Friday night lights

It is an inspiring revelation, I think, that at the (nearly) 58 year-old-mark, I'm still capable of having the best Friday night ever. Or it indicates I've lost the ability to remember Friday nights past. One of those.

Friday night is Timberwolves basketball night in Flyover Country, a distinction that historically earns the participant the scorn and ridicule of non-believers. And there have been plenty of them since the local NBA squad traded Kevin Garnett to the Boston Celtics years ago.

But I'm a season ticketholder and a follower of bad teams, not necessarily my intent; it's just the way it works out. This team, however, is on the upswing.

San Antonio was in town last night; we beat them earlier this season with a little luck and surprise. But now, the art of surprise lost, the squad had to win on the strength of talent.

But I brought the team's good-luck charm anyway...

It worked.

During the game, Ali Lozoff, the marketing guru at The Current, tweeted me a message asking if we'd like to come over to First Ave (across the street) for The Current's 7th birthday party, a sold-out, two-night affair. Well, sure. You can never have enough elderly people at First Ave., right?

The game over, we walked in, got into the VIP section, saw our pals...

... and watched the concert up close...

Jim McGuinn, The Current's fine program boss, asked me to come on stage for the staff introductions, but, you know, as much recognition I get for doing four minutes of radio once a day with Mary Lucia, doing that would've taken away the spotlight -- if only just a sliver -- from the all-the-time people who do such a great job building America's best radio station. They're tremendously fun and welcoming people...

Now the part my father -- who kept track of his money -- would like.

Cost of Timberwolves tickets: $10
Cost of water and a Klondike Bar: $7
Cost to park: $5
Cost for First Ave entry: $0
Cost for drinks: $0
Total minus $5 Timberwolves food voucher for not bailing during the NBA lockout: $17

Life is good.

The job posting

The more I worked with my oldest son at the company I've worked for for nearly 20 years, the more I understand why my father, against all logic, tried to get me to take over his insurance business. And the more I understand why it probably killed him when I left after less than a year to continue my pursuit of a career in radio. But I didn't just leave, I repudiated the very notion of working in the same office.

It was dumb and it was just the type of thing 20-year-olds do.

My son never did that to me in the time he worked with me and I've never enjoyed walking in the door of work more than the five or so years he was on the other side of the doors.

Watching him work reminded me of the time I went to a band concert of his in the 5th or 6th grade and began to see him as an individual of unique talents that I did not possess. He was good at what he did, he was smart, and he brought the Collins Type A personality and critical self-assessment with him, which is the tragic assault of my DNA.

We'd have coffee almost every morning and during the day sometimes he'd stop by to shoot the breeze. It was great, especially considering all those years when father-and-son related the way fathers and sons often do.

Through absolutely no fault of his own, he's been unable to continue in the job. My company, knowing a valued employee when it sees one, worked hard to give him the time and space he needed, but in the end, he couldn't do the work to his level of satisfaction. The curse of Dad's DNA.

Last week, he informed the company he wouldn't be able to return to work, and last night, the company posted his job, which of course they had to do, but which, nonetheless, hit me like a ton of bricks anyway, even though I knew what was coming.

Windows Systems Administrator #168-12
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Salary Range: $56,177-$84,265
Exempt/Non-Exempt: Exempt
Benefits: yes
Employment Type: Full Time
Description: The Windows Systems Administrator will work in the IT Infrastructure team within the Technology and Operations department of American Public Media | Minnesota Public Radio. The Windows Systems Administrator will provide technical support, upgrades, patch management, and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) administration. The Windows System Administrator will support, upgrade, and maintain media and broadcast related Microsoft servers and applications that are critical to the support of Minnesota Public Radio such as automation and play to air. This position will support Broadcast Media/Operations/Windows servers/applications in all APMG locations. Primary reporting will be to the Manager of IT Infrastructure with secondary reporting to the Manager of Media Productions.

