About 12 years ago we spent a couple of years living the USA. One of the good things about the USA is that when you place an order with a company it is nearly always fulfilled on time and on specification. Contrast that with the 3 years we spent in the UK directly after that when only one order I placed with a company was fulfilled on time and on specification. Sometimes I feel it hasn't got any better in the last decade. Today was an example:
About a month ago I placed an order for a Manfrotto 522C - it's a remote zoom control handle for our Canon XL1 video camera - the C is important it specifies that it works with the Canon cameras and not the Sony cameras. Because we're in Cyprus I got it delivered to a colleague who would bring it out. When it arrived I found the company had supplied a 522A not a 522C. So I got in touch with them, firstly they claimed that the 522A works with Canon - I referred them to the Manfrotto website.
Then they came back and told me Manfrotto no longer made the 522C and so I would have to have a cheaper and not so good one. No that wasn't what I wanted. So I researched the Manfrotto website again and found a better version which was slightly more expensive... yes they could get that for me and deliver it to the international office in the UK in time for the filming I am doing next week. I also ordered 40 video tapes for that filming and FAXed them delivery details.
Today the people from the office are going to the venue where the conference will be held and phoned me to confirm everything I had got sent to them had arrived. Everything had... except... yes you guessed, the remote zoom control and the 40 tapes I had ordered for filming. So I phoned the company [yes, these are all International phone calls] and eventually spoke to one of the managers who apologised profusely and said that the piece of paper with my order was sitting on his desk and he had forgotten to sent it out!
After a whole series of phone calls he is now sending it overnight to arrive before 9am tomorrow at the international office, when one of the team will hopefully collect it and take it to the conference. Amazon.co.uk and all of the sellers I have used through ebay.co.uk, on the other hand, delivered everything on time and on specification.
We're not a commercial company but I wonder how much it costs european industry [we have the same problems out here in Cyprus] with people spending hours and many phone calls chasing orders, sending back stuff that is wrong, re-ordering what they should have supplied in the beginning and waiting till it arrives late.
My youngest son came in today to try to build a new video edit computer, and, no he didn't complete it because the Cyprus company that faithfully promised to supply the RAM failed to do so. That too ended up with numerous phone calls and wasted time chasing it up. One wonders why europeans don't have a word like the Arabs do - maleesh - which is close to our 'whatever' but much more expressive.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Teaching or learning?
In the old days there were craftsmen, master-craftsmen and apprentices. People learnt by working alongside others who had been doing the craft for many years. In recent times we have schools and training colleges and universities. It almost appears like people want to open their head like taking the lid off a kettle and pour in knowledge. All over the world this seems to be the modern way. But you don't gain skills that way.
One of the things that we are trying to do is improve the skills in media of our brothers and sisters in the Middle East. But often we have found they come approaching it as if they want the knowledge without the skills. The website we are developing as a way of encouraging learning now has this as its motto “This is not the place where you come to train. This is the place where you come to learn.”
I spent part of today with a colleague trying to get the right style for this site. Its important that its friendly - not just a load of facts. People from the Middle East are very relational so it has to have the feel of a workshop with people working alongside each other and learning from each other. Well, we'll have to see how it turns out and if the people we want to encourage find it helpful... as they say 'watch this space'.
Most of the day was spent editing, and programme 5 is nearly finished now. It was left rendering over-night.
This evening I wired another mobile phone into the system and then wrote the extre program code to make the system work with multiple phones. Tomorrow another colleague will test it.
Monday, August 01, 2005
T shirts with slogans
The Christmas before last my oldest son gave both me and my other son t-shirts. He had added slogans to them. Mine said 'Don't ask me... it's a hardware problem!' and my son's said 'Don't ask me... it's a software problem!'
This is the last week before I go to the conference so I set myself two targets:
In between that I was back and forth to the computer shop we use. My youngest son has been helping us by building the second and new video edit computer [it's a hardware problem!]. Only it has proved more difficult than we hoped. We use a Matrox 2500 system which is somewhat old technology but works very well and we managed to buy one new recently for about 15% of the cost.
However, it is very fussy with the other hardware that it is connected to and my son spent a week trying various things in the office before we decided that the motherboard would never work with this system. So today he was in at the computer shop trying another one... and other pieces of hardware to work with it. We finished there around 5pm having finally sorted out what we need. That's the good news. The bad news is that it will cost about 400 pounds more than we expected.
In between going back and forth to the shop I taught another colleague how to use the new wiki I mentioned and in doing so found that we needed another application on the wiki site to allow him to upload images. I got that working this evening.
What I had hoped to do this evening was to do a bit of the programming for the SMS gateway [a software problem!]. The SMS gateway allows listeners to send SMS messages [also called text messages] from their mobile phones and they get put into a database system here. Then the people from the radio stations who respond to listeners can read the messages and type a response which is then sent out by our system. I wrote the software that takes the SMS messages in and sends them out.
