Incohe-RANTs From The Console

We are having a show this Thursday at 8PM US/Eastern. No false alarm there. Meanwhile, along the Jersey Shore, a story of a test warning that went a bit farther than needed.  " Two New Jersey Police Departments Issue False Tsunami Warnings" PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Two New Jersey police departments startled residents with a false tsunami warning. Harvey Cedars Police Department tweeted on Monday afternoon that a tsunami warning would be in effect until 2:06 p.m. -- More at CBS Philly (Channel 3) Longtime listeners to BSR may remember similarities to the story of the Emergency Broadcast System scare of 1971 . See you Thursday! Illya

The first broadcast of BSR was during the week of July 25, 2005.  In looking through some old station materials and history, it appears that it has been 3 years, 8 months, 10 days since the last broadcast. That broadcast was held at Intervention 6 in Rockville, Maryland . I had already been on hiatus for some period of time, but I was asked to return to Intervention. The station and the listeners had some wonderful parties, and some memorable radio during Intervention's run. It was, as a recall, a pretty good show. Then again, almost all of them were... I had let myself forget that under the weight of Real Life(tm).  44 months is a long time to be away. It is time to break loose a bit, poke fun at the serious, and remember not to take much seriously. BSR is back. SAY IT LOUD! WE ARE BACK BABY (ribs)! The plan is to return to a regularly scheduled show, add some improved technology, more awful music, lots of incoherent (incohe-rant) talk, and all the weirdness t...

Good day! Tomorrow at 8PM US/Eastern time is our first show of the new season. Here are a few reminders on things you should consider doing in preparation to enjoy the show. The primary place for station news, schedules and information is the website  http://bomb.shelter.radio.am/ and the blog  https://bsr-rants.blogspot.com/ . During the show our listeners, DJs, and station administration folks gather in a "chat room" on slack. Join us on slack at https://bombshelterradio.slack.com/ . If you need at invite to the slack instance, click here . Make sure you have a music client that can read an Icecast mp3 stream (M3U filetype). The VLC Media Player is an excellent choice if you don't already have something installed. The server is located at  http://bombshelternewsroom.com:8000/ . WinAmp and iTunes also work well.  We play the game Cthulhu Dice in the slack instance during most broadcasts. You can find the rules on the...

Ivory/Black Cthulhu Dice available from Steve Jackson Games ($5.00) Order from Warehouse 23 (This is not a paid ad, we just like the game) One of the staples of Bomb Shelter Radio is a slack channel (Have you joined the slack channel yet?) game of the Steve Jackson Games dice game Cthulhu Dice. Cthulhu dice is a simple game where each turn an Attacker (Caster) attempts to steal sanity from a target (Victim). Then the Victim gets an opportunity to steal it back.  Meanwhile, Cthulhu sits in the middle of this collecting sanity from everyone. The game starts with everyone having three sanity, and ends when only one person is sane... Or Cthulhu has taken the sanity from all. There is no truth to the rumor that the DJ prefers the "Everyone goes insane, Cthulhu WINS!" result. We play this in channel by gathering a number of players, those players rotate through being the Caster and pick whichever other player as their Victim. DJ Illya rolls the dice (I don...

It is an oft repeated quote at Bomb Shelter Radio, "Without our listeners, we are nothing." It is easy enough to interpret that as "Thanks for listening, otherwise there would be no reason to do the show." While that is a true statement, there is a lot more to it. Over the years our listeners have contributed to the health of the station in many ways. Some have made bumps, short and often humorous sound clips that introduce the show. Others have provided music, technical help, graphics, advice, and made our chat room a fun and eclectic place to hang out. BTW, have you joined our slack channel yet? You can find an invite at http://bomb.shelter.radio.am/ So, lets talk about the website for a bit. As our listeners know, I am no artist when it comes to web design. I grew up in the pre-CSS era, I hand coded HTML, and frankly those skilz run pretty deep in the cranium and probably couldn't be derailed without high explosives. So, when it came time to stand up the ...

Tried using the Android client to do a post at lunch. I won't make that mistake again. A story about Security folks doing their best in an environment that isn't supporting them. Hug a Security goon today, and if you are at Coachella, buy them a sammich and a bottle of aqua. https://www.thedailybeast.com/coachella-security-guards-allege-inhumane-treatment-people-over-here-are-starving In other news, I made Easter Eggs for Mrs. Illya.

Sesame Street and two hot HBO properties put together some amusing mashups about respecting each other. -- Jennifer Maas on Y! One article had probably the best quote I've seen so far... "Mark my words, Elmo will end up on the Iron Throne" -- Karen Han on MSN Entertainment You can check out the mashups on the link above. I look forward to seeing Cookie Monster next to Felix and Sylvester during Westworld Season 3.

