Gardening & Radio Automation

I know, Blogger; I'd almost forgot how much I used to post here. Some thoughts just don't really fit in a typical social media post, so here we are.

Coming in from harvesting some leaf lettuce last night I was struck by the idea that while they seem very different, there are some definite parallels between my gardening hobby and my career in radio automation, especially when considering the concept of managing unpredictable elements, such as studio failover.

Here's how they can be compared:

• Planning and Setup (Initial Automation/Garden Design):

  • Radio Automation: You design a system, set up playlists, schedule content, and configure rules for how everything should run automatically.

  • Gardening: You plan your garden layout, choose plants, prepare the soil, and set up irrigation systems. You're trying to create an environment where things grow "automatically" once planted.

• Automated Processes (Growth/Scheduled Broadcast):

  • Radio Automation: Once set up, the system runs autonomously, (or should...) playing music, ads, and pre-recorded segments without constant human intervention, especially during "automated hours."

  • Gardening: Plants grow, flowers bloom, and vegetables ripen through natural processes (sunlight, water, soil nutrients) without you needing to actively pull them up each day.

• Unpredictable Elements (Weather/Studio Failover):

  • Radio Automation: In certain scenarios, or other unforeseen issues (like a server going down, a network glitch, or a software bug) can cause a failure or disruption. These are external factors that the automation system itself can't always control or foresee.

  • Gardening: You cannot predict the weather (droughts, heavy rain, unexpected frosts, pests, diseases). These are external factors that can severely impact your garden's automated growth.

• Manual Intervention / User Definition (Troubleshooting/Adaptation):

  • Radio Automation: There are times a human may need to step in, assess the situation, and redirect the system to the correct, active studio to restore normal operations. In the event of a major unpredictable event, an automation system still needs a human touch.

  • Gardening: When unpredictable elements hit (a sudden pest infestation, a plant wilting from lack of water, or an unexpected heatwave), you "manually define" what needs to happen. You intervene by applying pest control, watering, providing shade, or even replanting. You adapt to the unforeseen.

• Goal (Smooth Operation/Healthy Growth):

  • Both: The ultimate goal is to maintain a smooth, continuous operation (radio broadcast) or healthy, thriving growth (garden), despite the inherent unpredictability of the environment.

So, just as a gardener needs to be ready to intervene and adapt when nature throws a curveball, radio automation, despite its sophisticated programming, still requires human oversight and "user definition" when the unpredictable happens, especially during critical moments like a studio failover.

Radio Show Prep in the 80's and 90's

 

While cleaning out an old briefcase (remember those?) I came across these pages of my KUDL-FM (Kansas City) show prep from 1994. I’m not sure whether to just throw this out or submit it to a broadcasting museum.

In the mid to late 80’s I would research my show prep by heading to the local public library to use their computerized card catalog to show synopsis of various entertainment magazine articles which featured artists my station played. I would then have to write the information down, take to my father-in-law’s house since he had a Compaq IBM PC compatible “luggable” with Lotus 1-2-3 where I could add to my show prep spreadsheet stored on a 5.25” floppy and print on tractor fed paper with a dot matrix printer, the result you see above.

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In the early 90’s I had a PC clone with a 2400 baud dial up modem. This allowed me to access the library’s BBS to perform the same searches, but with the advantage of being able to cut and paste the text into my spreadsheet. Even better, the radio station at which I was working had CompuServe. I would get to the station a bit early to sign in and search for more articles on the artists and songs we were playing and add to the spreadsheet.

 

The first studio with a computer with internet access that I remember was in 2000, and that was always plagued with a virus of some sort. 

 

The things we take for granted, right?

 

Do I Really Need My Car?

Reading Elly Blue's book Bikenomics got me to thinking, how much am I spending per month to own my car?

I bought a new car two years ago, right before the pandemic shut things down. Since that time, I've driven a little over 4,800 miles, or 194 miles per month on average (I work from home and if the weather's nice and the trip is shorter than a couple miles, I'll ride my bike).

I've now done the math and with car payments, insurance, and the 13 times I've had to buy gasoline, my average monthly cost to own this car is $477.33.

If I break it down to what it costs me per mile, the total is $2.46 of which $0.12 is gasoline.

If I use the IRS standard business use mileage rates for 2022, which is 58.5 cents per mile, and subtract that $112.91 from my monthly total of $477.33, it is costing me $364.42 a month to have my car spend most of the time sitting in the garage.

If I use Uber's rate calculator, a trip to and back from one of my grandsons' soccer games would cost me $50 without tip. $16 round-trip to go to church. So, with other trips factored in for times when I need to go somewhere, and my wife's vehicle isn't available, I could maybe save $100 or so a month by using a ride service.