Currently we have one phone connected to the system, but we want to have a number of them, so that many of the radio and tv stations we work with can use this facility. And what I have to write is the bit that swaps from phone to phone sending and receiving messages. I can only program when I have peace and quiet - like in the evenings - I'm not a terribly good programmer and get distracted easily [that's a plug by the way that we need a programmer out here full time, someone who knows Perl, PHP and UNIX].
The system is being used by one of our partners and we didn't realise just how critical it was till last Monday when three of us from the office went to a meeting in another town with them. When we got there we found that during the time we had driven to the other town a small problem had developed such that they could no access it. Normally had one of us been there it would have been a 5 minute [or less] job to fix.
In the process we found that they were receiving 15-20 messages a day and that they were using them every day for a programme that was broadcast later in the day - responding to listeners questions. Without the live facility the production team were having to go back over old messages to find some to respond to. It showed us that everyday people in the the Middle East asking questions about Jesus and want to know more about Him.
Anyhow I didn't get started even tonight as one of my colleagues is away on holiday this week and one of the servers out here went wierd, gobbling up all the free space on one of the hard drives and stopping it working in the process. I tried everything to find the problem and eventually rebooted the machine. This is drastic, we try never to re-boot unless necessary... and ... it didn't restart. Which meant at 9.30pm I had to go into the office and sort out the problem.
We use a system called RAID on our servers. RAID means that we use 2 hard drives every place that you would normally use 1, and all the data is simulaneously written to both hard drives. The logic for this is that if one of the hard disks fail [as happens to all hard disks, the only question is when... bit like human beings and death I guess] then you have not lost your data. It appears that one of the hard drives had partially failed and the server was sitting there when it re-started saying 'Press Control-D to enter maintainance mode'. Which I did and fixed the problem.
This is the last week before I go to the conference so I set myself two targets:
- Finish the editing of a training series so I can take it to the conference
- Finish the programming of the SMS gateway so we can use more mobile phones on the system
In between that I was back and forth to the computer shop we use. My youngest son has been helping us by building the second and new video edit computer [it's a hardware problem!]. Only it has proved more difficult than we hoped. We use a Matrox 2500 system which is somewhat old technology but works very well and we managed to buy one new recently for about 15% of the cost.
However, it is very fussy with the other hardware that it is connected to and my son spent a week trying various things in the office before we decided that the motherboard would never work with this system. So today he was in at the computer shop trying another one... and other pieces of hardware to work with it. We finished there around 5pm having finally sorted out what we need. That's the good news. The bad news is that it will cost about 400 pounds more than we expected.
In between going back and forth to the shop I taught another colleague how to use the new wiki I mentioned and in doing so found that we needed another application on the wiki site to allow him to upload images. I got that working this evening.
What I had hoped to do this evening was to do a bit of the programming for the SMS gateway [a software problem!]. The SMS gateway allows listeners to send SMS messages [also called text messages] from their mobile phones and they get put into a database system here. Then the people from the radio stations who respond to listeners can read the messages and type a response which is then sent out by our system. I wrote the software that takes the SMS messages in and sends them out.
Currently we have one phone connected to the system, but we want to have a number of them, so that many of the radio and tv stations we work with can use this facility. And what I have to write is the bit that swaps from phone to phone sending and receiving messages. I can only program when I have peace and quiet - like in the evenings - I'm not a terribly good programmer and get distracted easily [that's a plug by the way that we need a programmer out here full time, someone who knows Perl, PHP and UNIX].
The system is being used by one of our partners and we didn't realise just how critical it was till last Monday when three of us from the office went to a meeting in another town with them. When we got there we found that during the time we had driven to the other town a small problem had developed such that they could no access it. Normally had one of us been there it would have been a 5 minute [or less] job to fix.
In the process we found that they were receiving 15-20 messages a day and that they were using them every day for a programme that was broadcast later in the day - responding to listeners questions. Without the live facility the production team were having to go back over old messages to find some to respond to. It showed us that everyday people in the the Middle East asking questions about Jesus and want to know more about Him.
Anyhow I didn't get started even tonight as one of my colleagues is away on holiday this week and one of the servers out here went wierd, gobbling up all the free space on one of the hard drives and stopping it working in the process. I tried everything to find the problem and eventually rebooted the machine. This is drastic, we try never to re-boot unless necessary... and ... it didn't restart. Which meant at 9.30pm I had to go into the office and sort out the problem.
