Women in AV (and everywhere else)

"Daddy, do any girls work with you," -- Chloe, age 5 on the eve of Take Your Children to Work day (see  earlier blog post)

I work, as you know, in the wonderful world of commercial AV, spreading the joys of audio-visual technology throughout the land. I've worked for two different integrators, worked for scores of clients including Fortune 100 companies with their own internal AV support staff.

Of team with whom I currently work?
Installation technicians - all male.
Service technicians - all male
Project engineers - all male.
Design engineers and sales engineers - all male.
Programmers - all male.
Project specialists (testing and verification technicians) - all male.
CAD technician - female.

That's right. Of the twentysome people in various technical positions in our local office, there is exactly one female in a technical role.

Scenes from a day of AV Training

Lest you think this a local problem in the past six months alone I've taken part in vendor training from Biamp, ClearOne, Extron, Crestron, AVI-SPL's in-house AV Project Management training, Crestron again, and Meyer sound. Those training classes alone represent contact with somewhere between a hundred and a hundred fifty of my fellow AV professionals.

Of those, exactly one was a woman.

At Extron Training - this was the highest female/male ratio of
any training I attended this year

Why do I see this as a problem? The quote with which I lead is the first hint; inequalities like this create a self-perpetuating division between "women's jobs" and "men's jobs". Your psychologist, your kids' schoolteachers, and the receptionist in the last office you visited are probably women. Your car mechanic, your computer programmer and, yes, your AV technician are probably men. This drives young people to specific industries by an idea of where they'd "fit in" and what's "appropriate" for them rather than what their natural talents and interests would lead them; if you're a young man and all of the psychologists you encounter are women, then it's hard for "psychologist" to be an aspirational position for you. If you're a young women and all of the technical people you encounter are men, it becomes a role in which it's harder to see yourself. If you're a teacher and have a promising young female student, she likely doesn't look like a potential engineer to you, even if you never consciously recognize this bias.

The second problem is one for the industry; we rob ourselves of half the potential talent available by closing the door to half the population. This is a truism for all industries; greater diversity of candidates breeds greater diversity of viewpoints and, in the long term, better results.

So what do do about it? The good news is that the culture is changing, from greater acceptance to less of a "boys' club" atmosphere.  For example, most AV professionals today are reluctant to use sexually suggestive test media when commissioning a system. It is worth noting that at least two of AVI-SPL's local offices are being run by women. I'm very proud that the Women in AV group (an industry group of some very talented and successful people working towards mentoring and promotion of women in the industry) chose one of our account managers (Alexis LaBroi from the Atlanta office) for their inaugural mentoring award. Having women not only in leadership positions in the industry but using those positions to help others follow in their footsteps is one step towards a more inclusive industry. It's the slow, organic way to grow.

Are there wider, better solutions possible? That's very hard for  me to say. I suspect it would take an overall change in how we look at men and women for the AV industry - or any technology industry - to become truly gender blind. It's still an ideal worth fighting for and one towards which we're currently - albeit it slowly - working.

Blog Hop: the penultimate installment of Riley's Story

For those who just joined, this is my last contribution to a collaborative pass-the-story game with Carrie Sorenstein and Nicole Pyles. Carrie stared it off a month ago now, and we're now up to the fifth and final installment.

If you need a reminder, we started here:

Riley's Story, Part one at Chasing Revery (Carrie K Sorensen)
Part 2 - Fate Calls at World of My Imagination (Nicole Pyles)
Part 3 - The Hands of Fate. Right here, by me!
Part 4 - Unexpected Fate at Chasing Revery



"Abandoned Fate"

Saturday morning and I needed a break. From Fate and Kate and all this. It had started off as a lark, but what if it was real? Like I told Kate, I knew some of their stories. Not much of it, but enough to know one thing. You can't cheat fate. The storybooks - and maybe the history books - are littered with the broken fragments of people who thought they could. The problem is I didn't know what Fate wanted. Or what I wanted. For the fifteenth or twentieth or hundredth time I shuffled through the stack instructions torn off Fate's notebook. For the fifteenth or twentieth or hundredth time they made no damn sense to me. What does Fate even need an assistant for? I was jolted from my study by the sudden and unexpected ringing of the doorbell.

