So what have I been up to in 2007? Looking back at what I wrote last year I would have to say, "Not a lot". I can't even say, "More of the same". It's more like, "Less of the same", compared to previous years. With a few notable exceptions. Some short bursts of activity but few memorable moments in between. I did create a new web site early in the year called www.dv2broadcast.co.uk to promote my audio/video service work, which has achieved a really good Google rating if you search for dv and broadcast. Last time I checked it was at No 2 out of about 1,750,000 possible results! (Not that it's brought in any actual work yet.)

Some more broadcast sound work for Granada, but little of it actually broadcast

Probably about a dozen days in total, all of it via (and with) ex-Granada cameraman Lawrence Jones. The first two jobs were back in February & March for Tonight with Trevor MacDonald on ITV. These were transmitted, but then a bit later we did some work for the pilot of That Antony Cotton Show (ITV daytime) and then in the summer spent about 8 days on one episode of a new show called Undercover Mum. The transmission date was in September and apparently they'd started work on it the previous year, but it was not going well so a new producer had been brought in (from Tonight with Trevor McD) and much of it was being re-shot.

Of the three programmes, our one was about family debt and the (irresponsible?) role of the "Sub-Prime" lenders. The presenter, ex-police officer and mum Nina Hobson had applied for a job with the Provident and been given training in door-to-door sales. This had already been filmed using hidden cameras and now part of our job was to go back to the people she'd visited and have her turn up to explain she'd been working undercover and talk to them about their experience of dealing with loan companies. We also visited families in Walsall, Reading and Haverfordwest who were struggling to cope a variety of debt problems.

Despite our episode supposedly being the best of the three (and that doesn't say a lot about the other two), to the best of my knowledge it was not transmitted. The series sunk without trace after the first episode which was, to be fair, pretty diabolically awful. Increasingly, these days, the TV schedules contain programmes with insufficient content to justify the allocated time slot. Two hour dramas with barely enough plot to fill an hour, half hour reality shows stretched to an hour by endlessly repeating what little content they have. Ep 1 of Undercover Mum was one such show which might just have made a reasonable half hour. But at an hour long there was no escaping the repetition of hearing what they were going to do next, at the head of the show and before the ad breaks, then after the ad break a recap of what we'd seen in the previous part, followed by another reminder of what was yet to come, and so on. The sort of thing that makes you want to scream, "Yes I know - just get on with it!".  

Shock-horror - I bought a SatNav!

As you may know if you've read previous years' blogs, I'm a SatNav luddite. This is because I believe having some knowledge of geography and basic navigational skills is a "good thing", particularly if acquired at a reasonably early age, and that an over-dependence on SatNav will produce a complete generation unable to navigate their way out of a paper bag without an electronic map to guide them. Not that there weren't people like that in previous generations, but at least there were fair number of us who could.

Anyway, I was one of those who could plot a moving course on any map you cared to give me, and find my way to most parts of the country without even the need for a map. However, as I discovered during the Undercover Mum shoots, travelling in Lawrence's car with his stick-on TomTom device, it really comes into it's own for the very last part of the journey when you're finding a specific street address in an unknown town. And it has a few other clever tricks as well, like giving a surprisingly accurate estimate of journey time and ETA. So, whilst I will still continue to make most major navigational decisions manually, I now own a TomTom One to help me home in on the final section of any previously unvisited destination, and tell me when I'm going to arrive there (or back home).

I bought it specifically for the big job in Stafford (below). Not to get me to the Police HQ - that's easy - but in case I needed to buy supplies locally (I didn't) or find my way to a hotel off the beaten track. It's here that I did come unstuck, and learned that it's always better to navigate to a street address rather than a postcode. One night I was booked into the Utoxetter Travelodge, which is just off the A50 Stoke<>Derby dual-carriageway. I had a quick look at a map before setting off, so had a rough idea of where it should be taking me, and the route looked fairly straightforward. It was easy enough getting to Utoxetter, and then I started following the SatNav instructions as it lead me through the town in what seemed to be the correct general direction. I arrived at a junction with the A50, where there was a Travel Inn, but it directed me across to the other side and then down a small side road to the left. It was dark, and I couldn't see the hotel, nor was there a hotel sign at the turn off, but I did pass a sign saying something like "Residents Parking Only" so I carried on, passed over a cattle grid and shortly after the voice announced, "You have reached your destination". A single track road in the middle of a field, albeit just off the A50.

So I made my way back to the A50 junction and went in to the Travel Inn reception. "I hope you don't mind me asking", I said, "but I'm looking for...". "The Travel Lodge?", said the receptionist. "We both have the same post code - it happens all the time. It's just past the next roundabout". So the moral of that is that whilst postcodes in big cities define very small areas (like one street), in rural areas they can cover big enough distances to get lost in. Equally, the maps are not always up to date or even entirely accurate. Our office at Carolina Way in Salford Quays is not on the TomTom map yet, and if you enter its M50 2ZY post code you will end up near, but not even in sight of the entrance.

Staffordshire Police HQ - AV Unit installation

The AV team at Stafford Police HQ are one of my "regular" customers, which means no more than that every so often they spend some money with me. The first time I visited they were in temporary accommodation - one of the "tied" police houses on the HQ estate - into every room of which was crammed workstation desks piled high with monitors and tape decks. Some of it was neatly installed; less so the more recent acquisitions, on account of the fact that they were "moving again soon". That was five years ago, but finally this year they were allocated a place in a brand new building at the Weston Road complex a few miles away. 