We use a system called RAID on our servers. RAID means that we use 2 hard drives every place that you would normally use 1, and all the data is simulaneously written to both hard drives. The logic for this is that if one of the hard disks fail [as happens to all hard disks, the only question is when... bit like human beings and death I guess] then you have not lost your data. It appears that one of the hard drives had partially failed and the server was sitting there when it re-started saying 'Press Control-D to enter maintainance mode'. Which I did and fixed the problem.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Business as usual?
Some days things seems to happen and are significant, other days its just 'business as usual'. The last two days have been like that. So what is 'business as usual'?
Yesterday I went to Nicosia with a colleague from another organization - they use our facilities to make DVD masters of films, and one of the films they are making a DVD of has just been dubbed into Farsi, the language spoken in Iran. The video tape format that the tape was sent in was one we couldn't handle [DVCAM - more harware we need sometime! Anyone want to donate, this is what we need!] so the other organization got a company in Nicosia to make a copy onto a format we could handle. Unfortuneately in the process the sound got muddled and in places we had Greek audio not Farsi audio. There was also some audio missing from the video tape. So one of the reasons for going was to check that the audio would be done right this time.
When it is copied correctly, some time in the next month, we will then take it into our dubbing suite [for those of you interested it's a Digidesign Digi002 system] to mix the Farsi dialogue with the music and sound effects. At the same time we will correct the levels and make the audio quality correct for the pictures. Then we can create the DVD master that will be used to allow Iranians to see the film.
The second reason for the trip to Nicosia was to buy a new lighting stand and to buy a couple of padded camera bags for equipment... well... that was the plan... but things changed when I got to the company that sells the equipment. Firstly they had some old camera bags that they were prepared to sell at approx 20% the cost I was expecting to pay and secondly they had a new lightweight complete lighting system cheaper than I could buy in the UK, as they had directly imported from Italy. So I ended up buying a complete lightweight lighting system. This now completes our portable filming equipment - about 3-4 weeks ago we were given a new very good sound mixer which is also a 'hard disk recorder' [in other words it records audio onto a computer type hard disk - its an Edirol R4 for those interested] from a donor in another European country.
In a week's time I shall be travelling to yet another European country to record about 32 interviews and a seminar or two, plus set up some training, and we need all this for that event and for other projects we have in the next year.
Today I spent most of the day video editing a training programme [we make a few training programmes for other organizations]. Editing training programmes, which are often just one person speaking to camera with captions and other graphics is not very exciting as a production, but the value to the people all over the world is great, so the motivation is not from the artistic but from the content. We have a few more to finish by the end of next week so that I can take the masters to the conference I mentioned earlier.
I also spent some time talking through with a colleague about a training website for people doing media in our region. This will take the form of a wiki and a forum. What's a wiki I hear you ask?
Wikipedia defines a wiki as "a web application that allows users to add content and their own version of History, as on anInternet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content." In other words its kind of like a book that anyone can add pages or edit. Sounds wierd doesn't it. I mean, what if the Bible were a wiki, so anyone could add, delete or edit? I was really skeptical about them when I first heard. But if you think of it more in terms of a co-authored book then you can begin to see how it will work. So we are setting up a wiki and discussion forum with a group of other consultants to bring together training materials for people in the region that we work. It won't be open to everyone, like Wikipedia [which is an encyclopedia as a wiki] but only to people who are part of one of the organizations we work with.
So that's it... the end of another week. Next week one of my colleagues is away on vacation so I shall be doing all the support work too.
Yesterday I went to Nicosia with a colleague from another organization - they use our facilities to make DVD masters of films, and one of the films they are making a DVD of has just been dubbed into Farsi, the language spoken in Iran. The video tape format that the tape was sent in was one we couldn't handle [DVCAM - more harware we need sometime! Anyone want to donate, this is what we need!] so the other organization got a company in Nicosia to make a copy onto a format we could handle. Unfortuneately in the process the sound got muddled and in places we had Greek audio not Farsi audio. There was also some audio missing from the video tape. So one of the reasons for going was to check that the audio would be done right this time.
When it is copied correctly, some time in the next month, we will then take it into our dubbing suite [for those of you interested it's a Digidesign Digi002 system] to mix the Farsi dialogue with the music and sound effects. At the same time we will correct the levels and make the audio quality correct for the pictures. Then we can create the DVD master that will be used to allow Iranians to see the film.
The second reason for the trip to Nicosia was to buy a new lighting stand and to buy a couple of padded camera bags for equipment... well... that was the plan... but things changed when I got to the company that sells the equipment. Firstly they had some old camera bags that they were prepared to sell at approx 20% the cost I was expecting to pay and secondly they had a new lightweight complete lighting system cheaper than I could buy in the UK, as they had directly imported from Italy. So I ended up buying a complete lightweight lighting system. This now completes our portable filming equipment - about 3-4 weeks ago we were given a new very good sound mixer which is also a 'hard disk recorder' [in other words it records audio onto a computer type hard disk - its an Edirol R4 for those interested] from a donor in another European country.
