Which Family Guy Character Are You?

Turns out...


Which Family Guy character are you?

I knew it.

Traffic Hits... Fo Shizzle!!!

I really enjoyed Lenslinger's Anatomy of a Live Shot, so I thought I would do a similar story showing all the kids how I set up my live traffic hits! Don't forget, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them, because sometimes the thumbnails don't show the whole picture!

First, of course, I need to get to where I am going. My destination of the day is going to be Charleston and Rancho. Apparently there is some road construction and it is our duty to let the people who have been living under a rock for the past three months know this! So I head north - past the Strat - and up to my destination!

First thing I do upon arriving is power on the generator in the live truck. I have a nifty switch in the front seat so I can do it before I even park! If only the rest of the switches were up front... I could have half my live shot set up before unbuckling my seatbelt!

My first job once I get parked is to raise the mast. This requires me to first and foremost to look up. If I see no power lines, then I hold the little up switch on the mast controller. That pumps air into the hollow metal tube thingy. It then pushes the mast up to a height of 50 feet so that hopefully I can get line of site on one of our three receive sites.

Once I get the mast up, I make a guess to which site our live ops person will want me to shoot at. Since I am the third element, I make the guess that he is going to want me to shoot to our Summerlin receive site to the west.

I was wrong. Apparently he wants me to share our Stratosphere receive site with another crew so the helo can have her own receive site. Greedy helicopter.
So I am forced to re-aim the dish, since I need line of site. (Note - there used to be an image there but I hear it was messing with IE *coughUEFOXFIREIDIOT!cough*) Once I do, I power up and send my wonderful NTSC (which means Never The Same Color -- I guess you'd really have to spend 7 years in MC with the engineers to appreciate that one) bars. After a couple of minutes of 'Pan..... keep going...... keep going......STOP! SHIT! Go back.........STOP! Now, TILT!' I am given the three words I love to hear.

'Lock it down.'

WOO HOO! My live shot is tuned in and I am ready to take my place as a member of the Channel 8 Skywitness Traffic Team! I even have little pilots wings that if you want to see I'll show you... But I don't volunteer that kind of information.

Anywhoo... due to businesses and power lines I had to set up in a small strip mall parking lot. Said parking lot was about a third of a block down from my assigned corner. Not that big of a deal, Just have to string out a couple hundred feet of cable and poof! Here I am ready to show the awakening Las Vegas valley the scourge that is construction (storm drain work if I am not mistaken) on West Charleston at Rancho.

Lighting my traffic hits can be a pain in the ass. Allow me to demonstrate. Too my east we have sunshine!

And too my west, we have really, really dark clouds...

What does this mean? It means that when I pan down the street from west to east to show the congestion and construction I have to roll my iris about 10 stops to keep everything from being washed out. I ponder auto iris but the CAT bus that drives through my shot and sends my iris flying to the open side discourages this.

When I am not doing a traffic hit the producer usually will ask me for a beauty shot or a weather shot. Sometimes my location doesn't give me the ability to get them anything other than buildings or sand. But today there were some nifty looking clouds to the west. I happily used the trucks mast cam to get some bang up weather video only duplicated by the 15 other cameras we have around the valley! But alas I was still an important part of the Neighborhood Weather team...

We enter into CBS' Early Show at 7:10. My downtime is spent working on grabbing new angles and new, more exciting ways to bring viewers their morning traffic. I also check all truck systems to make sure the vehicle is running at 100% efficiency. I then keep my ears on the scanners and make calls to METRO and NHP to find out if there are any serious accidents we need to inform the public about.

Seriously, no one comment on how fat that picture makes me look. Really. I'll rip your soul out and eat it.

At 8:05 Daniel pipes into my ear and tells me that I am clear to come back. I stow my equipment, drop my mast and wind up my cables. I need to buy some gloves though. It's amazing how dirty and nasty those cables get. I guess I could use my winter gloves, since there is no winter here!

And THAT, my friends is how I make my living. Usually. Stew is right, yapping about my anime and my political beliefs doesn't a good blog make. I will still rant every now and then about W and animated boobies... But mostly I will be chronicling my life as a disposable cameraman on the mean streets of DHV (Dirty Hidden Vegas).

Fo Shizzle!

Hurrah?

I apparently ranked number one in a Google search for the word 'beyach'.

I guess I am finally pulling a Jeffersons and movin' on up!

Nightside... How I love thee!

Since I was bitching and moaning earlier why I hate working dayside, I thought I would take a moment to explain why I love nightside!

I guess it's not actually 'nightside', it's overnights - since nightside would be like 2PM - 10PM or something...

#1 Traffic

There is very little traffic......... except when I think it might be a good idea to travel up Las Vegas Blvd. (The Strip) on a Saturday night...
But outside of that, I can easily make it from one in of town to the other in the amount of time it takes me to go two miles during the day.

