During the week as it was a nice day and I was in Manchester City Centre, I found myself along with various other workers and shoppers at lunch time parked in front of the ‘BBC Big Screen’ in Exchange Square.

This screen seems to mainly show a mixture of BBC News output and rolling promos for the London 2012 Olympics (of which you’ll be able to watch on said screen,  perhaps even with more interested viewers than those in my picture a taken a couple of years ago when they screened the World Cup on the screen.)

In between the “look how good the Olympic Games will be” propaganda there was a very clever short promo for the BBC Radio 2 ’2 Day’ event next week. The basic premise being pieces to camera of different Radio 2 presenters, with the sound track over dubbed with the voices of someone different.

Sat just along the way from me was a couple of guys, looking like your average middle aged office workers, obviously on their lunch break. When this promo video had finished I overheard one of them saying to the other “did you see that” and they went on to discuss the video and some of the presenters in question.

What is notable on this is that they were not talking about the games or news ticker scrolling along  bottom of the screen, obviously the 2 Day promo video “did it’s job” of standing out and getting “talkability” amongst the general public.

I’ve seen this same promo on TV since and as I was thinking of writing this blog post I did wonder if I’d find the video on YouTube in order to link to it, so kudus to the BBC as when I visited the Radio 2 site I was not only given the option of viewing the video, but to “embed into your website or blog” – so I’ve done just that below, so this same talkability can be extended across social media.

So while non-BBC stations might not have the same ease of cross-trailing their promos – I’d suggest following the BBC lead of making their video embeddable on-line, YouTube is accessible to everyone if you don’t have the on-line infrastructure of the beeb.

STUDENT

COMMUNITY

HOSPITAL

How would you group them with these activities?

MEDIA

BROADCASTING

RADIO

Your answer possibly might not be how you come to name the representative associations.

Today on my twitter timeline I’ve been keeping tabs on events at #cracon – more formally known as the Student Radio Association (SRA) conference. This comes hot on the heals last weekend of #hbauk2012, or the Hospital Broadcasting Association (HBA) conference, and while we look in anticipation of the forthcoming Community Media Association (CMA) conference in a couple of months time, erm, not sure what the ‘hashtag’ for this is.

The most stand out name for me is the SRA, as a now outsider to the world of the student, I’d have thought that students are embracing a wider multi-platform world than *just* radio.

Naturally there is more in it than just a name, I’m sure there are still plenty of student newspapers and web-sites up and down the country, just interesting they are not represented by a combined ‘media’ association, much as how the Community Radio Association changed into the Community Media Association many years ago to represent a wider remit of ‘media organisations’.

The HBA uses the ‘broadcasting’ tag because as well as radio stations there are an very small handful of Hospital television stations, which begs the question of if there are any dedicated Student TV stations out there? I’ve heard of university ‘radio’ societies that are filming stuff and putting it on-line in a YouTube channel.

The motto is don’t always judge a book by it’s cover, I just find it quite ironic that the body with arguably the most ‘dated’ name is representing the fresh new talent which could be transforming the ‘broadcasting’ industry of the future into a new multi platform world.

The pictures I am posting will either have been taken on the actual day or recently, or from my collection of older photos which I think have some artistic merit.

The the end of each month I will highlight with some commentary the months pictures. Read my February review here.

Here is my March Review:

A nice spring time shot in Oldham Town Centre, nice contrast with the flowers in the foreground, with the bear branches of the tree in the background.

Sunset over Manchester, taken from a train approaching Manchester Piccadilly in the early evening, I really like the cloud formations and the red glow over the silhouette of the buildings.

This one is a snap I took several years ago, I just thought that the hand made sign was quite amusing. This was taken in 2007 in the racks rooms of Northants 96. The station, and whole studio complex has now closed, being merged into the regional ‘Heart’ operation elsewhere, there is a slight edit on this picture to blur the dynotape label with the phone number on (just in case said number still routes to somewhere in the global radio empire).

Close up of what in some technical peoples minds should be filed under ‘Vintage Technology – but as it still works.

Sunset on the Norfolk Broads, I like the reflection of the sunset in the water.

Similar vantage in the daytime.

Another sunset, looking over Oldham and Manchester from high vantage point.

This is another old picture, taken in 2004, of Gallery Oldham before the rest of the library and Life Long learning centre was built behind it.

Inside the conservatory in Alexandra Park, Oldham. I particularly like the angle of this to highlight the architecture.

Another view taken in Alexandra Park, Oldham, of the boating lake.

Just a nice little water feature shot.

Entrance to a block of flats in Wythenshawe, Manchester. I like the reflection of the glass next to the entrance and the fencing.

I snapped this pretty much in amazement that the windows were being washed by abseiling man.

A close up of some vintage 1970s era electronics.

Another close up of some vintage 1970s era electronics.

By way of comparison some 21st century electronics in close up. Special bonus points if you can identify what kit the past three pictures are from.

Portland Tower in City Centre Manchester, looking quite imposing on a slightly overcast day.

Time for a nice spring time walk in the woods and snap some pictures in Tandle Hill Park Oldham, there is a year round blanket of leaves on the ground, with the sun shining through the branches giving a slight silhouette effect on the trees.

Out of the woods and looking out over towards Oldham and further in the distance the Cheshire plains. Yet again I selected this one for the cloud formation.

A couple of shots of what I think is one of the better mainline stations for architecture, mixing the classic and modern redevelopment.  This being Manchester Piccadilly. Here on a sunny day the natural light highlights the trains nicely.

Another picture of Manchester Piccadilly, I think these have turned out reasonably well to say they where taken on a mobile phone camera.

A couple more mobile phone snaps, a roof top view across the city centre, looking towards Deansgate from the Royal Exchange theatre building.

Another roof top view, looking towards the Cathedral, with the Arena and Strangeways visible in the distance.  I should have the opportunity in the future to get some similar pictures taken with a proper camera, which will be nice.

This aerial view I took a few years back, taking in the view from the roof of Mancat / The Manchester College building in Moston, Manchester.

It’s springtime with lines of daffodils by the road side. These actually looked a lot better in real life than this photo does.