It was Caleb, and he  had that look. The one where the muscles on his face tighten up just a bit, like he's about to cry or hit someone. The first time I'd seen that look I'd asked what was wrong, got nothing but an angry glare and a defiantly muttered "nothing". So, I learned. The look means he doesn't want to talk. Not about anything real. Not that he ever does.

"Hey Riley. I was around. Thought I'd join you, maybe play X-box, maybe a beer?" The last hopefully, almost a question.

I stepped back to let him in. "uh...sure. My folks're out and..." he brushed past me, up the stairs.
  
It went the way I'd expect. Caleb sitting next to me at the edge of the bed, leaning toward the TV, the game controller tightly clenched between to fists, grimly slaughtering virtual legions of space marines, soldiers, aliens. He'd leave a half-finished beer sitting on the side-table half forgotten, then suddenly grab it and take a deep pull.

Something else was wrong. He smelled. Caleb's never been the most impeccably groomed kid, but this was something different than usual - a faint but definite body odor, as if he'd gone a day or more without showering. I glanced sidelong at him, saw the tightness in his jaw and neck, then turned back to the TV,  content with the companionable silence of gunfire and explosions for the time being. I was sure he'd open up eventually. It's fate, right?

The buzz of my phone jolted me out of the game-trance. Caleb flinched away from me as he felt the phone buzz, dropped his game controller to the floor. I didn't have to look. I knew who it was.

Caleb knew too. He dropped the controller to the floor, stood up with a quick, jerky movement. "That job again." He looked me in the eye for about a half second, then looked out the door. " I guess I'll go."

I got up, took the phone out of my pocket. The same no-number number as always. I took a deep breath, silenced the phone and tossed it back onto the bed. "No. I ... I deserve a day off." I grabbed his empty beer bottle. "Lemme get you a another."

Caleb nodded, sank back down to the bed. He muttered something under his breath that might have been "thanks". I trekked down to the kitchen, grabbed a couple of beers, carried them back slowly, willing the muscles in my gut to unclench. I'd just abandoned Fate, but if felt like the right thing to do. I hoped it wouldn't end badly.

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This has been an interesting experience. The story didn't take the shape I expected from the beginning, nor did any succeeding chapter follow the previous in the way I expected - and that includes mine! My favorite part thus far was Carrie's opening chapter, and I clearly circled back there in an attempt to draw Caleb back into the story. None of this is what I would have written on my own, but I think we got something interesting out of the endeavor and am very glad to have taken part.  Next week Nicole Pyles will close it out. Stay tuned!

Digital Media Certifcation

For those who just joined us here  - or who have been here from the first but forgot - I'm currently on a journey from an AV Project Manager role to an AV Project Engineer role. De facto, I'm almost exclusively doing PE work, but before I get to change the  title on my business card I need to collect all of AVI-SPL's official requirements. Along the way, I'm picking up the skills and knowledge to better be able to handle the work.

This week I finished another step - Crestron's three-day Digital Media Certified Engineer training class.This was sometimes interesting, sometimes humbling, and an excellent addition to my AV education.
Digital Media was introduced seven years ago (it doesn't seem like that long!) when digital video was still primarily associated with consumer applications. The idea was that you could take various video formats (S-Video, VGA, composite video, HDMI), convert them to a digital signal and send them over a single cable to your display. The original solution (which we now call "DM Copper" to distinguish from newer versions) included transmitters at source locations, switches, and receivers at the destination. All of these were connected with Crestron's proprietary Digital Media cable. This cable,  about the diameter of a garden hose, contains three individually jacketed cables - an 8 conductor UTP which looks just like a Cat5, an 8 conductor STP (this carries everything but audio and video) with a rigid spline down the center to separate the pairs (this carries audio and video), and a 4-conductor control cable for communication and power of the transmitters and receivers. Since then, they've added "DM 8G" which uses a single shielded twisted pair (regular Cat5e or 6 works), as well as multimode fiber solutions. It's an important technology to be comfortable with, as Crestron has recently sold their 50,000th DM switch, and shows no signs of slowing down.

