Sunday, March 06, 2005

So Long to the Voice of the Orioles I grew up with Chuck Thompson broadcasting the Orioles on the radio on WBAL, and I also got to hear him on the televised baseball games in the late 1980s as he was paired with Brooks Robinson on WMAR-TV. He died this morning after suffering a stroke on Saturday. I will truly miss this great broadcasting icon and great supporter of Baltimore. Chuck Thompson's voice was one of the two that are synonomous with baseball radio broadcasts. The other voice is Jon Miller, who I consider the greatest modern play-by-play announcer working today. (So what if my bias is local, I'm right and you know it.) Chuck, "ain't the beer cold" in the hereafter? 9:44:37 PM    comment []  trackback []

Workin' on the Weekend Every once in a while, my job requires that I work the occasional weekend or late night.  Another part of my job requires that I am on-call once a week.  As of 5 PM this Friday, I began my week of "bitch duty" as I affectionately call it.  Shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, I received a page.  Of course, I did not see this page until getting a late-night snack with my friends following the end-of-the-week beer consumption.  Upon seeing it, my first reaction was "Dammit!"  The server that went down does not have the remote access component functioning.  Thus, if the server was down, I would have to drive all the way to College Park and restart the server manually.  At this point, it was about 1:15 AM.  I called my boss, and informed him of the situation.  I asked him if I needed to get the server back online immediately or if it could wait until early morning.  He said that we need to get it back up, so I told him I would head out the door in the next fifteen minutes.  I then got into my car with my laptop, and headed down the road.  I stopped for some hot chocolate from Royal Farms to help keep me awake.  It was now 2:30 AM at this point.  I arrived at the location where the server is housed.  I fired up my laptop, and I investigated the problem.  I restarted the server, and I made sure everything else was in order.  All was well, so I called my boss to let him know that all was back in order.  I also let him know I would submit the outage report later this weekend.  It was just after 3:30 AM at this point.  I headed back up the road to Baltimore, keeping my window rolled down just to keep myself up.  I got back into Federal Hill just after 4 AM, and I began the futile search for a parking spot.  I had to park illegally, and I thought that I would be greeted with a parking ticket.  I wake up later in the morning on Saturday--sometime after 11 AM.  I get up to run some errands, and I was greeted by the friendly piece of white paper that said CITY OF BALTIMORE PARKING CITATION on the back.  Double dammit!  So, on top of ruining about 4 hours of my weekend, I also have to pay the the City of Baltimore $27.  That's just great.  Thankfully, I will get some comp time out of the deal.  This is one of those times when I don't like my job nearly as much as I should.  9:30:28 PM    comment []  trackback []