Position Responsibility:

• Develop, install, recommends purchase, implementation, and configuration of Microsoft technologies and infrastructure systems.
• Implementation, administration, maintenance, and disaster recovery planning for multi-site Microsoft Server environment.
• Administration and management of Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).
• Distribute application and operating system patches to Windows desktops, laptops and servers.
• Develop, manage and install application and operating system deployments, including Play to Air and Broadcast Media systems, using SCCM.
• Perform Windows systems capacity planning and performance analysis.
• Conduct complex troubleshooting and repair of Active Directory, Windows server 2000/2003/2008, DNS, user authentication and other operational systems as needed.
• Research, evaluate and recommend new technologies in order to meet business requirements and contribute to long-range planning for systems evolution.
• Research, build, administer, implement, and support all current APMG play-to-air and media production computer based systems. These systems include: ENCO, Dalet, Protools, Music Master, Final Cut, other audio/video systems and related media systems.
• Recommend alterations to existing technologies to improve quality and/or reduce costs.
• Document strategies, designs, policies, recommendations, procedures, and status using Microsoft Office, Visio, and/or Project using clear, consistent, and concise language.
• Implement disaster recovery plan for all media production systems when needed, assist with regular test procedures and user training.
• Use scripting tools/languages to automate software installations
• Work with peers to establish security, management and support standards for APMG computer environment.
• Manage Microsoft group policies.
• Complete support assignments on time and within budget.
• Work with vendors for product information and design, pricing, and support escalation.
• Provide cross training to team members who provide secondary support.
• Provide IT departmental budget input as requested.
• Provide On-Call support in a 24/7 environment.
• Assist in special projects as assigned.

Required Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
• 3-5 years of experience installing and supporting computer hardware and Microsoft software in an enterprise setting.
• 3-5 years of administration experience with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008.
• 3+ years of experience managing SMS 2003 or SCCM 2007.
• Experience managing operating system deployment systems.
• Experience with enterprise implementations of Microsoft applications (e.g. SQL, AD, WSUS)

Required Skills, Knowledge and Abilities:

• Strong diagnostic skills and demonstrated ability to research problems independently using multiple resources to support computer hardware and software at the enterprise level.
• Thorough understanding of client computers in a business environment.
• Thorough understanding of security risks in the current business computing environment.
• Understanding of Microsoft Active Directory schema.
• Deep knowledge of SMS 2003 or SCCM 2007’s patching capabilities and application distribution functionality.
• Working knowledge of application installation and methodologies for automated installation.
• Scripting knowledge.
• Able to perform work independently or in a team environment.
• Ability to effectively communicate with the appropriate level of technical detail for your audience.
• Ability to establish and maintain positive working relationships in order to achieve common goals.
• Excellent listening and organizational skills.

Preferred Skills and Experience:

• Microsoft certification (such as MCSE, MCITP, MCTS, or MTA).
• Knowledge of Wake-on-LAN desired.
• Experience in a broadcasting or media environment.
• Skill with using scripting languages.

I think about my son almost every minute of every day. A lot of people can forget about their worries by diving into things at work. That doesn't work for me.

If that job sounds like it's right up your alley, you should apply for it. But you'll be filling some big shoes of one hell of a kid.

You'll notice, perhaps, that I've only made three posts on the blog this year. This has been the worst year we've ever had, and at this Thanksgiving, I struggle to be grateful that it wasn't worse.

Jose Cardenal and the bucket list

Today is Jose Cardenal's birthday. He might be the person who made it possible for me to check an item off my "bucket list," but, alas, he's not.

Jose played for the Cleveland Indians for only two years -- 1968 and 1969 -- and he wasn't particularly good for them, but to a young Indians fan, he might as well have been Babe Ruth. Such is the nature of hero worship.

It was September 16, 1969 and my mother took me to the ballgame at Fenway Park when the Indians came to town. Bleacher tickets back then were only $1 and we frequently watched baseball from what was widely thought to be the best deal in baseball.

