Judging’s Not For Me

Right now, I would like to take a nap. My whole body is bloated. I wish I had some Alka Seltzer

I did a live shot on-the-air this evening. That’s become more of a rarity as my boss strives to separate ‘Fun Geoff’ from ‘Weather Geoff’.

PIC-0088This was the annual “Taste of the Nation,” which benefits the Connecticut Food Bank and other charitable endeavors. It all took place at the Omni Hotel at Yale, in Downtown New Haven.

The live hits were fun, for a variety of reasons. First, I enjoy having the opportunity to play around a little while on-camera. Second, I tried to solve a techno challenge and succeeded.

Until now, there was no way to control my weather equipment from the field. I’d cue the director, who would cue the floor manager, who would push my weather graphics button. Often, there was missed communication, which took me out of sync with what was on the screen.

This evening, I brought in a laptop, connected using the venue’s wireless Internet cloud, and used logmein.com to bring my weather computer’s screen and controls to the laptop in the field. Though it won’t show me the actual high-res graphic I’m displaying on the air, every other part of the system’s back end was there.

This was a huge burden off my shoulders. It worked perfectly.

PIC-0090After the news, I assumed my second job of the evening – judging the food. I had been volunteered for the job. Who knew how difficult judging is?

I’m not talking about the qualitative judgement. That’s not the tough part of judging. The tough part is the shear quantity of restaurants and food. I had to sample some of everything!

Right now, I would like to take a nap. My whole body is bloated. I wish I had some Alka Seltzer.

I guess I’m the wrong guy to recommend for Iron Chef.

7 thoughts on “Judging’s Not For Me”

  1. I should do a full entry about this site. For those first hearing about it, http://www.logmein.com allows two computers to run as one as far as keyboard, monitor and mouse are concerned.

    There are some things it won’t do, but for most applications, they are peripheral.

    I know this seems like a little thing, but for what I wanted to do, it’s huge. Just having positive control over the graphics computer from the field, as opposed to cuing someone back in the studio, removes 90% of the chances for screw-ups.

  2. Geoff,

    Why not have your IT guys set up a VPN, and use VNC or something of the like to accomplish the same task?

    As an IT Security professional, sites like logmein.com and gotomypc make me nervous. You’re allowing a 3rd party potential unfettered access to your corporate network. Even assuming nobody is going to be malicious, what if they have a mixup in accounts, and someone else gets your login by mistake? Bad News.

  3. If these others make you nervous.

    ShowMyPC help you use your own middle desktop sharing server, it uses the standard VNC and SSH mechanism, but the cool part is you making your own network. You can still use their servers.

    More here…

    ShowMyPC.com

  4. I’m working here at LogMeIn and my colleague came across this post.

    Heem, to address your concern, we require Windows authentication in addition to a LogMeIn password so we cannot compromise your access credentials. We have even had people contact us because they forgot their Windows password and there was nothing we can do to help in that case.

    Excellent story, Thanks Geoff! We appreciate the spreading of the good word.

    Best regards,

    Steve

    sdupree at logmein dot com

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