ShaneStanton.com

Today I took off my technical director’s hat and put on my radio engineer hat, to do a service call for a radio station three and a half hours away. Had a disappointing day trying to fix a IP codec box that feeds the signal from the Daytona Beach mother station to the remote station 150 miles away. Besides the problem that the DSL line was being used by a TV station in the same building for streaming, without our permission, the IP codec was dead.

I brought a power supply and figured it would fix it, unfortunately the power supply did not bring the device back to life. Being the technician that I am I broke out my trusty Fluke meter and started probing to make sure everything was receiving power, in my testing I decided to make sure power was getting through the filter at the power inlet and there wasn’t some unseen fuse blown. I moved the probe in and WHAM! I shorted the hot side to the case, sparks went flying and I saw life flash before my eyes (or maybe that was just the flash from the 120v). I have worked on a lot of powered up electronics and transmitters, and have never done something like that before. I have seen plenty of sparks and flames with FM and AM transmitters when the high voltage arcs across a bad component, but never had it happen from my hands before. 

Now my meter probe now bears the scars of 120 VAC shorted to ground, and I learned what happens when you do something stupid. I will make sure I am more careful next time, like I normally am. 

Thinking about when things go wrong… here’s a video from last year when one of our drummers did fall off the drum platform.

Sometimes it feels like it all goes wrong, as the technical director at TCC I feel responsible for tech related issues, and even though it really doesn’t all go wrong I still get that sinking feeling when stuff is going wrong. I have to admit it I am a perfectionist sometimes (ok a lot of the time), and when it comes to the production of a service I like perfection. But I know that perfection is beyond reach, we will never have a “perfect” service, sometimes lyrics or lights will be late (or early, or wrong), mic cues will be wrong, something will feedback, guitar strings will break or go out of tune, mic stands will fall over, the wrong patch on a keyboard will be played, the drummer will fall off the platform, batteries will go dead, FPL will drop 1 leg of power long enough to cause my projectors and moving lights to have to be reset, (all of this has actually happened at one time or another) basically something will go wrong. I think I sometimes confuse my desire to not be a “distraction” with perfection.

I believe that God has a great sense of humor (He created me….) and every so often I think He just goes “hey watch this, I’m totally gonna mess with them, this going to be so funny!” In our hardest to worship Him and bring others into that same worship, I think we sometimes take ourselves too seriously and we let imperfections affect our worship. Personally how I tend to worship is through what I do, when I am using the talents and gifts given to me in service I am at my best worship at that moment. What I must do, and I find I do much better than I used to as I have grown and matured, is to not let imperfections distract me from my worship of our Creator. So Father I thank you that we are not perfect, cause it’d be a boring world if we were! I pray I can laugh and enjoy it when things seem to “all go wrong” and know You are still God. I will worship you with my talents, my praise and my laughter. You created laughter and I have to let it go and just enjoy the moment.

Well we got 2 of those converter coupons from the federal government, so off to Circuit City yesterday, after a lot of research about the boxes. Picked up the Zenith ones and hooked one up. I must say digital tv looks great, when you get reception… when you get… reception. Right now I think we can get two stations in solid, and one of them isn’t in english… so I’m totally lost watching that channel. Soon I’ll be investing in some sort of outdoor antenna so we can get the Orlando tv stations in. You may be wondering why we just don’t get cable or satellite, well we decided it wasn’t worth the money every month to watch a handful of tv shows. The saga of DTV will continue on for the Stanton’s for some time to come…

Well to add to my level of web two dot oh involvement I have decided to start my blog. Still learning my way around WordPress, but shouldn’t be too hard… I hope. I figure I can use this to give you a glimpse of what is hiding out inside my head, but not too deep of a showing, that could be scary!

So stay tuned and enjoy the ride!