At some point, possibly before the game started, an old usher stood at the bottom of the row, leaning on the giant cement wall in centerfield and motioned for me to come down to him.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a baseball -- a real Major League Baseball official baseball, which presumably had been swatted into the bleachers during batting practice.

In the third inning, with nobody on and two out, Jose Cardenal launched a Jim Lonborg pitch into the bleachers for his 10th homerun of the year, propelling the Indians to a 5-2 win, a rare occasion for the team in 1969, a season in which they lost 90 games.

At some point in the game, my mother suggested I claim that the ball in my hands was that homerun. And so I did for some years thereafter.

But it wasn't. And I've never come close to checking "catch a ball at a baseball game" off the bucket list again.

Happy birthday, Jose!

It's not the heat, it's the memories

If we are not careful and paying attention, we can let the professional weatherpeople lead us down the path of meteorological despair. "It's 90, but it feels like 106!" they warned today as summer made the apparently unwelcome visit to Minnesota even though we've been longing for it for weeks.

When I let the Blog Dog back in from her morning inspection of the south 40 this morning, she was panting like a two-stroke engine, a reminder to me to keep the windows shut and the air conditioner on. You don't want to go out in this weather because, you know, it's not the heat, it's the humidity that will get you if you're not careful.

That's a phrase that still occupies a disk sector in the hard drive in my head, "it's not the heat, it's the humidity."

It's around 1960, the memory bank reveals, and I'm at my mother's feet while she utters those words to someone. We're in the driveway of our home.

"What's humidity?" I asked.

"You can't really feel it when you're a kid," she said. "But when you get older, you'll know."

I'm older now, of course. I recognize humidity and loathe its existence and the passing of time that made its recognition possible.

The senses are a time machine. A song on the radio takes you anywhere in the past you want to go. A smell -- for me, it's Candyland in downtown St. Paul -- transports you to a boardwalk, a summer night, and a lost love.

I could avoid the outdoors no longer this morning. I had to dump the coffee grounds in the compost bin. I had no choice but to accept fate, open the back door and step into ... 1964.

This temperature. This humidity. I remember this exact combination in a place and moment that no longer exists. It's a trailer on the oceanfront of Plum Island in Newburyport, Massachusetts, which seemed like luxury then but which I realize now was a desperately cramped spot for five kids and two parents.

I am 10 years old and it's the beginning of another perfect day, me with my freedom to spend it roaming the beach looking for lost lures, watching the charter boats head for George's Bank, seeing what's up at the Coast Guard station, standing at the end of the jetty as the tide comes in pretending I'm the captain of a trawler in the storm, smelling the rope at the tackle store, or riding the bike to the variety store for the latest Archie comic book. My parents are half the age I am now. It is summer, I don't know what a dewpoint is, and these are the best days of my life.

Be careful if you go out today. You might become 10 years old again.

The RKO years

It's impossible to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade each year without thinking back to two years I wish I could do over.  The parade at that time went down Broadway, and I worked on the 5th floor of  1440 Broadway, at the RKO Radio Network. Thanksgiving was a good time for our families to come into the sports department and watch the balloons go by at eye level  (The image above is the 1985 parade from the vantage point). I was usually working in the windowless newsroom, so I never really got to see the parade.

It was 1984 when I moved to New York. The radio news business was different then. There was a "nuclear core" of the industry. If you worked in the news business, you wanted to get to New York. It's what motivated radio newspeople in small markets all across America.

I'd worked at WHDH in Boston, which was the only dream in broadcasting I ever really had -- Boston -- but much of the newsroom was laid off in May, even though we were the #1 station in the market.  My old boss, Ed Bell, helped me get a "summer relief" job at WCVB in Boston, which at the time was known as the best local TV station in America. It was an honor richly deserved.