I was requested to quote for the job of disconnecting and reconnecting all the equipment, whilst the actual job of moving the equipment would be handled by the contracted removal company. Given that it usually takes me about half an hour to connect up the sort of computer/video systems that I usually supply, and that they had about ten of these, my initial response was that it was only a few days work at most. However, they persuaded me that the other quotes they'd had were considerably higher and that mine should be similar - although they apparently wanted me to do it anyway. I went down and had another look around, took lots of photos and put together what I thought was, for me, a pretty professional-looking proposal. I got the job.

Because I felt guilty about clearly overcharging for the required work, off the record I promised I'd throw in a number of extras like additional patch bays for the outlying workstations, and creating a local network for the machines which aren't allowed to be on the main police IT network. Custom Wiring not being my strong point these days, partly due to failing eyesight, I'd recruited ex-Granada wireman Graham Harper for a couple of days on-site work, which I thought would be ample to connect up the new tie lines and any of my promised additional wiring features.

In the event, most of it went to plan, and the majority of the unit's functionality was restored within the first few days of moving to the new location. Granted, there had been more work then I expected in physically bubble-wrapping and packing each piece of equipment into the supplied crates, a task which I hadn't realised would fall mainly to me. So by the day of the move I'd already spent 6 days, but there was much more to come once I tackled what became my nemeses, the main patch bays (pic below). My quote was based on one main principle - that I was disconnecting and reconnecting their equipment using the existing connecting cables. If it was all working now then it would work the same when re-connected. Sure, there were a few tie line cables which connected one room to another, but I'd budgeted for replacing those, had pre-installed them before the move and had Graham (the wireman) to connect them up. 

Where it all went wrong began when I'd started dismantling the existing patch bay wiring. Now I'm very patient and methodical about separating and untangling cables, but what I found once I got going on it was that most of it had been created in situ in such a way that it could not be removed intact. Where you see me squatting beside two rack cabinets, there were about 80 connecting cables between them. Now the sensible thing would have been to have removed the two adjacent side panels (it only involves a dozen screws) so that the cables could freely pass through the void. But no, all those cables were crammed through two slots in the base of each cabinet. Not only that, but most of the cables were unnecessarily long, with the excess coils laying in a tangled mess in the base of each cabinet. In short, it was horrendous, and I had no choice but to cut through parts of it simply to be able to reduce the cabinet contents into quantities that could be packed into crates.

Skip forward a week or two (or just skip to the next topic if you're getting bored!). Graham has been with me for three days and we've made a very neat job of installing one patchbay module (out of seven). Meanwhile we've also created dozens of made-to-measure BNC cables out of the way-too-long originals. At this stage I'm told that they'd like to introduce some new monitoring equipment into the rack, thus creating several entirely new problems. The rack is already pretty full, as are the patchbays, and, what's more, many of the outputs that they want to monitor were never even connected to the previous patchbay. So now, at the thirteenth hour, when we should have been just about finished, I'm sitting down to do a complete redesign of the patchbay wiring, a rejig of the positions where things are screwed in, and suggesting yet more equipment (two 16x16 matrix switchers) to give us a chance of making it all work.

At this point I switched to a different work plan. I'd already spent about a dozen days in Stafford, usually in two day trips so that I travelled down one day, worked, stayed overnight, worked the next day and then travelled back. Such was the slow rate of progress once we got onto the unexpected wiring phase that my return journeys were getting later and later and I'd be getting home at 11pm. I'd already spent more than I'd allowed for Graham's wiring work, so I decided I'd have to do the rest myself, but pre-making and testing the wiring for each panel back at base. Then I could just travel down for a day and connect it up. This worked quite well, and finally, after about 25 days work, I'm just about finished. I have been paid for the job as quoted, although what I've actually done and provided goes some way beyond the quote, and I'm yet to negotiate on what extras I can charge. On the one hand it's my own fault for doing and supplying the things over and above the quote, which unfortunately were appropriate to do at a time before it all started going wrong for me, and on the other hand they did move the goalposts when the job was well underway. They are nice people to work with, generally, which is another reason why I wanted them to get as much out of this "upgrade opportunity" as possible, so I'm sure we can work something out.  

If nothing else, I have learned a lot about AV installation wiring which I will probably never need again, not least because I have no intention of ever taking on another job like this in the future!!! And if I'd known what it was going to turn into I probably wouldn't have taken this one on either. 

New tenants upstairs

During the Stafford job I had an enquiry about the office space which has translated into a new lease being signed, albeit only for a year initially, but you never know. It could go either way, based on previous experience! As is often the case (with me), I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand the rent income will be very welcome. On the other hand I would rather have had a slightly more up-market company with fewer staff and less of a "sweat-shop" atmosphere. And doing something other than generating leads for the financial services industry of the type that might have featured in the ill-fated Undercover Mum TV programme I worked on earlier in the year.  

The lease started mid-November, but they hadn't started working there in earnest before Christmas. That was mainly due to a delay in getting the phone system installed and working despite the lines being ordered from BT in October. Not that it was all BT's fault, although it did take them at least four visits with different teams working on various aspects of getting connections from the street to the wall-box. It was finally all working a week before Christmas, so I expect to be hit by the implications of what will feel like an "occupation" when I return in the New Year.