Broadcasting since 2002 and still going strong…

Pengovsky’s workplace – featuring the legendary AKG-K141 headphones

The Firm™ celebrated it’s fourth anniversarry yesterday. While the concept of a multimedia (or convergent) radio was brewing in our heads as early as 2001, we didn’t have it on paper until early-2002 and it took another six months to set up the company as a legal entity and put together a team of enthusiasts. Most of the legal wrangling was done by El Presidente™ for Pengovsky was just an undergraduate greenhorn back then. We did a test run on an IT event called Interinfos, then shut down for about fourteen days in order to move all the equipement to our present location and have all the communications set up. But on November 21st 2002 we started broadcasting – and have been ever since.

As I intend to keep this post short (the Official History of the Firm™ is yet to be written) I would only like to put down a couple of things I have learned in the last four years:

–Never go in business with your family. Ever. While El presidente™ rocks and has incredible managerial and financial skills the project did put a lot of strain on our relationship. Grief neither of us needed.
–A line in a PHP script always ends with a semicolon;
–Private enterprise in Slovenia sucks. I love my job, but it will not make me rich and/or famous and as I work 12+ hours a day it makes the prospect of a “normal” family life a rather distant one.
–When you try to sell an idea always make the other party sign a non-disclosure agreement (this one I learned very painfully).
–Cable operators sometimes tend to abuse their local monopolies (as also witnessed by this incident).
–Most of Slovene journalists have absolutely no idea how to do the job properly and have a criminally short memory. Kudos to the selected few who constantly save the face of the profession. Hopefully someday I will have achieved that status.
–There is a difference between objectivity and neutrality.
–System administrators are species that live in a dusty part of the LAN network and ingest only beer
–If you want to do your job professionally, never put all of your eggs in one basket. If you step on somebody’s toe and he/she knocks over one basket, you’ve still got at least one more. Maybe not as full and beautiful as the first one, but it makes starting over much more easier.
–Only spineless editors and journalist are prone to political influence. There are many in Slovenia, but that many
–Dimitrij Rupel is an idiot and an international menace.
–The study of journalism on FDV should be made a post-graduate study exclusivelly. I’m not a journalist by education, but the cadre that is produced by FDV is awful: Overambitious, overzealous, overopinionated and without the foggiest about what media is really about or about the subject of their supposed reporting
–Any given cable is always 20 centimetres too short
–The food at the Prime Minister’s New Year banquet is awful
–Boštan at the City Hall makes the best coffee in town (sadly his place is not open to public)
–Geonavtik makes the best publicly available coffee in town
–All journalists are either chain-smokers and drunks or right-wingers or on the verge of becoming either of the two

I would not have learned these things without the help of the following people who have my eternal gratitude for being a part of this project at its various stages (some of them even more than once):
Boštjan (a.k.a. Voja Brajović, Veliki Beštijan), Greciozo, Igor (who first put together our webpage), Rollo Tomassi, Mojca, Neža, Ajda, Katarina, Janja, Urša, Brigita, Katja, Matej, Gospod Ravnatelj (formerly of Gama MM), as of late also Luka and Goran, and of course El presidente™. I just hope I gave something back to these people (besides ulcers and ocassional fits of rage)

That said, there are things that need to be done as soon as possible:

–overhaul the webpage
–promote the mobile webpage
–hell, promote the entire Firm™!!!
–update and edit the musical database so that the music played by the computer will stop suffering from a manic-depressive dissorder (i.e.: going from absolutely faboulous to Radio Center-like)
–update the English page regularly
–finally get an FM frequency in Ljubljana
–finally get some vacation
–listen more to RSI (100,8 MHz in Ljubljana)

Damn! It was a long post afterall…..