But I never felt comfortable in TV; I couldn't understand the entire "write to the pictures" method of writing, and I never could figure out the union duties and who could do what. In radio, you controlled the story from the beginning all the way to the end. It doesn't work that way in TV.

So when RKO's managing editor, Harvey Nagler,  called -- presumably at the behest of my old WHDH pal Nick Young-- I jumped at the opportunity to fly down to New York and check out a "WGA" position (Writer's Guild of America). Basically, WGAs called people and interviewed them, sliced up the tape, and sent it out to the anchors. Also involved was an editor's shift or two. No heavy lifting, really.

I was hired and we moved to New York where we were immediately depressed by the apartment market. We were moving away from families and New York then seemed far away from Massachusetts. I wish I'd known then what I know now.

I loved taking the train into the city, I loved the Empire State Building at night,  I loved being around the best of the best, and  I loved reading some of the finest writing I've ever seen come out of an anchor's hands, but while I thought $43,000 was a lot of money, in New York it was chump change. We couldn't really afford to do anything to enjoy New York.

On the second day of work,  RKO was reported to have double-billed advertisers in its 1984 Olympics coverage. It would have to repay it and everyone knew that money had to come from somewhere. Its owner, General Tire, was already known as a corporation that wasn't qualified to own broadcast facilities in the country (this was back when the FCC gave a damn about the character of the people who ran broadcast stations). Over the summer that number grew into the millions.

Every week, another story came out about the future of the RKO Radio Networks, given the collapsing finances of General. And I liked job security (which is why my decision to get into radio wasn't that bright to begin with). The stench of death was in the air constantly and I don't deal with that well, not being that optimistic a guy for one. Being a stupid 30-year-old with a new baby at home for another. 

When the layoffs start happening, Nagler called me into his office. I thought it was the end. "Are you worried about losing your job?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Don't be," he said.

Still, I sent resumes out. I wanted to go work at ABC News, but nothing developed. At the same time, I was working with people I admired tremendously. They were professional. They were fun. It looked easy for them. And I was out of my league.

A year later, just before 5 on a Friday night, a memo was circulated. We'd been sold to Dick Clark and the Transtar Radio Network, which distributed syndicated music specials. I, and a lot of other people, knew that they weren't interested in running a news operation (which was renamed the United Stations Radio Network).  they were interested in the satellite transponders RKO owned, and the affiliate lists.

In the spring of 1986, my father-in-law asked me to come back to the Berkshires to help start an FM station in a license battle the company was involved in. For two years, I'd heard some frustrated RKO anchors say, "I'd like to go back to run a small-market radio station," and given the opportunity now, it seemed like a no-brainer (it's the hardest thing in the broadcating business, I know now, but that's another story).

After I gave my notice, ABC News called and the news director said, "I just now saw your resume and I think we need to talk." But it was too late.

As it turned out, leaving New York has worked out well, and yet I regret I wasn't smart enough, good enough, or adult enough to be better at it.

A year or so later, we had a reunion on Long Island.  It was great fun to see everyone again. As we were leaving, Ross Klavan, an anchor I was saying goodbye to laughed at one point and said, "We were glad to see you go."

I laughed too, even if it was the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.

And even though he was right.

Our disappearing lives

Yesterday, Netflix announced that it will begin to offer a lower-priced package for people who would rather stream movies than get a DVD in the mail. It's big news in tech circles today and judging by the number of blogs I've read today, people are switching their plans without giving it a thought.

I, however, did.


Netflix's announcement has spawned another panic attack that my family's analog -- and now, digital -- history is disappearing in a hurry and I probably shouldn't put off saving it any longer. But save it... to what?
Over the weekend, I crawled into the space under the stairs to get the Christmas tree and decorations (the earliest I've ever done that so I'm not completely losing the non-procrastinator war) and stumbled across this:




It's a Super 8 mm movie projector, still apparently in good shape after 20+ years of no use. Inside was this treasure:




A take-up reel (this was once an "every day expression"), a rusty shoe horn (beats me, but I think I've used the projector more recently than the shoe horn) and the only roll of film I ever shot of my oldest son, on his first days home from the hospital more than 25 years ago.