What was the DMC-E class like? It's a combination of Creston's other two DM classes - DMC-D (Designer) and DMC-T (Technician). The goal was that, at the end of three days, I'd be able to lay out a DM system, put it together (including cable terminations), test and commission it. It was quite a bit to pack in to three days!


We started with the "D" part, reviewing the alphabet soup that goes with digital video - HDMI, HDCP, EDID, CEC, TMDS, and even a brief mention of SDI. It's all stuff that I mostly have by now, but did add a couple of details about, for example, exactly how CEC works and how we could use it in the unlikely case that we found a reason to do so. For those who don't know, CEC is an absurdly slow control protocol embedded in HDMI video. The idea is that any bit of equipment can trade control signals with any other. So, if you turn on your Sony Blu-ray player, it can automatically switch on your Panasonic TV and flip it to the right input. The problem is that many manufacturers don't want to make it too easy to use competitors' gear, so they use their own proprietary codes as part of the "extended" command set. In the commercial world, of course, we just turn these things off.

Day 1 ended with a fairly detailed review of the capabilities and limitations (most frustrating limitation - that DM systems only support USB 1.0, while many interactive touchscreens require USB 2.x. There seem to be no plans to improve upon this) available digital media hardware, some applications exercises, and a test. This was a fairly easy day for me, and relatively fun.
Day 2 covered the "T" part of the certification. This was, for me, the humbling part. In my project manager role, I'd become often handed a drawing set to a team of technicians and taken for granted that they'd fly through it, quickly and accurately terminating and connecting all manner of cables. While I can put together a standard or even shielded RJ45 connector if given enough time, the multi part DM connectors quite honestly gave me fits. I'd not wrap enough braid around the inner jacket and leave the cable loose. Or leave the conductors too long so the strain relief didn't grip the outer jacket. Or just plain wear out the little teeth inside the connector from having to open and close it too many times after putting one pair in backwards. I'm sure that if I did this kind of work every day I'd get better at it. I also know that after a half day of working on one connector, I discovered new respect for the people who do it everyday and can even manage more than one termination per hour. Frustration notwithstanding, I did manage to head home at the end of Day 2 leaving working DM Copper and 8G cables behind.

We also got to try our hands at a fiber terminations, which was half safety lesson and half actual work. Fiber safety is pretty simple; it's made of glass. You don't want to eat glass, you don't want glass in your eyes, and you don't want glass splinters. So wear goggles, don't eat where you're working on fiber, and if you break a piece off clean it up and throw it away. Putting the connector on a fiber-optic cable is a step-by-step process that feels as if it should be happening in a laboratory. Mark it with the measuring card, strip the outer jacket, strip the inner jacket, wipe clean, cleave with the cleaving tool, realize that you forgot to put the little boot over the cable, swear at yourself while you try to carefully slide it past the now naked fiber without breaking it, slip the end into the connector, screw it together.

Day 3 was the putting it together and testing day - back to my comfort zone. We hooked up all those cables we made to a DM switcher, transmitters, receivers, controller, and a couple of monitors and then got to play with it. I must confess that it did take some of the sting out of the ours toiling over connectors to get to hook them up and see them work.  The theory is fine, but there really is nothing to compare with actually logging into a system and seeing just what you can make it do to confirm that you actually have learned something.
At the end of the day we took a test, showed the instructor that we got our system to work, and got our official certificates. And that is our technology post for this week. Tune in next week for the penultimate installment of the blog-hopping "Riley's Story" .