In a week's time I shall be travelling to yet another European country to record about 32 interviews and a seminar or two, plus set up some training, and we need all this for that event and for other projects we have in the next year.
Today I spent most of the day video editing a training programme [we make a few training programmes for other organizations]. Editing training programmes, which are often just one person speaking to camera with captions and other graphics is not very exciting as a production, but the value to the people all over the world is great, so the motivation is not from the artistic but from the content. We have a few more to finish by the end of next week so that I can take the masters to the conference I mentioned earlier.
I also spent some time talking through with a colleague about a training website for people doing media in our region. This will take the form of a wiki and a forum. What's a wiki I hear you ask?
Wikipedia defines a wiki as "a web application that allows users to add content and their own version of History, as on anInternet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content." In other words its kind of like a book that anyone can add pages or edit. Sounds wierd doesn't it. I mean, what if the Bible were a wiki, so anyone could add, delete or edit? I was really skeptical about them when I first heard. But if you think of it more in terms of a co-authored book then you can begin to see how it will work. So we are setting up a wiki and discussion forum with a group of other consultants to bring together training materials for people in the region that we work. It won't be open to everyone, like Wikipedia [which is an encyclopedia as a wiki] but only to people who are part of one of the organizations we work with.
So that's it... the end of another week. Next week one of my colleagues is away on vacation so I shall be doing all the support work too.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
It had to happen...
Well, being the last in the family to have a blog, and being told that people want to know what I do with myself... I decided to start a blog.
This evening the guys from the office were taking an Egyptian colleague out go-carting as a 'goodbye' thank you for helping us over the last month. Just before we left I got an email from one of the ministries that we broadcast their radio station on the Internet for saying they were having problems and people were not able to 'tune in' reliably. The problem is their end as all the other ones we handle are working fine... but could we help. So off to go-carting while thinking about how to help.
Cyprus, like many places in the Middle East, does 'deals' or barters so when we got there although the prices were displayed we are all asking what sort of deal they could do for us. 4 people, so instead of 9 pounds for 15 minutes what price would it be. They said they could do a deal and it would be 36 pounds for all four! Anyway we had a great time, the Egyptian colleague started off driving as if he was driving a car and soon learned that go-carting makes driving in Cairo seem possitively calm and relaxing.
Back to the office after the carting [11pm] and we pulled out one of our satellite receivers and re-configured things so that we were sending the radio station feed to London rather than the partner ministry. This cleared up the problem and so in the next few days we will work with them in trying to find out what their problem is... or passing it on to the relevant person in their organization.
Much of what we do now is 'mission critical'- in other words if we stop or have a fault then people notice quickly and it affects how people hear [or don't hear] the Gospel on a daily, hour by hour basis. It had never been our intention of being a 'service provider' but more of a pioneer and developer. What this means is that either we have to find another ministry to take over the day-to-day stuff or we need more people here to work alongside us. That's where the Egyptian colleague comes in... we really hope that he will be coming back and doing a year internship with us. It would be a win-win situation and on the physical level all of us are for it, but we really want to know what God wants.
This evening the guys from the office were taking an Egyptian colleague out go-carting as a 'goodbye' thank you for helping us over the last month. Just before we left I got an email from one of the ministries that we broadcast their radio station on the Internet for saying they were having problems and people were not able to 'tune in' reliably. The problem is their end as all the other ones we handle are working fine... but could we help. So off to go-carting while thinking about how to help.
Cyprus, like many places in the Middle East, does 'deals' or barters so when we got there although the prices were displayed we are all asking what sort of deal they could do for us. 4 people, so instead of 9 pounds for 15 minutes what price would it be. They said they could do a deal and it would be 36 pounds for all four! Anyway we had a great time, the Egyptian colleague started off driving as if he was driving a car and soon learned that go-carting makes driving in Cairo seem possitively calm and relaxing.
Back to the office after the carting [11pm] and we pulled out one of our satellite receivers and re-configured things so that we were sending the radio station feed to London rather than the partner ministry. This cleared up the problem and so in the next few days we will work with them in trying to find out what their problem is... or passing it on to the relevant person in their organization.
Much of what we do now is 'mission critical'- in other words if we stop or have a fault then people notice quickly and it affects how people hear [or don't hear] the Gospel on a daily, hour by hour basis. It had never been our intention of being a 'service provider' but more of a pioneer and developer. What this means is that either we have to find another ministry to take over the day-to-day stuff or we need more people here to work alongside us. That's where the Egyptian colleague comes in... we really hope that he will be coming back and doing a year internship with us. It would be a win-win situation and on the physical level all of us are for it, but we really want to know what God wants.
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