#2 Plenty of Vehicles!

Unlike during the day when I have to have a duel with another photographer for a vehicle, overnights there are plenty........... even when two of them are down and a third (not listed) has been siezed by an early working photog.
I'm EWI in case you guys didn't figure that out. :)

#3 No People!

The newsroom is a virtual ghost town! Just the way I like things. Why if it wasn't for the MCO I could wander around the newsroom all night nekkid!
Of course I would never do that. You never know when someone would think it was fun to use the newsroom cam as a late night bump shot.

#4 Darkness!

Now, while the darkness makes my digital camera teh suck, it's great for my eyes. I love shooting at night. The red and blue of the police lights are much more briliant. And as much of a craptastic city Las Vegas is, it really does look awesome at night. Especially when you go to the edge of the valley and you can see the entire city.
Coming later, as a semi-follow up to Lenslinger's Anatomy of a Live Shot, I will be showing you the Anatomy of a Mobile Traffic Camera! It'll be hellafun.

Happy Birthday Las Vegas!

Las Vegas turns 100 today! Just imagine what a party city like Vegas does when it has a reason to party!

Lots of stuff going on this weekend. Too bad I have to sleep through most of it!

I'm Found, Bitch!

Apparently Dave Chapelle has come out of hiding and is talking to Time. It also is apparent that he was NOT in a South African insane asylum as previously indicated.

That's what you get when you take Entertainment Weekly as a real news source!

PreFight Night!

I have decided NOT to explain why I wanted to unload a 9mm into my skull on Friday and instead tell you of my time at the MGM Grand! It's kind of neat to be doing things - shooting events - that I never ever would have done if I'd stayed in Springfield. I also would like to apologize for the pictures. My digital camera is teh suck.

Felix Trinidad Vs. Winky Wright was Saturday night and I was sent to cover the weigh in. I've never been a fan of boxing. Too violent for my tastes. Though I think if we brought back sword fights and duels and put them on TV, I'd watch.

But there are a lot of boxing fans out there. Apparently the entire Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. See, that's where Felix Trinidad is from. There were even some Puerto Rican celebrities there! Including the fine little number on the right. I don't know who she is, I don't know what she does. All I know is that I should really consider learning Spanish and seeing how fluid the teevee cameraman market is in the Commonwealth.

Back to boxing. Winky was the first to come and weigh in. He got cheered, but it was hard to hear over the one billion people booing him. He weighed in at 160. I assume that is a good thing. Trinidad came in second. My ears exploded at the sound of the frenzied hordes screaming and hooting. He also weighed in at 160. I knew for a fact this was good as my ears once again began to bleed.

The total time of the weigh in was about 4 minutes. Waiting for that to happen was long, but entertaining because we got to listen to Don King speak in Spanish, and of course the main attraction, Michael Buffer! (That's the 'Let's get ready to rumble!' guy.) He didn't say the line, but it was kind cool to listen to him in person though!

And for the record, to the chagrin of many American-lite boxing fans, Winky Wright won in a 12 round unanimous decision.

Dayside... How I Loathe Thee...

I really hate working dayside.

Twas 8:15 AM. I'd been up for a few hours since I try to keep my sleeping schedule consistant even on my days off.

My Nextel chirps at me. It's the assignment manager. They need someone to come in and shoot a couple of sports stories. I agree and I plan on arriving at 11:30.

The details of my day are yet to come, but I just wanted to share with you the reasons why I hate working during the day.

#1 Traffic

It took me 34 minutes to get to work. It's a five mile drive with two turns. Both roads are 6 lanes wide (Desert Inn is even 8 lanes for a bit!). Yet somehow traffic manages to sit for hours on end. If anyone is looking for a reason NOT to move to Las Vegas, it's the traffic.

People tell me that it's not as bad as other places, but I really don't care. Traffic here sucks and the drivers are the most rude, assholish people on the planet. Most of the people here are from Southern California. I am beginning to see a motive for the freeway shootings.

#2 No Vehicles

I don't have my own car, so when I come in I have to either take a live truck, or someone elses car. Today I had to take someone elses car. I don't know whos, but it did smell nice.

#3 People

The newsroom was full. Full of people. Lots of managers. No managers at night.

More people walking around outside as well. On the Strip you have a lot of people walking around 24/7. I'm used to the drunk tourists. But in the rest of Vegas (or Dirty Hidden Vegas ((DHV)) as I call it) you just have idiots who think don't walk means everyone but them, get mad at you when they dart out in front of you and you honk at them, and weigh 522 pounds yet STILL wear a halter top. Jesus Christ people. I am a big fat ass, but you don't see me running around with my gut and ass cheeks hanging out. Good Lord!!!

#4 Sunlight

Oh how I hate the sun. If Mr. Burns ever wants to build a sunblocker here, I will gladly assist him.