More springtime flowers taken in the grounds of The Manchester College’s Openshaw campus.

Artistic illustration of ProTools software in use on a Apple iMac

I always find that train stations are good for opportunities for nice photo taking, other than by lurking round platforms with a camera people may think I’m a train spotter – which I’m not, more of a train station spotter I suppose. This is a lovely shot of rusty steps on the bridge at Ashburys station just outside of Manchester.

“Keep feet clear of Yellow Lines” sign on escalator coming up from underground railway platform at Liverpool Lime Street. I was particularly pleased at the outcome of this as a spare of the moment “I bet that would make a good picture” thought and snap on the phone camera.

Close up of mixing desk controls – just a nice close up nothing more.

A long exposure shot of flashing LEDs on an Inovonics audio processor, although the specifics of the device doesn’t really matter it just turns out as a nice abstract photo.

The pictures I am posting will either have been taken on the actual day or recently, or from my collection of older photos which I think have some artistic merit.

The the end of each month I will highlight with some commentary the months pictures. Read my January review here.

Here is my February Review:

All good equipment racks should have lots of ‘flashing lights’ to impress non technical viewers, and panic the engineers when they notice that the lights which should be lit are not. This is an attempt to capture the glow of such lights in a darkened room, though it hasn’t turned out as well as I’d hoped.

Another one from my collection of pictures I took around the ‘Oldham Loop Line’ on it’s closure. This is a close up of a sign at Oldham Mumps station.

Another detail shot of the former Oldham Mumps rail station.

The former Oldham Mumps rail station – which has now been demolished as the line has been converted to Metrolink.

Just to prove there was snow on February 5th 2012.

Snow again, but from December 2009, this is Oldham Werneth station – post line closure, thus the un-cleared tracks. I particularly like the Orange glow on the housing in the distance.

Another one in the snow theme. Snow was falling when this one was taken, although it doesn’t show up as clear as I’d like.

A couple more on a rail theme now. This one from February 2012, taken from the end of the platform as Asburys station looking towards Manchester City Centre. In the distance Beetham Tower, Manchester tallest building looks positively tiny, although notably larger than the other towers blocks in the city centre, such as City Tower (formally Sunley Tower) next to Piccadily Gardens at the far right of the photograph.

Again from Ashburys station, more detail on the rail tracks and overhead power lines on this one.

Back street in Manchester City Centre, imposing old buildings which look like they haven’t changed in decades, possibly why this is one of the streets which you see Gene Hunt driving his Ford Cortina down in the ‘Life On Mars’ TV series. For those who played the ‘spot the non 70′s fixtures’ in said series, the NCP car park backing onto Piccadilly at the far end of the street in picture is also spotted in Life on Mars.

Piccadilly Gardens Metrolink stop, with tram and City Tower in background. This was taken early evening and I like the lighting in the photo.

More Manchester City Centre Architecture, showing some of the old.

More Manchester City Centre Architecture, showing some of the new.

.

Manchester Urbis, soon to the home of the ‘National Football Museum’, this photo taken a couple of years ago was while ‘Channel M’ was still operating from here.

More architecture, this time in Oldham, this is a view of Hilton Arcade.

I took loads of pictures around the Oldham Loop line around the time of it’s closure – this is one of Shaw Signal box – again now demolished.

This is a close-up of the Sky EPG – just for something a little different (and also as I may use it to illustrate an article I am writing.)

The stained glass roof in the Spindles Shopping Centre Oldham.

Oldham Civic Centre early evening.

A little ‘happy snap’ of slightly amusing boxes – though I’m not sure what sort of cable would be classified of a ‘non technical nature’.

What do you do when you’re in the midst of disassembling a radio studio? Stick funny notes on the lights to change ‘Mic Live’ to ‘Mic Dead’.

One from 2009 on a trip to London, a picture of the London Eye, on a slightly overcast day.

A view of the Houses of Parliament from the London Eye.

As Michael Jackson once sang “I always feel like Somebody’s watchin’ me”…. CCTV camera set against clouds.

Disco lights creating a pattern on a dancefloor – I just think these make for some really nice abstract patterns with the shadow of a solo dancer.

Another dance floor abstract shot.

River at Chadderton Hall Park in springtime – just a nice little composition.

This one didn’t come out quite as good as I’d hoped on phone camera – real reason to take was as a possible illustration.

Finally our leap year bonus… A view of the gardens outside Gallery Oldham.

In 2012 I decided to revisit this with a difference. I’m trying to publish a new picture each day on my Flickr page.

A lot of these pictures will be older pictures, my idea being to give me a chance to publish some of the many pictures I have taken over the years.

Then at the end of each month I plan to post on my site here a review of the months pictures with a commentary on the pictures, this being the January review.

Jan 01

The interior of the BBC Quay House at Media City UK, looking down from the top floor.

Jan 02

I originally snapped this one just to show the apparent 7 hour train delay, however if you ignore the actual content of the board I like the picture with the trees and sky. This is the first you’ll see of my ongoing theme of sky and clouds in pictures.

Jan 03

Another train station themed picture, with the same theme of the trees and sky.

Jan 04

This one was taken in the early evening in late Autumn, I like the lighting on this one, with the mixture of sun and shadows. I think there is a nice composition of traditional pub building, and the modern road.

Jan 05

Not the best photo in the world taken on my camera phone, however the slight graininess nicely mirrors the analogue nature of the machinery of these cart machines.

Jan 06

A result of wiling away a few minutes playing with the Photoshop Express Android App – despite it’s Photoshop name it’s not really a photo editor, more of a collection of fixed filters and effects.

Jan 07

The first of a couple taken in Blackpool last year. This one from the end of Central Pier, spot my favoured sky against a menacing sea – a typical Blackpool summer day!

Jan 08

A view towards the Tower.

Jan 09

A nice effect on this one with the foreground in focus and blurred computer screen .

Jan 10

Sign at Wythenshawe Forum – one of my less favourite pictures from the collection, at this point I was scratching around for something to upload for this date.