Ink, Pixels, and Roses

This weekend was a digital vacation for me. No email, no social media, no blogging, not even any writing!

Why?

Because I had the pleasure of spending the weekend away, with my lovely bride Karine, at a Bed and Breakfast in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania on the occasion of our tenth wedding anniversary.

May 19, 2012

 We stayed in a neat little bed and breakfast, did a farmhouse tour, checked out the wonderful quilts and other local crafts, snacked on ice-cream produced at a local dairy farm/creamery (this was some of the richest ice cream I've ever eaten), and mostly just enjoyed the adventure of exploring the country roads running  between farms. Our lovely kids were dropped off with family, leaving the time for just the two of us.

May 19, 2002

More things have changed in the past decade then can fit here, but if the past years lead to nothing more than a trip home from a relaxing and romantic week off, with two patient children back in the car and another set of happy memories in our minds ... well, it's been a good ten years.

To my love, Happy Anniversary.

To the rest of you, later this week we return to our regularly scheduled blog.

Blog Hop time! Riley's Story - Part the Third

Time to shake off the pixels and dig back into the virtual ink-bottle for some collaborative writing. I'm a couple of days late on this one; life was too busy to do a credible job with it last week, and this past weekend was a "digital vacation" for me.

• Part the First at Carrie K Sorensen's Chasing Revery
• Part the Second from Nicole Pyles at The World of My Imagination

Now, let's rejoin our hero Riley, and see what Fate has in store for him.

"Riley's Story, Part Three. The Hands of Fate"

At least the job was interesting in my mind. I'd once read a book about spycraft, and this felt exactly what like that. Not  the James Bond car chase and gunfight kind of spycraft. Not even the Jack Ryan NSA analyst genius behind the action kind of spycraft. No, this was the invisible kind. A puzzle made up of a million tiny random acts, painting some big picture seen only by Fate.


Like my first assignment on that very first day, when he'd spoken my name and that damn lie about Caleb. I was still leaning towards the door, wishing I'd left before he nailed me into the room like some kind of taxidermied butterfly with his cheap "I know your name" parlor trick. Was it a trick? Knowing our names was one thing, but that other stuff he said... well, I  just wasn't quite ready yet for some secrets to be out. So I stayed. Besides, it would be an adventure. He turned back to his notebook - one of those marble composition things they make you buy for first grade - and ripped out a page. The tearing paper sounded like thunder in the small office, and it felt shocking. If this was Fate's own notebook, should it be torn?

The paper was just ordinary, torn a bit unevenly with the corner missing. It was filled with numbers and letters written in a spidery, cramped hand,  what looked like astrological symbols and, in the middle, a few recognizable words,

"Bob Linton. 3PM, Hicksville Station, east end of platform. Brown sportcoat, black loafers. Say hello."

I looked from the paper to the strange man - I still wasn't ready to call him Fate - and back again, "Is this some kind of joke? Say "hello"? What kind of job is this?"

He turned back to his notebook, started scribbling something as he answered. It's the same way a teacher will kind of sort of answer your questions while starting to grade papers or something. The message was clear: he was done with me. "You're my assistant. Some people need a nudge. Just a tiny one. Maybe hearing his name when he isn't expecting it will change his mind about something he was going to do today." He looked up at me for just a moment. "It changed your mind, didn't it?" He broke eye contact, looked back down at his papers. I stared at the slightly uneven part in his sandy hair as he talked to the desk, not to me. "And Riley, this is the last time you get an explanation." he glanced up, his lips curled into the barest hint of a smile. "You'll have to put yourself in my hands."


The assignments were all like that, more or less. Packages delivered at odd hours or simply left on a bench in the park.  "Accidentally" bumping into someone on their way off of a bus and apologizing to them by name.  Knock over someone's trashcan. Ride my bike across their lawn, tearing up the grass a bit. Dropping off a letter or spilling water on one,  dissolving words of love or sorrow or anger into a blur of ink and pulp. Whenever I had a letter to destroy, I'd always hope it was words of anger. It must have been. How could it be Fate to erase words of true love?