All of this is an oversimplification, of course. I like my car; I don't like using a ride service. I like being able to drop everything and do something for my wife, kids, or grandkids without having to book and wait for a ride. At some point the car payments will go away and for what I'd pay Uber to take me to a soccer game, I could pay the insurance. I'll have a low milage car with a really high resale value. 

I've talked myself into keeping the car.

A Life Changing Internet Search

I was listening to an episode of Jordan Raynor's The Call to Mastery podcast where he was talking with his Editor, Becky Nesbitt. Jordan made a comment that if you ask people about life changing moments, they typically either point to a person or a book. That prompted me to do several Google searches for "This (x) changed my life" and books are clearly the winner. Here are my results:

Competitive, or Just a Jerk?

My wife and I were watching a quiz show the other night where the presenter stated as fact that hermaphroditic banana slugs sometimes bite off their partner's penis after copulation in order to prevent the amputee from being able to be the one to mate as a male. I wish I could have been there to ask how they got that information; did they conduct interviews with the biters? Were some sort of slug police reports filed? Isn’t it possible that some banana slugs are just super jerks?

The More Things Change...

When I was away at college in the late '70's and early 80's, my mother would send clippings from the newspaper which she thought I would enjoy, or from which I would benefit. Had she lived during the advent of the internet I am sure she would have sent me links to similar stories, or forward those multiply-already-forwarded emails that I used to receive from other older relatives. Sure, as a young man at the time I rolled my eyes on occasion; still, I have found recently that I have kept some of those clippings...and they were really, really good.

I came across the passage below while reading Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography (part 2) this morning and thought it was something I would like to pass along to someone. If you've stumbled upon this post, I guess that's you. So, in some ways, I truly have become like my parents.
Watch out kids.

Anyway, I hope you'll find this at least partially as interesting as I did. Keep in mind, this was published back in 1974.

After returning to London in 1934 after 18 months working in Geneva at The League of Nations:

“Everything looked differently to me; especially the assumption on which I had lived from my earliest years, that such and such changes, brought about peacefully through the ballot-box, or drastically through some sort of revolutionary process, would transform human life; making it brotherly, prosperous and just, instead of, as it had always been, and still was for most people, full of poverty, exploitation and conflict. I no longer believed this, nor ever would again. The essential quality of our lives, as I now understood, was a factor, not so much of how we lived, but of why we lived. It was our values, not our production processes, or our laws, or our social relationships, that governed our existence.” ~Malcolm Muggeridge in The Infernal Grove

 [Edited on 2/25 to add]

He also made the following statement which reminded me particularly of this last year:

"This was to be increasingly an age of polarized loyalties."

Broadcast Radio's Product Life Cycle

The normal product life cycle looks something like: 

Development > Introduction > Growth > Maturity > Decline

So, where does broadcast radio fit within this cycle today?

The 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated the cap on nationwide broadcast radio station ownership resulting in a move from mostly locally (or regional) to mostly national ownership. As a result, in my opinion, programming became more and more homogenized, and less and less local. 

When I started doing doing product support for radio automation software back in the early 90's, the industry focus was on setting stations up to run satellite delivered programming with the intent to make it sound as local as possible. As the cost of computer data storage dropped and technology advanced to where audio data could be shared via the internet, stations started running their own music and could allow their DJ's to do voice tracking (where the jocks pre-record their segments) in the studio or remotely. This allowed a smaller number of DJ's to be on the air and allow them to track for numerous radio stations in different markets across the country. When the pandemic hit calling for stay-at-home orders fell into place, we started getting calls from some of the rare stations that still had live, local DJ's, asking to set them up so they could voice track from home. This showed radio groups that voice tracking can be reliable and effective, and resulted in reductions in force for radio station employees (and radio automation software employees...). 

So, radio has become less and less local and more and more like a streaming service, except that it still runs long blocks of 60 and 30 second commercials in the second and fourth quarters of the hour. 

I like this quote from Tim Wu's book The Attention Merchants; "Knowing how to keep the pot simmering without boiling over in public protest, [William S.] Paley proactively set limits on CBS's [radio] advertising; among them, he cut its share of airtime to 10 percent and banned commercials considered offensive. At the risk of giving him too much credit, one could say that such policies not only kept critics at bay but also showed a shrewd awareness of the attention merchant's eternal dilemma: too little advertising and the business can't grow; too much and the listener grows resentful and tunes out."

It may be worth mentioning that monitoring some random stations from across the country recently indicated that their normal commercial airtime at times fell within the 20 to 27 percent range.

If broadcast radio is to continue in, or perhaps get back to, the Maturity phase of the product life cycle, it should take this to heart. #buticouldbewrong