A couple of TWC related stories, for those of you who aren't interested in the Mueller report... "The Weather Channel, sadly, has been the victim of a malicious software attack today," said anchor Jim Cantore. --  The Weather Channel knocked off air by 'malicious software attack' CNN Business As if there isn't enough to worry about with glaciers melting and releasing trapped greenhouse gases and long-dead viruses, now it turns out the world's glaciers are storing tons of radioactive nuclear fallout that could prove troublesome as they continue to melt. --  World's Glaciers Are Storing Radioactive Nuclear Fallout. Should We Be Worried? The Weather Channel

So, in about seven days BSR will be back on the air. For some folks, connecting to BSR will be old hat. The server is in the same location it was during our last million broadcasts, and they already have a streaming application they are familiar with. For others, this may be a new experience (and if so, welcome aboard!) or they need a refresher. Rather than try a one size fits all tutorial just yet, I figured I would start with some basic questions. What listening tool would you like to use? (e.g. iTunes) What operating system are you on? (e.g. Windows) This will help us develop a few tutorials to get folks started. Please let us know in the comments. And now, your moment of zen… https://twitter.com/VirginAustralia/status/1118760531618172928 Cheers, Illya PS: In theory this should post automatically to the slack channel as well. It is interesting to see the difference between a tool that encourages collaboration (slack), and one that is a closed system (f...

Facebook, can't live with it... can't live without it... can't deploy chemical weapons... So, we have two Facebook groups for BSR. This has been true for quite a while, and I've forgotten how that came to be. At some point I renamed them with an "A" and "B" prefix so I could remember to post to both of them. One of the staph suggested it was time to consolidate them. So I started sprucing up the larger of the two lists (A) and asked folks on the other list (B) to move over. Our FB home going forward is at https://www.facebook.com/groups/bombshelterradio/ FB has a huge raft of issues, and frankly BSR is only there because it does help us get the word out. However, never fear... BSR will continue to pick on FB at every amusing opportunity. Cheers, Illya

I just finished mixing the new opening for the show. This required me to find new mixing software, teach myself how to hack through it, find some text to speech software with the right feature set, pick some decent background music, and probably most important find my motivation and/or my muse. Probably 12 hours work for about 3 minutes of finished audio. I was so happy I screamed at the top of my lungs "I DID IT!" when I finished. This confused Mrs. Illya, and I should note she puts up with quite a bit of nonsense from me. I then bombed a friend of the show and... shh... a new staph member with the finished product. Now that I have ruined everyone's data plan for the month, I could use a snack. Seriously, the completion of this step makes it feels like that BSR is really back in business. Now where did I put the damn music library??? Finally, a couple of articles of recent interest: American Museum of Natural History learns to ask who is being honored before ...

The show opening has been an amalgamation of oddly sequenced sound clips usually tied to an instrumental backing track. The new opening promises... MORE OF THE SAME! Nothing is ready to publish yet, but I'll give you a few tidbits. The backing track is from Tron: Legacy, and clips include bits from Apocalypse Now, Charade, Anchorman, and Goldeneye.. I haven't updated the website, but we are shooting for our first broadcast on... <DRUM ROLL> Thursday April 25th at 8PM US/Eastern (UTC-4) I hope you will join us. --Illya

While I have been lucky enough to be in Paris a couple of times, I've only seen Notre Dame from the outside. Rough guess is the last time I was in Paris was October 1993 during Interop Paris '93. That was a rough trip, by the end I was so homesick I broke into tears at the top of the Eiffel Tower when I faced towards the United States. You might ask, "how the heck did you not see..." The answer is simple, I was there for work. Almost all of the international travel I've done was for work. When you are working, you only find small snippets of time to see things. I don't think people who have never travelled extensively for business understand that. Right now we watch and we wait. We hope there has been no loss of life, we hope that enough of the iconic structure survives for the religious and the secular, and we for a brief moment will share a good thought from our country to another county suffering a loss. We should hold onto that moment, we are all hum...

This looks like a great chair. A great chair that would never be allowed in the average American office... https://odditymall.com/lay-flat-office-chair-for-naps

We are still hammering out the details, but we will be using Slack to provide the chat capability for BSR. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which was the Chat system for WKOL and BSR since their founding in 2005, was shut down in 2017. As an open source developer on the TiK AIM client, I have fond memories of the AIM system and I continue to miss it. --Illya

A collection of quotes from a Major League, which is a favorite of mine... https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/04/10-quotes-major-league/ Like a few really good sports films, this isn't about sports... I'm not a huge sports nut, but this made me laugh quite a bit and provided some insight into the madness of life. Another great one in the same vein is The Replacements. I suggest you check them out, even if you have seen them before. We could all use a good laugh, and some insight, given the madness of life right now. --Illya

Decided to start working with Amazon Web Services to handle the BSR website. There is a teaser posted here on AWS. It will be pointed to by bomb.shelter.radio.am and www.bomb.shelter.radio.am as soon as DNS refreshes. I was going to host the server at the Bomb Shelter, but my ISP keeps messing up my firewall settings on their firewall. In other news, we have been running tests with the new console software and hardware (we will continue to use the Newsroom server hosted by CT7). It looks like MIXX running on a Surface Pro 3 with Windows 10 will replace the former console, which was Nicecast on Mac OS X. I've got nothing against the previous toolset, we had a lot of great shows with that console. But frankly, Apple has priced themselves out of my market. Our first show will be in April 2019. Small steps, but still steps...