Jan 11

This is a picture from a couple of years ago, a snow covered train track on the approach to Oldham Werneth station. Nice colours in this pictures.

Jan 12

The Wheel of Manchester on a miserable January day.

Jan 13

Continue on a theme – around a year before the previous photo I took this picture of the Capital FM Routemaster bus in Piccadilly in Manchester.

Jan 14

Multicoloured ‘slinky’ toy under neon lighting.

Jan 15

Another from the collection of pictures I took before the closure of the Oldham Loop line. Nice contract of sign and brickwork in this picture.

Jan 16

The first of a series of sport stadia linked pictures. Here a temporary radio studio set-up at football ground (can you identify the football club?)

Jan 17

There is a vague sport stadium link in this one. Taken from the roof of the Salford Lads Club. Nice clouds yet again on this (the vague sport link is Old Trafford in the distance.)

Jan 18

A somewhat less glamorous sport ground, The Whitebank Stadium.

Jan 19

Another glowing toy.

Jan 20

The beach at Rhyl, North Wales – continuing my love of cloud formations.

Jan 21

Wythenshawe Forum Centre – drawing an interesting comparison to this 70′s picture .

Jan 22

A panoramic photo of Media City UK at Salford Quays, stitched together in Photoshop from several individual photos.

Jan 23

For some reason I feel like titling this one ‘simples’ .

Jan 24

Washford transmitting station.

Jan 25

“Caution Radio Transmitters Operating” – one on my theme of signs, again at Washford.

Jan 26

Another view of radio transmitting aerials.

Jan 27

No prizes for guessing this is an older picture. Nice autumn view in Tandle Hill Country Park.

Jan 28

The summit at Tandle Hill – great mostly clear blue sky.

Jan 29

Peacock at Heaton Park..

Jan 30

Another phone snap for the amusement of extra signage to ‘press to exit’.

Jan 31

Heaton Park, grass and clouds yet again.

Lets start with the formalities and wish you all the best for the 2012, if you’re watching this site like an hawk then you should read this just in time for the New Year in the UK (please provide your own Auld Lang Syne music, but you can have the fireworks display above.) If you happen to reading this in the middle of July in which case ignore this first paragraph.

I titled this ‘Things have changed around here’ as I’ve taken the opportunity of the Christmas break to make a few tweaks to this website. Most of this has taken the form of me twiddling with the code in the background, learning all about child themes in WordPress and their pitfalls , so there’s only a few things you’ll notice as an end user which I highlight below.

The main idea is when accessing the site via your desktop to use front page to highlight some of the more ‘in depth’ pieces that I’ve written, allowing the other bits to be a little less ‘in your face’.

What is new if you access the site via a mobile phone browser you should see a ‘iOS app style’ interface which lists all the blog posts in a more mobile friendly style.

Naturally if you read my content via the RSS feed in something such as Google Reader you’ll continue to just get my new blog posts as they are posted. Talking of google in the main desktop version of the post pages there is now Google+1 buttons as well as Tweet buttons.

Finally to note in my introduction to 2012, back in 2010 I did a ‘Photo 365′ experiment, where I took a picture everyday and published it on Flickr - where I failed miserably part way through the year. In 2012 I’m going to repeat the exercise, with a twist of just posting a new picture everyday, which could be contemporary or from my personal photo archives of pictures I’ve taken over the past few years.

I’ve been a T-Mobile UK customer for donkeys years since when it was One2One. In fact until a few months ago when I finally retired my GSM SIM card and rather late joined the 3G Smart Phone party (as opposed to the LG KS360 2.5G ‘blackberry style pay as you go phone for teenagers who can’t afford a blackberry’) my phone display still showed ‘One2One’ as the operator. Now I’m long past a teenager and the specifics of the handsets in questions are an irrelevant detour on the way to the subject of these blog posts.

Now ‘back in the day’, now it’s probably no longer cool to use this phrase, but never mind, back in the day listening to your voice mail messages would be free. However for many many years T-Mobile have charged you to listen to your voicemail.

You could pretend you were a Sunday Newspaper journalist and dial your own phone from another cheaper line and insert the pin number (which of course you had changed from the default) and listen to your messages.

Now paying 12p a minute was a minor inconvenience when I was a ‘Pay as you go’ customer. But when I switched to a pay monthly contract (on a SIM Only deal on the afore mentioned LG device) I find that listening to voicemail is not included as part of your inclusive minutes. I’m paying 12p a minute to listen to my voicemail no matter what.

Therefore the aim is to find a way to avoid this, so the obvious answer is a voicemail to email service, but if only life was that simple.

I purchased a nice 03 number from my normal supplier of such services, Flextel, this cost me a couple of quid for the number, plus a quid top up of ‘call credit’. I wouldn’t be using any of this as I configured the number as voicemail.

I set my call diversion on my phone to my new 03 number. When a message us left on the voicemail Flextel email me the message as an email attachment, which I can then listen to on my phone at no cost, the files are tiny as not to worry my “acceptable use” none specfic data allowance.

This threw up a problem. The email attachment is a ulaw formatted wav file. The native android media player doesn’t recognise this codec.

This is fixed with a 99p app called WavPlayer.

So for the price of a pint down the pub there’s no paying 12p a minute to listen to voicemail……..or THAT’S what I thought until I examined my phone bill……. Wait for part two to find out the next T Mobile plan feature I hadn’t spotted….

A couple of stories I read this week got me thinking.

Steve Penk owner of Oldham’s Revolution sacked one of his jocks over a row over Armistice day silence. This got a front page splash in the local rag.

Meanwhile on air and on the revolution’s website all reference to the departed DJ disappears overnight.

Meanwhile while browsing through the blogs I subscribe to I spotted this one, not only is one of Absolute Radio’s jocks leaving we are getting advanced notice.

I know this is not exactly the fairest of comparisons one being sacked the other just moving on (or coming to end of contract or whatever it may be) but taking it wider what do you do when someone moves on?

In this connected age there are a number of interesting things to consider.