Damn ball of fire and plasma.

Anyway, now that I have complained enough, I will leave you with this photo to tease the story of my first ever PreFight Night experience.

You know, I always thought his hair was a computer generated effect. Apparently it's not. ((Shiver!))

Photog Bloggers Unite!

Welcome to the first ever and first (insert however often we'll be doing this) Photog Bloggers Unite Show 'N Tell!

There are a lot of photog bloggers now. And being a tight knit little group, we like to do group activities! So we're doing a show and tell of our camera, autos, and lockers.

Okay. Here's what happened. I agreed to do this, and like usual, I forgot. So I apologize for not having better pictures. And having no picture of my locker. :( Sadness!

My Camera!

I have a 6 year old Panasonic DVCPro camera. And while it still takes some decent pictures, every day I am hoping for some sort of spontaneous combustion to end it's sad little life.

In fact, the camera in this picture is a loaner from Panasonic because mine if off being repaired. Again. We're allegedly getting new, P2 cameras soon, but not soon enough! Being new, I won't get one but I will get someone elses 'not-as-old' DVC!

She doesn't weight a lot. Much less than the BetacamSP I used to have at my old station, but she does weigh more than the DVCs at my last station.

My record button sticks sometimes so I have to hit it four or five times to get it to start recording. And my wireless receiver is fubared and I get about 7 inches worth of range out of my wireless mics.

Okay, I'm done complaining about that!

Live Remote Truck Unit 22
I really do love my car. Granted its a cumbersome, extremely conspicuous live truck, but I do love it. So much in fact that I have named her.
T-TIC! Well, T-TIC when I am doing my morning show traffic stuff. It's just Unit 22 when I am out chasing death and destruction. It's a brand new truck, only has about 16,000 miles on it (had 7,000 when I started). And while some people knock her bright orange markings, I don't. I think it looks cool!
That said, if I was given the opportunity to drive a smaller vehicle, I would take it in a heart beat. We have one fleet car (explorer) which I drive on Saturdays since there is no AM show. A live truck is very cumbersome. It limits where I can go and how easy it is for me to hide. Even a heavily marked Explorer can disappear into a parking lot better than a live truck can!
The picture on the right is of my trucks communications console. From top to bottom, left to right: My portable scanner, my 88.5 MHz transmitter for my MP3 player, My 2-Way mic, the speaker for the mounted scanner, my 2-way radio, my MP3 player, and my mounted scanner.

My Office

Since I forgot to take a picture of my locker, I will just show you where I spend my day. My office is unit 22. My camera sits besides me on the floorboard, just waiting for me to hop out, run to a breaking news scene, and realize I forgot a tape.

Hopefully next time we do a show and tell I will be better prepared. Kids, this is why you shouldn't sniff glue.

---

Here's the all the photog bloggers that are doing the show-n-tell today.

Be sure to check them out!

lenslinger
tv photog blog
newshutr's views
beFrank
kazz's world
little lost robot
smitty
erin winking
colonel corn

T-TIC Tock & We Don't Stop!

I've realized something.

I don't ever blog about work, much. And when I do, it's just complaints about rude firemen. And I don't post any pictures! No wonder Lenslinger's blog does so much better than mine (putting aside he's a genius when it comes to writing and I'm mildly retarded...).

Working 2:00AM - 11:00AM is an odd shift. You might be wondering what I do. 2:00AM is a bit to late for the good homicides and stuff, but too early for any planned news.

I am what I humbly refer to myself as, a disposable camera. I'm a utility player. I come in with no plan - which leaves me open to do what ever needs to be done. I'll be the first to breaking news to determine if it's important enough to pull one of the other two reporter/photog crews off their story. I investigate oddities on the scanner, follow up phone calls, and see why that Accident (Property Damage) has been on METRO's website for three hours...

This morning, I got myself a semi rollover.

First, let me put your minds and hearts at ease. The driver was A-Okay. Just tried to take a left too fast, learned a quick - yet effective lesson in gravity. I rolled up and saw no other TV crews. Hell, why would I? No injuries. But I knew that they wouldn't have this big boy back on his wheels by rush hour. Time for the T-TIC to get to work.

T-TIC; Terrestrial Traffic Information Center. An acronym I came up with one day while I had too much time on my hands. I am still trying to get the traffic guy to say it on air. Anyway, that's what I call myself when I am on traffic stories like this. See the story isn't that the truck rolled over. The story is that it (and the impending up righting efforts) is blocking three lanes of Russell Road at I-15. Not a good place to have all westbound traffic closed.

Our chopper doesn't go airborne till 6:00, so from 5-6, I am the sole 'live camera' on the traffic beat. Once she goes up though, you have team coverage baby! In fact they decided to put my fat ass on TV! Thank god I don't look as fat from 2000 feet.