What would you do now? That's exactly what I did.



Unless I get around to finding some place that will convert Super 8mm film to digital, that history is gone. Forever. When I was growing up, my parents had a huge drawer of these films, documenting the lives of me and my four brothers and sisters. As far as I know, that's all gone now, too.

My house is full of disappearing history. In closets and cabinets all over the house, there are VHS cassettes -- unindexed -- occupying space. I didn't shoot a lot of video of the kids -- I didn't want to be that guy -- but what little I shot is around here somewhere.



And if I ever find it, this is the last remaining VHS player in the house: the old TV.




Another one died a month or so ago and has left us permanently. When this one goes, all that VHS history probably goes too, unless I get around to transferring it to another media -- perhaps DVD. Underneath the TV is a DVD player we bought when VHS started to disappear.

This week, an old desktop PC which has most of my digital images started dying. Of all the important data that's on it, my first action was to save the pictures -- our history. I burned them all onto a DVD.
And that will work fine, until DVD players disappear too. That will probably happen in my house, because last month we bought this:



It's a home-entertainment system that connects to the Internet and allows us to stream video. No DVDs necessary. This is why Netflix did what it did yesterday. And this is why all the other media in the house is nearly obsolete.

I'm not recommending we go back to the old days. But as technology moves along at an ever-increasing pace, it makes it difficult for us to preserve our visual histories. Maybe today you'll upload your images to Picassa, or a blog, or Flickr, or Facebook, or leave them on your phone, not thinking that there's no guarantee Picassa, your blog, or Flickr, or Facebook, or your phone technology will be there 30 years from now, any more than there was a guarantee that my movie projector would work today. Maybe that doesn't matter to you now, but it'll matter in 30 years. Trust me on this.

Now here's the odd part: Of all the technology that exists and has existed to preserve our histories, this is still the one that seems to work the best over time in my house: a shoebox.



Beat that Netflix.

It was 25 years ago today

Today is my oldest son, Sean's, 25th birthday and just as I did on #21 and #23, I'm about to embarrass him again. Because I have an audience, Sean and Patrick get to have many of their secrets aired in public.

See this?

We had a lot of rocks in Sheffield, where we lived from the time Sean was six months old to the time he was 6. One day, he decided he would collect them, paint them, and sell them.

As with so many of the exploits of my children, I talked about this on the radio one day and when I went to get lunch at the local pizza joint, the owner said he wanted a couple of these well-painted rocks to "sell." So I delivered two of them, and gave Sean $1 each. If you're a parent, you know what this means: It means you're about to get a whole new crop of painted rocks, and a heightened expectation of riches.

I kept this one. I keep a lot of things from my kids' youth. I've got old hats they wore at baseball, old games, T-shirts and God knows what else. There isn't enough money in the world to pry this rock from my hands.

Like other parents, I look at all of these things and try to remember the kids that fit them. But I mostly can't. When Sean and his brother, Patrick, were very young, I remember holding them like footballs and thinking, "I've got to remember what this feeling is like." But while I remember doing it, I can't quite remember the moment. Few people can.

Our brains are not wired to be able to remember a snapshot like this. Our memories might be preserved but the feelings are not. As each one comes along, our brain rewrites the previous one until after 25 years, you have a composite feeling made of little pieces of 25 years. It's a good feeling -- a great feeling. But it's not the feeling of a singular moment.

On his 25th birthday, I want to believe that my oldest son had the best childhood a kid could have, that his memories of being the son of Bob and Carolie Collins are as joyful as his mother's and mine are, and that at 25, he realizes the great things that are still to come, and that they will be better than anything you can imagine.

Just like he is.