In the old days it was a lot simpler. I recall in my more youthful days back in the summer of 1991 listening to an entertaining young jock on MFM by the name of Mike Toolan who announced he was leaving for a new job in Leeds. Nice and simple, the listeners were not going to suddenly tune in one night to find him missing and in the pre web streaming days the station was not going to loose any listeners with fans following him to an out of area station. The jocks who followed in his place, the likes of Elliot Webb and Gregg Burns were even able to make reference to their predecessor. I’m afraid twenty years on the exact chronology of the MFM line up escapes me – see my footnotes, but it worthy of note of that the above jocks, and others, spent formative years in local radio in Wrexham before moving onto to bigger things.

So what do we need to consider these days?

The average listener (not just the anoraks and industry bods) can not only very easily get info on where the DJ has gone on the web, they may well be actively interacting with the DJ on social media and can find out before they even tune into the radio station.

Therefore as a radio station you need to ensure the station is as big as the individual personalities. Why should the listener stay with you and not follow the jock to their new gig? Just pretending they never existed is putting all your faith in the strength of the station brand at the risk of alienating listeners by treating them with contempt.

How to handle succession is an interesting one. Every so often you’ll read the press coverage mulling over what will happen when Moyles eventually leaves the Radio One breakfast show. How many of his fans will be lost to Radio One? How many of those who interact with Radio One via social media will be lost. Similar experiences can be drawn of when Chris Tarrant left Capital, and how will they handle Johnny Vaughan leaving?

The same applies on a smaller stage. To take my 90s jock example and bring it up to date. Now Toolan is a major attraction as breakfast host on Key103. My unchecked reckoning sees Mike, in his two stints on Key breakfast as the longest serving breakfast host in Piccadilly / Key 103′s history. When he moves on will Key have to deal with things differently than MFM did?

Question one is the obvious question of what to do on-air, however the further, more interesting questions are to do with social media.

One thing that Key are arguably doing right is channelling social media through station and “Key103 Breakfast” accounts. However it’s fun to see that Facebook recommends ‘Capital FM’s’ page as similar to Key 103.

Say in our example that Toolan follows in his Key breakfast predecessor, Steve Penk and buys his own radio station, assuming it’s local to Manchester he could be promoted right on Key 103′s prime outlet for social interaction with their listeners. No simple answer to this one, but food for thought.

I must point out I’ve absolutely no information about his career plans, I’m using Toolan here as nothing more than an hypothetical example to illustrate the point by way of bringing us full circle to were we started with Steve Penk.

Footnotes
I’m recalling the MFM line up from memory and may have my evening and late shows mixed up.
I wrote the first draft of this article last Friday morning on my phone while commuting. It’s a shame I never completed it as this would have made this even more timely as later that day Capital Radio announced Johnny Vaughan had just done is last show, where from what I’ve read he didn’t acknowledge on air he was leaving. It also shows it is a small world as we hear that Gregg Burns is depping in the slot in the meantime.

Normally on Children in Need day when you walk through Manchester City Centre you are sure to encounter people collecting for Children In Need (CIN). Strangely today I didn’t see any (not to say there was none – I probably just wasn’t in the right location at the right time).

Watching the show tonight knowing first hand that CIN does support projects that do good work I thought I’d be generous and give some money. (Disclosure I work for organisations that have received CIN funding in the past.)

I didn’t fancy calling the number they kept promoting (incidentally a 03 ‘non geographic – geographic rate’ number) – mainly as I didn’t have my credit card to hand – which I assume they would want, plus didn’t really fancy sticking a donation on my card.

One failing this year – they didn’t promote SMS text donation on air very much.

However the rest of my experience was excellent.

Opening the bbc.co.uk/pudsey address, which was constantly on screen, on my mobile phone, the site detected I was using a mobile, and gave me a nice mobile friendly page.

I found the ‘how to donate’ link fairly clearly – which then gave me a list of links including donation by phone, post, paypal, you name it – plus donate by text.

Following the ‘text’ link gave me clear instructions to text a short code (plus explanation of costs etc.)

The short code was a hyper-link – pressing which opened my text message composer pre-entered with the shortcode number and relevant message keyword.

Hitting send and I’ll be relieved of £5 on my next mobile bill (well I bet it will be £5.12 – as the ‘one text at standard operator rate’ last time I did something like this did not come out of my free texts allowance.)

The confirmation text I received gave me a nice link to a special page to ‘gift aid’ the donation. Another mobile friendly webpage to confirm my mobile number and name and address in order to register for gift aid (where the charity can reclaim the tax on the donation).

Overall an excellent user experience which is worthy of note. I feel that “I’ve done my bit”  with minimum effort and at no point feeling that I should stop the process as it was too complicated or unclear.

I guess if you wanted a totally seemless experience this gift aid form could have been pre-populated with details like my mobile phone number (even name and address) – but that would mean that my phone company would have to pass on my personal details to a third party – I may ‘trust’ BBC CIN – but certainly wouldn’t trust some other companies who work in the mobile arena with getting my personal details from my telco. So I’ll live with filling them in myself.

Thus if I’ve clicked all the correct buttons, downloaded all the correct software and inserted all the correct codes my first tweet should be a ‘hello world’ announcement linking to this blog posting. Not only that but any future blog posts I make should be tweeted in the same way – thus guaranteeing me sending some tweets without ever needing to go to touch a twitter client (though strictly speaking that’s not true as philedmonds.com is now registered as a twitter app.)

So clickly click on the e-mail link and get asked to sign into my google account and….

So I can’t use Google+ without a  Google profile, but ‘my organisation’ doesn’t allow me to have a profile…… as I’m the admin I didn’t know I was stopping myself having a Google profile.

A little searching later shows multiple results such as this, showing that I’m not the only one encountering this. I have a Google Apps account and I can’t have a Google Profile with this, therefore I can’t join google+ (or at least I’ll have to set-up a new google account to use google+) This comes just weeks after I finally merged my ‘personal’ google account with my google apps account with the same e-mail address with all sorts of fun and games.

So  it’s back to the drawing board before I can create my “circles” and “hangout” with people….

Your starter question, how many ‘Windows Updates’ would you expect to be pulled down onto a XP Pro laptop that hasn’t seen an internet connection since mid December 2010?

