Sebastian Payne

It has been three weeks since I last put a post out so, it is time for an update. With my return to Durham, my Facebook usage has increased while my Radio Nowhere postings have decreased. There is a link here - it never surprises me how vital Facebook is to daily life at Durham. My return at the end of April also saw me become the official Station Manager of Purple Radio. The first two weeks of broadcasting have been fantastic, stressful, exciting and worrying all at the same time. Some of the issues have included a broken compressor, a broken swivel chair, a broken studio monitor and an air-con machine blowing out hot air. Continuing to study and run the station is a major task of balance and will take a while for adjustment. Next year when my work load increases for Computer Science will bring extra challenges too.

On the other hand, some things have been excellent. The new exec team have really pulled their weight and everyone has done everything expected of them so far. Our new posters have arrived and feature everywhere in Durham - pubs, student bars, colleges, shops and random university buildings. To accompany these, two 8ft banners were ordered in the first week and arrived just a few days ago. After several emails with Estates and Buildings, they are up at the University Library and Dunelm House.

This Sunday will bring us the biggest thing the station has ever done - the Student Radio Chart Show. Several student stations around the country are taking their turn to host the show and 11th May is the turn of Purple Radio. Both the new and old exec have been working very hard to make this a memorable occasion for the station. If you want to hear the best of student radio and latest music, remember to tune in this Sunday at 3:00pm to www.purpleradio.co.uk. Fingers crossed for no technical problems, or personelle ones for that matter.

When I arrived back at Durham from the Christmas break, this was what the Purple Radio office looked like

A horrendous state of old servers, old Sun workstations, boxes, cables, CRT monitors and general computing rubbish. Most visitors would comment 'was this a radio station or an IT lab' - I have wondered this myself. Slowly over Epiphany term, the situation has improved by binning lots of rubbish, cannibalising computers to get the useful bits out and seeing what isn't needed. On the last few days of term, Jake and Graham from the IT & Systems team went in with myself for a big dumping session. My uncle and I then took 12 old systems, two G3 iMacs and a laser printer to the local dump 'household waste recycling centre' and things were looking much better. All of these systems were either beyond repair or too old to be any use to anyone. Recycling them would have been better but no one was interested in them.

Over the holidays, I have been buying posters and tomorrow, I'm traveling back to start decorating with the help of some friends. Instead of the light blue, we are going magnolia with should brighten up the place and look cleaner. Expect some more photos soon of a much friendlier office (with a kettle and toaster to boot!). On another note, if anyone has any old equipment they don't need, please let me know as we may be able to use it. Monitors (flat screens), servers, desktops, RAM - anything really can be useful.

Yesterday was Sunday, which meant a visit down to Purple Radio to fix a few things, including our webcam and the chart vote areas of the site. We have to exist on barely-working equipment. Server-wise, it's mainly old Sun boxes with Solaris 10 (still a mystical beast to me). As well as a general desktop for general use, each person on the IT & Systems team has their own box. With various machines lying around the office, we decided to go through them all to find the useless ones, the ones that didn't work and the ones that might have usable stuff.

My workstation their had died so I was looking for something I could use. The best one found was a Dell 700Mhz Pentium III desktop with 256mb of RAM. Ubuntu won't run terribly well on this but some more memory may help. All I need it for is web browsing, music playing and terminal access to the variety of servers. If Ubuntu works, I may leave it but I've spotted a good PowerMac G4 733Mhz locally on eBay for less than £60.00! Putting 10.4 or even 10.5 on here would make a nicer environment than Ubuntu can provide. If you are interested in the stuff we have a Purple, check out a tour of our studios on Flickr.