See you on the air soon.!

George - W2XBS
Executive Producer
This Week in Amateur Radio