Your answer – 64!  (This will include MS Office updates as well as Windows) -  that is before the countless other updates in the way of Firefox, Flash Player,  Adobe Reader, Java and other countless sundry bits and pieces – though thankfully these are all automated.

Next uninstall some of the assorted junk that’s found itself onto the machine and I’m two hours down the line before I get to the main task in hand, loading the 500MB download of Quickbooks 2010 software. Quickbooks is a popular accounting software package.

Now my experience in the past is that Quickbooks is notoriously fickle. However on reading up on-line while I was waiting for the myriad of updates to load it seems that Intuit have finally come into the ‘real world’ of corporate computing and made Quickbooks run as a ‘limited user’ (I guess because they’ve got to do this to have vista/7  support were even an Admin user is not running ‘administrator’ rights all the time).

Good news after much loading time (including various .net frameworks, some Office 2003 integration tools and other various bits and bobs as well as Quickbooks itself) all seemed to work, bar the fact that the install was anything but ‘quick’. I’ll stand-by to eat my words about it “all working” once our finance guy has got his mits on the laptop.

So onto the other two points of my title for this post.

All this extended evening activity lead me to a couple of listening opportunities, the first was to a radio programme that I’d not normally tune into and found myself fascinated by an Iranian drama piece on the Persian Seda programme. I didn’t understand a word of it, but found myself drawn in by the drama of the different tones of voices. Although it was spoken word there is almost a musical quality to the delivery.

This is a great example of were radio works uniquely. I’d never think of downloading a Persian podcast or search out such content on a streaming audio service, but did discover something I enjoyed via the radio.

Once I’d concluded my software wrangling duties at what some may call “supper time” I could finally jump on the train and got out my Walkman (by such I don’t mean I’m retro and playing cassette tapes, rather it is my Sony ‘iPod clone’) and “discovered” – Burst of the Worst – which gave me some much needed light relief and a few chuckles. Now this was another nice discovery but in a different way. I’d made a deliberate decision to download these podcasts, most of which are somewhat different to this “Christmas tape” edition. An interesting thought for podcasters why not occasionally throw in something a little different. The listener can always just skip past it. Obviously in this case Jonathan Marks is podcasting archive radio programmes, so perhaps decades ago him and his team were doing just this on the radio.

Many months ago on my blog I suggested that I would do “Tuesday technical tips” – quick little bits of advice. It’s been ages since I’ve done so, then today – being a Tuesday I came across the problem as described in the title and first line of this post. If they mean nothing to you then stop reading (there will be something less geeky coming along soon.)

Here’s the senerio:

Linux server running Samba 3 as Windows Domain Controller
“New” windows xp pro workstation I want to add to the domain

All very simple – go into ‘network identification’ on the windows box, type in the relevant computer name and domain, click okay, get prompted for user name/password of an account with permissions to add workstation to the domain, type in ‘root’ as username and my carefully crafted password and rather then getting the ‘Welcome to the<NAME OF DOMAIN> domain’ message I’m expecting, I get an ‘Access Denied’ error message.

So I though, as I’m adding a ‘new’ machine, but reusing an old computer name, perhaps I need to delete the ‘old’ machine’s ‘workstation trust account’, so off I go and delete the <MACHINENAME>$ account in both the linux users and samba users list and so that the system would recreate them automatically. Still no joy.

Many tweaks later I suddenly twigged. As a good system administrator I recently changed all the passwords on our systems. This included the root password on the server. What I’d done is changed the linux ‘root’ user password, but not the password of the user ‘root’ in the samba password file. On entering my old root password into the windows ‘join domain’ window it all worked as expected.

Lesson learnt – if you change your linux passwords you need to change your samba passwords as well (or take measures to sync the two if needed or one of many other permutations of actions you might like which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.).

Here’s an e-mail I recently sent to the Community Media Association’s mailing list you may find of interest:

Again my personal views….

On 23/04/2011 20:56, ROBERT TYLER wrote:

In any event, all of national advertising is sold based on RAJAR data,
in other words, no RAJAR no interest.

Just pondering – in the last RAJAR figures, ‘other listening’ counts for 6% reach.

This ‘other listening’ consists of:

Non RAJAR subscribing stations – i.e. many Digital only, Community, Student, Hospital and Pirate stations.
‘Out of area’ listening (i.e. if I ticked Liverpool’s ‘Radio City’ as a Manchester listener I’d be in ‘other listening’ as I’m outside their TSA).

Also RAJAR state that 25% of listening is via Digital Platforms.

Therefore you could argue that discounting 25% of the 6% of ‘other listening’ – leaves us with Community Radio having ‘the best part of’ a 4% audience reach.

Of course some Community Radio listening is via Internet – which is Digital in the RAJAR survey and there are many other non Community ‘other’ stations.

The biggest, of many, blows to the statistical validity of this 4% figure is that there is not universal enough coverage of Community Radio. We are all so different that if a respondent in Town A listens to a Community Radio station, we can’t justifiably assume that a similar demographic non surveyed listener in Town B listens to their local Community Radio station.

Even if you take a margin out of the ‘other listening’ for listeners to non Rajar, non Community Radio, a 2% reach brings us in line with the reach of BBC 6Music – but still this is pretty dodgy ground to claim with any validity. In any case in the commercial world there’s only Premier Christian Radio, Kissmat, Buzz Asia, Gold Devon and Yorkshire Radio at such low reach figures (the first three being niche broadcasters, the last digital only and we can only assume Oldies on AM is not a mass market attraction in Devon.)

So depending on how you spin it 2% may or may not be that ‘attractive’ a statistic.

However I believe the reach of Community Radio will be greater than this – but a significant audience will only tune in for one or two specific programmes.

The Rajar methodology will never work for this as the survey size is just many a factor (I’d argue at least hundreds times) too small to catch all these niche one or two hours a week listeners. BUT it is perfectly “statistically valid” to “gauge” the audience of large mainstream radio stations.

Anyway this is some food for thought – I’m sure some Rajar gurus might be able to pull apart some of this argument as I don’t claim to be any expert!