The trip to Fate's office grew familiar, but each little job added to the mystery. How did he know where so many people would be, what they'd need to see? What, really, were these little nudges accomplishing? Even the pay was weird. He'd give me an envelope containing eighty-seven dollars and forty-one cents cash every other week; one twenty dollar bill, one ten, one five, a single, all the way down to one penny. There was even one of those dollar coins in there. I saved the fifties and spent the rest, except the dollar coins. Those seemed special enough that I tucked them into a drawer along with his notes. Yes, I kept every note. Eventually I'd be glad I did.


Fate never mentioned a deadline, or even a rush, but it just felt wrong to keep Fate waiting. So I'd push, standing on the pedals, sucking the kind of dry sharp air that cuts up the inside of your throat and makes you want to puke It was worth hurrying. This is, after all, Fate.  Finally, I'd lean my bike against the wall of the office complex, force myself to walk not run to his door, willing my heart to slow down just enough for him to not see me sweating. "It's just a job", I'd tell myself. "He's just your boss. Not even that cute."

It never worked.

Today's assignment started like any other. The paper this time was from a spiral notebook, cheap and wide-ruled. He didn't look up, didn't acknowledge that anything about this one was different. I read the note twice before folding it twice and slipping it into my pocket, not realizing how the arrangement - and my life - was about to change.


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Nicole will pick this one up from where I left it. I have definite ideas to some of the unanswered questions (including the one Carrie asked about whether Riley is a boy or a girl) and gave some hints leaning in the direction I see, and am quite curious to see where my two collaborators take it.

Next time I get a turn I'll write it more quickly; this was, again, a special week.

Hello Project Management Academy. Fare-well Project Management!

This past week I've been away from the office (and home, and the blog) for AVI-SPL's in-house "Project Management Academy". Along with Tech 2 Academy, Tech 3 Academy, and Sales Academy it's a part of our training and  consistent standards to our team. It is also a requirement for my new position as a Project Engineer. So, ironically, I had to take Project Management Academy to leave my current position in Project Management!

Project Management, as defined by the Project Management Institute, is the application of knowledge, tools, and skills towards the completion of a project (which in turn is described as a temporary endeavor to provide a unique product or service. Ongoing or recurring work is, generally speaking, not a project). AV project management generally involves the design, installation, and testing of integrated audio-video systems.
What happens in a week of AV project management training? It starts with a brief technical review, including information about not only AV wiring connectors and standards, but also touching on construction, reading architectural drawings, and types of hardware. After two days of that (plus a test!) we moved on to project management principles. Most of these (ie managing the classic "triple constraint" of quality-cost-schedule) were somewhat familiar to me, but it was valuable to put it in a standardized framework which we can all use together.

A page of notes on structural things

Some of the best parts of the class were tangential to the formal instruction. Not only did meeting my  peers give me a good feeling of the commonality of our work together - we share many of the same struggles, feel the same excitement at overcoming a technical challenge,  and all love technology - but in reminding us what a genuinely broad and deep talent base AVI-SPL has. No matter what challenge a lesson would bring to mind, be it a technical issue, relationship with a tough subcontractor, or a resource issue, There was always someone in the group who had not only met that challenge but found a solution. Someone, for example, mentioned a serious vibration issue with a projector. We had more than one engineer who knew that the right solution, as shown my notes, would be a spring-isolation system uniquely engineered for the given size and weight of the projector. Do I know enough to perform the calculations to create this kind of solution? No, but I do know what it looks like and, better yet, who to ask for help if the problem comes up for me. The week was filled with delightful surprises like that, and reminders that if we need anything from a set of 3D Revit drawings to audio programming to network engineering to structural design of a rigging system,  we not only have people for that, but we very often have experts. It was one of those "proud to be part of the team" moments.