I remain camped out on the center median calling in updates to the traffic situation and doing hits every 10 minutes. From the amount of traffic that was STILL trying to get through, I don't think anyone was watching us. But for those who were, the T-TIC was doing it's best to show what a cluster fuck this intersection had become.

As the sun came up, I began to realize I should have stopped on my way and gotten something to drink and to snack on. But at the same time I realized that if I had, I'd have to - expel - what wasn't necessary. Not something you can do in the middle of the road with Nevada State Troopers all around you.

All in all it was a good day. I didn't get hit by any cars, and while the mast was bending a good 15 feet in either direction from the wind (they swore the gusts were under 20MPH...) my truck did not blow away (or worse, over). The best part was that I did not get rained on.

Now it's the weekend. The lack of shows means there will be no traffic hits, just ambulance chasing. But come Monday We'll see if I will get to spend another morning on the seeming boring but actually enjoyable mobile traffic camera duty.

T-TIC tock and it don't stop...

Buried Treasure

OMG!!!!

Digging through some old CD's - trying to clean house you know - I found back ups of some of my old and origional websites that I did and assumed were lost forever!

I also found hard copies of my ORIGIONAL websites!!!

I hope to post some sort of evolution soon.

((ewink runs around, giddy like a school girl, but fortunatly for his neighbors, not dressed like one...))

Fear & Loathing in HTML 4.1...

For those of you who don't know, I like to design websites. My personal website is one example of this. I have also done a couple of sites that I have been paid for. I really have considered it a career, and may still do so, once my lazy ass learns Flash.

When I first started playing around with webpages, back in 1993 when it was actually considered cool and special to have one, I learned HTML - the coding language used to make websites. As time went on, and websites evolved, I didn't. My problem is that I started using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to design my sites. Unfortunately I have come to the realization that I have relied on that far to much. I don't remember how to code anymore. (You can see more of what goes into a website by clicking the link on the left.)

Sure, I remember the basics. A HREF, IMG, BR, ALIGN, TR, TD, UL, yadda yadda, but HTML (and now XML) is so much more advanced than that anymore. I got so used to using my WYSIWYG editor, that I felt I wouldn't need to keep up. It's like relying on getting dinner at McDonald's and forgetting how to cook.

Well, I need to know how to cook now.

Back in 1993 I was a big name on the internets when it came to anime websites. Ewink's GROOVY Ranma 1/2 and Sailor Moon Site was visited by thousands. I was big shit man. And I miss it. So in an attempt to avoid obscurity for as long as possible I have created an anime blog. But in order not to just be another blog in the wall as my friend and fellow blogger Jim Rose puts it, I need to design a great, sexy site that will make people say 'DAYUM!'. Blogger handles the hard stuff like the PHP or SQL or ASP or however the hell it turns a little text box into a website. But it's up to me to go from basic (yet nice, don't get me wrong) template to something deserving of the term FUNKDAFIED.

I dug through my closet and realized that I had abandoned my HTML books back in Illinois. I quickly phoned home and found that my book was terribly outdated...

HTML 1.2.

Ummm, we're on 4.1 now. Unacceptable. So I rushed down to Borders (I love that place) and found me a quick 4.1 reference book (the title suits me well I think). I also picked up a CSS book. CSS is Cascading Style Sheets - or how the site will look; the colors, the layout; more or less the visual blueprint for the site, while the HTML could be considered the architectural blueprint. CSS is what you see in the referenced picture above.

So, hopefully over the next few weeks I can keep off of Eve and get my ass to work. Because, as silly as it might sound, I think obscurity would be a fate worse than death for me.

((You can track my progress at my anime blog, but you probably won't see any changes for a few days.))

Pimpafy Yourself, Beyach.

Pimp Your Name!

I'm:

Big Playah E. Jazz

Word.

Good Luck Comes With (Sorta) Hard Work!

Sounds like a fortune cookie, but it happened to me today.

I was on my way home from work when I noticed I needed some petrol. That's gas to us Americans. I stopped at The Ho - no, that's not some woman I decided to defame but a casino/gas station on Industrial. After gassing up I realized I had to use the bathroom. I'll skip the details on that.

After I left the room, I noticed that there were some cool looking Monopoly slot machines. I figured 'what the hell' and dropped a $5. First spin, I got to do the little board game and roll dice. (No, slot machines don't just spin and jingle anymore... The machine in question looked a little like the one in the picture, but was newer.) Long story short, on one pull I won $50.

Good luck!

Heh, it was a nickel machine. I won't bore you with the details of having to scoop up $55 or so dollars worth of nickels, but it's a lot. Two buckets to be exact.

When I got to the cashier, I found out I dropped one, and had fifty something and ninety five cents coming back to me. I quickly gave her a nickel to make it an even amount because after all those nickels, I didn't want to see another one again.