Phil.

To be honest I’m not one for wadding through pages and pages of “social media comment” on the events over in Japan – reading the papers and the TV and Radio bulletins give a good over view. However one on the ground report I found was this one: Japan Earthquake – a full diary which I found from a pointer from John Myers blog.

Over on the CMA mailing list (the place were you often skip over e-mails from “Office -ccr fm”) I spotted that the guys at Canalside Community Radio have produced this Promo which they have offered freely to other Community Radio stations to play. If you do use it please contact the guys at Canalside Community Radio to let them know.

As part of my weekly Tuesday commute I normally listen to the Podcast of Talk Talk Radio, this weeks programme had some interesting chat about the events in Japan as well.

Finally I caught on TV yesterday morning this episode of BBC Click – looking at the use of the internet and technology in the quake. I hope the link I’ve given above is a world wide friendly link, rather than the UK geolocked iPlayer version.

We’ll after my text this afternoon to my local WordPress guru of “have you updated your sites to WordPress 3.1″ was “I hadn’t seen that news” I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and upgrade this site.

So far so good – it still works!

The most obvious change is the ‘admin bar’ at the top of the screen when you are logged in but browsing the site. It also interesting to see developments in native support for custom post types (which I’ve previously achieved via plug-ins) which along with streamlined admin pages are going to make for some tense moments with some sites I’m involved with – I see some late nights tweaking on a development server is in order. (Shh… don’t tell the family).

If all else fails this new release has prompted a new blog post from me (assuming you didn’t notice my ‘test’ posts which stayed live a little longer than I’d planned while I was testing my custom XML-RPC scripts).

There has been a lot of talk about the loss of more ‘heritage radio brands’ as Capital FM is rolled out quasi-nationally. Of course this will get the radio anoraks putting on their rose tinted glasses mourning the losses of all that was great before.

There has been plenty written about Global Radio’s master plan for the ‘Capital Network’ and lots of analysis from radio people who can and have written things much more enlightening than I can.

Today’s loss of the ‘Galaxy’ name in Manchester takes me back just over 13 years when there was concern over the loss of an equally respected at the time radio brand ‘Kiss 102′. Here’s a clip from a broadcast in Manchester in October 1997:

stormfm-oct-1997

The re-brand from Kiss to Galaxy came very quickly following board room manoeuvrings and the new owners being unable to licence use of the ‘Kiss’ name. There was much concern at the time over what this meant for the loss of some of the more notable Dance Music output on the station – given this was well prior to facebook campaigns there was not the opportunity for a major public outcry, only much smaller mumblings.

So how much of a loss to Manchester was loosing Kiss FM – here is a list of Radio Stations in the Manchester Area back in October 1997:

BBC National Network Radio’s 1-5
Classic FM
Local Radio:
BBC GMR (Or possibly still in it’s 1997 ‘GMR Talk’ incarnation) launched as Radio Manchester 10 September 1970
Piccadilly 1152 – launched 2 April 1974 as Piccadilly Radio, later Piccadilly Gold
Key 103 – launched 3 September 1988
Signal FM – launched 17 February 1990 as KFM, then became Signal Cheshire, dropping the ‘Cheshire’ tag in 1997 (Now Imagine FM)
Lite AM – launched on Sept 9 1996 (Previously est 31 May 1994 as Fortune 1458 , later became Big AM, Capital Gold and now Gold)
Kiss 102 – launched 16 October 94
Jazz FM – launched 25 July 94 (Now Smooth Radio)
Asian Sound Radio – launched 29 April 96
Wish FM – launched 19 April 1997

What’s interesting to see is the variety of stations in Manchester back then, I suspect only bettered in the capital.

It’s also interesting to note that other than BBC Radio One that Kiss 102 was the only outlet for Dance Music and certainly the only local outlet.

In the meantime we have the addition of many other radio stations in the Manchester Area:

Century 105.4 launched 4 Aug 98 (later became Real Radio)
Tower FM launched 14 Mar 99
96.2 The Revolution launched 16 Aug 99
Wythenshawe FM launched 22 Mar 02
AllFM launched 22 May 02
XFM 20 Feb 06
Oldham Community Radio launched 1 Mar 07
Salford City Radio launched 20 Sep 07
Tameside Radio launched 25 Sep 07
Rock Radio launched 8 Apr 08
Pure Radio launched 6 Nov 08
Bolton FM launched 27 May 09
North Manchester FM launched 12 Jun 09
Peace FM launched 27 Jul 09
Gaydio launched 8 Jun 10
Unity Radio launched 21 Jul 10

Again we can now comment about the wide variety of radio stations (possibly now not even beaten by the capital). There is also many more outlets for various specialist Dance Music programmes on the Community stations such as the established ALL FM and the cities latest addition Unity Radio.

Therefore if there was little outcry back in 1997 about the loss of Kiss 102 perhaps there is less reason for a public outcry over the loss of Galaxy 102. Of course for the pass year of so Galaxy has been migrating itself from ‘Dance and R’n'B’ to a ‘Hit Music Station’ so the people listening to Galaxy up to yesterday will probably be more mourning the loss of local identity than the loss of the Dance music. Which on a commercial front should be good for Key 103 if they push ‘Manchester’ and pick up some former Galaxy listeners.

It’s also potentially good for the Community stations if there is press coverage on the loss of ‘Galaxy 102 local radio’ then the Community stations should react with reminding the public that they are the real local service. They probably won’t pick up many ex-Galaxy listeners but might get a few new people trying out the station.

A few footnotes:
Sources of information on stations and launch dates:

Wikipedia
Some of the dates sourced from Ofcom will be Transmitter ‘switch on’ dates not necessarily the official station launch. Corrections welcomed.
I’ve only included stations based and audible in Manchester, not counted the several ‘out of area’ stations.
The embedded media player above doesn’t work in Firefox, as it’s an MP3 clip, it will either work in other browsers, or not display at all.
The audio was produced in 1997 so the Simpson’s sample might actually have still been cool.