Was it a positive takeaway to know that when I finish my last couple of projects I'll be running the post-mortem meeting with the same form everyone else is using, or to know exactly what to expect from an engineering perspective when I'm called  on to participate in a project kickoff meeting for another PM?
Absolutely. I took this class because it was a requirement, but at the end I felt that it was a week very well spent. It was, as our instructor said, "more fun than fighting a wildcat in a phone booth".

May I? Day 5 - The Girl who Loved Film

My usual process is to write during my commute, post when I get to a wifi hotspot. This means that weekends are ironically the least likely time for me to post, as I like to have the day with my family and need to have it with chores.

This one I'm writing on an airplane, en route to Dallas for some training. More on that later this week. For now, we'll pick up the next daily-ish writing exercise, another of the "May I?" photoprompts from over at G+. This is a core conceit that I very much like; it might be one of the daily flashes which grows into something more. Yesterday's writing accomplishment - sending "The Witch of Suburbia" out in search of a home - grew directly from a flash piece I wrote from one of these. Very little of my original prose remained, and I moved it from third-person to second-person, but it kept the idea and some of the tone of the original.  I'm not yet sure where this one will go if I carry it forward, but it might be fun to see.


"The Girl Who Loved Film"

On her first date with Zach, Jane brought an old, battered film camera. She wished she'd been born decades earlier, when photographs were something one took with a camera. Carefully and mindfully, followed by a patient wait for negatives, slides, prints. She'd set it at the table, gently touched it as she sipped her drink.
"Nobody even uses a camera anymore. They use phones or even iPads. And they don't take photograps. They take pictures."
Zach looked from the camera up to her eyes, his gaze lingering for just a half-beat  "What's the difference?"
"A photograph is a thing, an artifact, a unique work of art. The alchemy of the darkroom, double exposures, the enlarger lit or a heartbeat too long. It's magic in a way that a digital photo is not."
He grunted an assent through a mouthful of eggroll, discretely checking that his cameraphone was safely hidden in his pants pocket. If he knew one thing, he knew that if you wanted to get anywhere, you needed to humor your date. Besides, the craziest ones were often the kinkiest.
He'd later learn that she wasn't especially kinky, but was an agreeable lover with a soft, pleasant body. Her one quirk was, predictably, her damn cameras. She watched him undress through the viewfinder of an old SLR, playfully snapped shots of him with a refurbished polaroid, even photographed herself nude in the mirror, barely concious of his body pressed behind her, his hardness against her soft curves, one arm reaching across her body to cup a breast. He was barely aware of the camera. She smelled faintly of chemicals. Always.
At last she lead him, still naked, to her darkroom.  She gave him a moment to memorize the locations of shallow pans of developer and fixer, sealed cannisters of film, the remaining arcane tools of the photographer's trade. She turned off the lights, cloaking them in deeper darkness than he could remember; no illuminated clock, no streetlight spilling in through a window, no nightlight, nothing. Now she moved behind him, fingertips tracing his flank down to his hip, erect nipples scraping erotically against his back. She whispered, "don't you love this? Isn't it so much more real than digital?"
He whispered back a breathy yes, whether to the question or her touch unclear. To speak outloud seemed wrong, almost blasphemous. In the darkness, he became hyperaware of her touch, disconnected from any other awareness. As she wrapped a hand around him he closes his eyes, enveloping darkness in darkness. As the tension grew in him, she whisered,
"some say that the darkroon is a place of magic, of alchemy. That a true photographer can catch your very soul."
Her words came from impossibly far away, her touch impossibly near. The sounds of flesh against flesh, her hand squeezing tighter, moving faster, then at the moment of release a brightflash of white hot light, from nowhere, burning into the back of eyes and his brain and then fading
fading
to nothing.
Hours later, Jane returned to her darkroom. Alone, she examined the latest soul-print pinned it to the wall with the rest of her collection.
Prompt image, linked here, is NSFW.