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Wednesday, September 3, 2003
Radiations 
| |  Big Rick points to more shuffling of formats and call letters on the Bay Area FM dials. "The Wave" is gone from 93.3, the channel that can't keep a format, replaced by a simulcast of KBAY, which is currently on 94.5 out of San Jose. Later KBAY will move to 93.3 and leave 94.5 open for something else. (My choice: bring back KFAT, which was the best thing ever on that channel. You can still listen here.)
KBAY for many years was the biggest signal in the South Bay, radiating from the top of Loma Prieta Mountain on 100.3 (now home to the Spanish KBRG). When KBAY moved down the dial to 94.5, it went to a much weaker signal from the same transmitter site (to which the KFAT folks moved it from down in Gilroy, the town to which the station is still, technically, licensed). Later they moved the transmitter over to Coyote Mountain, which is really just a hill in Santa Teresa Park with a nice view up the Bay. With its low elevation, the station could raise the transmitter power, but still the signal is concentrated in the South Bay. |
| | The signal on 93.3 comes from another relatively low hill, in San Leandro, which gives it good coverage into a lot of the mid-Bay, but with terrain shadowing to the North and East. The transmitter used to be on Candlestick Hill by the ball field, on the old KYA tower (now KOIT's AM tower, and still an auxilliary site for 93.3, I believe) — a site reportedly chosen originally not for its technical merits (which didn't exist), but because the station was owned by Wm. Randolph Hearst, who liked the look of the hill. |
| | Most of San Francisco's stations radiate from Mt. San Bruno (e.g. the region's biggest signal, KQED), Mt. Sutro (e.g. KFOG) or Mt. Beacon in Marin (e.g. KDFC). My own fave is KPFA's site, above Berkeley, which has a great signal into the East Bay as well as everwhere else. |
| | Sorry, I can't resist this shit. I'm still an old radio engineer at heart. |
| | [Later...] My sister says the guy in the KFAT logo looks like me. (Except I've always looked like shit in a hat.) Hmm... maybe I should swap it for that 1999-vintage image up there on the title banner. |
Plug
| | A show inspired by, but not depicting, events in the Middle East. |
| | Using rolls of toilet paper, a plunger, and other bathroom hardware, Lunatique Fantastique tells the funny, poignant tale of the generational struggle over divided territory and limited resources. |
| | If you're going Friday, we'll see you there. |
Biting the hand that strokes you
| | I'm told that Business 2.0 has something nice to say about me, or Cluetrain, or ... I dunno, because the magazine has cluelessly decided to hide their "content" from all but subscribers, and even from some of them too, thanks to a login system that doesn't work. |
| | That said, I really do like Business 2.0. They're a dot-com boomzine that survived The Collapse very nicely (yeah, they got bought out and all, but still), an achievement that alone deserves plenty of kudos. It's also a good magazine. I read it, which is something I can't say for most of the magazines I subscribe to. |
| | But I'll say once again, to all the publishing folks who refuse to listen (and they are legion), What little you gain in subscriber leverage and sales of old articles by putting your "content" behind a costwall is far more than offset by lost authority. When none of your stuff can be found on the Web — either by search engine crawlers or by the countless writers who are denied the chance to link to your good stuff, you fail to exist in the largest and most vital business environment civilization has ever known. Links are what make the Web a web. Preventing them is the height of folly. |
All politics is personal
Falling back to school
| | Doesn't matter when the Equinox comes; Summer ends on the last day before school. Since the kid goes off to first grade today, that this the first day of Fall. |
| | Feels that way too, for some reason, even here in Southern California. |
| | When I was in North Carolina a couple weeks ago, in mid-August, kids were going back to school. That seemed wrong and evil to me. The summer was hardly over. It was (and still is) hot. Labor Day was still two weeks off. |
| | Anyway, today was the day when, as a kid, I would arrive at school, and dread knowing that, starting in a few minutes, I would be given instructions by the teacher that I would forget, and papers that I would lose. And that there would at least be plenty of lunch and recess over the next nine months. |
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