No it’s not yet another new station from the nice people at Absolute Radio, rather this is a posting about a new software firmware update recently pushed to Pure’s ‘flow’ family of internet enabled radios, such as the one pictured above courtesy of James Cridland.

Earlier in the week I was listening to our Pure Siesta Flow, their rather niffty ‘alarm clock’ style Internet/DAB/FM combo.

As I came to switch off the internet channel I was listening to I saw it was asking if I wanted to update the software, so pressed ‘yes’ radio went quiet and I left it to do it’s business.

About fifteen minutes later I came back in the room and noticed that it had switched on again. Then a song or two later got a surprise ‘Absolute Radio’ ident -I assume that the radio had switched to the first station in the directory, rather than my previous station (I’ve not even got absolute in my presets/ favourites or whatever it’s called.)

Maybe I should I go off to set up “AAAAAAAAAARadio” internet radio service and get it listed in ‘The Lounge’ to grab all the unsuspecting listeners.

Of a more interesting note than firmware update unexpected issues, I’m assuming this update is to support Pure’s new music identification service, which once I’ve had a play I *may* get round to writing a blog post about my experiences.

Last year, our now Prime Minister, David Cameron made the legendary comment about Twitter. Admittedly on Absolute Radio not Radio 4 were he is pictured above* – but that’s not the point.

I was searching through twitter recently, looking up references to a particular radio station. I found a tweet from a presenter at the station, from their own personal twitter account, which if you didn’t know that the person was a presenter on Radio Smallsville you’d probably not know the connection.

That was until they tweeted that they had some “Professional publicity pictures for Radio Smallsville taken yesterday” which they were not impressed with (you got the feeling they are one of those people who hate having their picture taken.)

So having wetted my appetite I checked out their other tweets – the next one “went out and got completely wasted last night” (or something along them lines – it may have been worded a bit stronger than that.)

As far as I know this presenter has never promoted the fact that they are on twitter ‘on-air’ – nor made any pretence that their Twitter feed is officially endorsed by Radio Smallsville. But never the less to the end reader just finding the person they heard on the radio on twitter “could” by association of taking about the radio station and their behaviour outside the studio make the radio station be seen in a negative light. Of course it could just reinforce to the reader that the presenter is a real person just like them.

Adds another dimension to what a radio presenter should and shouldn’t be posting on-line in a personal capacity, and what station management should be requiring their presenters to do.

Now as you may have guessed the Radio Smallsville presenter in question is a volunteer – so raises even more interesting issues when it is not a contacted employee you are dealing with.

* I’ve used the photo of Mr C at the beeb as they have published this under a Creative Commons licence – thus I can use it here, were as I couldn’t find an Absolute Radio picture under similar terms.

Just one that amused me – PSquared’s music scheduling software, Autotrack, has an option to do a web lookup on a track’s details.

Above is what I got when I wanted to check the date of The Cult’s classic “She Sells Sanctuary”.

If you are a regular commuter via mainline train stations in the UK you’ve probably picked up your morning cappuccino or a sneaky pint on the way home and felt the premium prices in the coffee shop or one of the interesting titled “real pubs on stations” make a hole in your wallet.

What would you say if I told you of a not that well publicised way to get a 20% discount on your purchases?

What you need is to get a BiTE card – it’s free – and unlike my vain attempt at finding a illustrative picture above – girl is not included. However also not included is any supermarket loyalty card style tracking of your movements. This is no swipe card – just a piece of card you flash and the nice person behind the till puts through your discount. All they seem to want to know is a few questions of how often you travel and through what stations when you sign up.

Given the pounds I’ve spent at stations over the years I just wish I’d paid more attention to the unassuming little flags stuck on some of the tills sooner.

Still trying to answer that one but two minutes in the Apple store in Manchester playing with one and I,m hooked by the Apple magic.

I,m writing this post on a iPad in said store and been throughly mesmorised. Even typing on the o screen keyboard is not as bad as I first though (Hopefully there is not too many typos in this to prove the point) althoug not sure if Id managed a long typing session. But that is not the point of the device.

But lets return to the point of do I want one? Well as I look up around the table at the front of this store there are a dozen iPads on disply, with crowds all having fun. But when I look at the price card I can safely say that my credit card will be staying safely in my wallet and saving me the “starting at £429″ price on the card in front of me.

So if you have a batch file saved on the drive with your finely crafted backup script, it may fail if your drive D:\ is now drive E:\

Enter to the rescue just the variable you need:

%~d0

Which gives you the path to the file in which the script is being run from,

so something like

robocopy \\my-server\files %~d0\backupfolder /mir

saved as ‘backup.bat’ in the root of your usb drive will work everytime.

Even for my mainly XP based work, Robocopy is a great advance over using the xcopy command with /d flag – which only copied newer files and could easily fall over with files in use.

The basic syntax I use is as follows

ROBOCOPY “Source Folder” “Destination Folder” /MIR /R:5 /W:5 /FFT

The flags I’m using:

/MIR – mirror the source to directory – will delete files in the destination that are no longer in the source (the main benefit over xcopy)

/R:5 – retry 5 times on error, the default is 1 million, which effectively halts your command unless you are very patient!

/W:5 -wait 5 seconds on error – default if 30 seconds, I find a shorter time better

/FFT – uses Fat File Times – only compares file time to accuracy of 2seconds as used on FAT file system, needed if you’re copying to an external drive formatted as such. Also found works more accurately if copying from / to a Samba/Linux server with this flag.

I use 3′s mobile internet service – which works well for me (although I’ve never ventured much out side a city conurbation with it.)

Maybe their offering is aimed at the mass market of Hotmail users – but if you are a traditional e-mail client user it’s worth noting they don’t (appear) to have their own SMTP (outgoing email) server.

Furthermore they appear to block all traffic on Port 25 – thus when I tried to connect to a particular SMTP server, which uses authenticated SMTP I couldn’t. This confused me – as the last time I’d used this “laptop and email client not on regular network” combo was via the free wi-fi in McDonalds (yes I know but in my defence I was meeting someone*) it had worked.

The solution was to connect via a secure connection which uses a different port. Also made me think not necessarily a bad thing using secure connections.

* I’m generally not a big fan of fast food, but in this case the drive through next to the Motorway exit made for a convenient no sat-nav required congregation point.

I’m mentioning this as a rather annoying bug in WordPress that has lost me a number of drafts of posts which I was working on.

The issue – which has had me banging my head against the proverbial wall half the evening – you come to save or publish a post you are editing and you get an error:

Your attempt to edit this post: foobar has failed. Please try again.


I have seen this quite a bit – and foolish I thought I’d have my ‘auto-saves’ to save me, but this proved not to be the case.

The well documented fix is to edit the wp-admin/post-new.php file and commenting out this line of code

//wp_enqueue_script('autosave');


This turns of auto-save – so remember to save them drafts.

I want to automate generation of MP3 files on a linux box- so I need to install LAME so I can do this via a command line.

So this is what I did

1 – First grab from the DAG repository the rpm for your distro:

http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/lame/

2 – Switch to the directory you’ve saved the file

3 – Install the rpm – replacing the package name with the relevant file

rpm -ivh lame-3.96.1-2.2.el4.rf.x86_64.rpm

Tis done.

I’m currently using Microsoft Security Essentials on some machines on one site, with quite favourable results so far.

From the GUI there is no way to exclude network paths from real time scanning. On these machines I want to exclude certain network files which hold my playout system audio and databases.

The answer lies on this Microsoft page

You can do this via the registry, by editing this registry key :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\Exclusions\Paths

Right click > New DWord value

Set the value to be 0
Set the name to be the share you are trying to exclude.

\\server\share : 0

Also here you’ll find the file type exclusions. I set up exclusions as per my playout system vendors recommendations.

The Microsoft page states you may have to change the permissions on the key by taking the ownership of the key from advanced tab and give write permissions to yourself.

This appears true – I exported the relevant keys to a reg file to import into other workstations, but had to first use regedit to edit the permissions to give me write access.

My idea being where I have encountered something where I couldn’t find the complete answer by googling (other search engines are available) I’ll post it up here for the benefit of others.

Google have been on a big advertising campaign on bill boards and in wrap round front cover adverts in the free ‘Metro’ newspaper of recent times.

They are touting the browser as “made for everyone” – now without being suspicious of “what’s in it for Google” (which I’ll explore below) there is the slight issue of system requirements.

For my sins I still often use a Windows 2000 based system – can I use Chrome? Not chance I need XP or greater – still w2k was superceeded in 2001.

But at least I’ll be able to try it on my Mac right?

Erm no again – I need to be running Mac OS 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard  – the Mac OS variant as of late 2007 – so of no use to me with my trusty iBook with the obviously lesser big cat – Panther (a.k.a 10.3). Not that I’d be able to run Leopard if I wanted – it doesn’t support my older hardware.

Now there’s a good argument that I shouldn’t expect to run the latest greatet toys on my ‘obsolete’ hardware – but – my old windows box would happly upgrade to Win XP, but not chance of upgrading past Mac OS 10.4 on my iBook (assuming I could actualy buy a copy) as Apple dropped support for older hardware such as mine.

Now for what I use it for I don’t need all the latest bells and whistles from my OS – but it is rather disapointing that Google’s browser offer rules out any Mac more than a couple of years old.

Anyway there’s still my question of “what’s in it for Google” – why are they spending mega bucks advertising Chrome. Now I don’t use iGoogle, but am aware that they will be tracking my searches made from the same browser as me (just they probably don’t know exactly who ‘I’ am.) If I get Chrome are they tracking every page I view? After all Firefox knows what sites I visting a lot with their auto complete (I can visit some of my favourite sites by typing little more than the first two letters in the address bar) will google get to know this information if i use Chrome?

First question to ask is what are my aims of running this as a blog site?

One is definitely a technical exercise, slightly inspired by panellist Dr Ron from a tech podcast I regularly listen to. I want to learn more about the WordPress platform in a non mission critical situation. Unless I suddenly get a unexpected cult following I’m not going to lose sleep at night if I break this site conducting a ‘science experiment’ as Dr Ron might describe it.

Second is as a platform to share various things on my mind – things that I’d probably not go to the effort of making a traditional web page about. My Phil.Edmonds.net site suffers from minimal updates, and I want to focus that site more on static information, particularly focusing on some archive materials, as historic information is what is mainly on that site.

What about topics to post about?

A blog I read often is that of the self proclaimed ‘radio futurologist’ James Cridland, mainly because of the prime subject, radio and the internet is of particular interest to me. He also used to post about beer but then decided to move this into another site, as not to dilute the credibility of his main blog.

This moving of the beer posts is a shame. Now I am more than happy to consume a pint of cheap and cheerful Moss Side’s finest Amber Necter*, despite sporting a beard you won’t find me carrying a CAMRA membership card, but given the right time and place I quite enjoy sampling something different. I enjoyed reading James’ beer postings once in a while when they came as an unexpected extra, but I never bother going off and reading his dedicated beer blog.

So focusing on just one topic is not something that I’m worried about, so varied subjects are fine by me.

So what topics will I post on?

Radio and radio technology on a grass roots level is an obvious one. Though I can’t promise the great insights of Mr Cridland and the quality writing and analysis of the likes of Paul Easton.

IT. I’m for ever amassing little tricks and tips as I deal with many and varied computing systems, it’ll be good for myself to keep a note of useful things. For issues where “someone else” hasn’t had exactly the same problem putting it online for the benefit of others can only be a good thing to do.

Finally I am, rather slowly, going through my years of collected recordings and other radio stuff from my “anorak” collection. I’m pondering on how best to publish some of this on-line. There’s certainly pros for publishing this via a blog for the benefit of interested parties who want to follow via an RSS feed. However if this fits in better on a separate site I’m unsure. So jury is out on this one for now.

*This being my standing comment that round these parts “Australia’s Famous Beer” (their slogan not mine) Fosters is actually “brewed in the EU” – most likely at the Scottish & Newcastle brewery in downtown Manchester.

I’ve not got much stuff on here yet – but watch this space.