…and to think I was going to go to bed at 9pm tonight… HA!<\/p>\n
So, for no particularly good reason, I’m sitting here at 12:13am, listening to the Kern County, California Law and Fire Radio Scanner<\/a> (open that with Winamp, MediaPlayer, or iTunes, I’m assuming).<\/p>\n It’s sort of amazing, that there’s so much going on, and yet the dispatchers (all women, it seems) are capable of instantly matching the speed, tone, and urgency of their “folks in the field.” There’s a tonality shift that happens whenever there’s a new hailing on the line, and it’s like they’ll chorus together so they know who they’re talking to when there’s four or five interspersed conversations going on at once.<\/p>\n It’s like there’s this constant flow from Control of “I know you’re in danger, I know maybe you’re scared, but we’re all back here, and we’ll send more to you if you need it, okay? Just keep breathing, stay calm, and watch for the signs.” That’s a lot of data to cram into 2.5 seconds, and 40 syllables.<\/p>\n There’s also all sorts of weirdness (beeps, bleeps, and bloopie noises), and my techie brain instantly jumps in an starts counting pulses to see if I can tell if there were 7\/10 codes (a phone number?) or some data stream going on. I’ve listened to enough analog data streams in my time to be able to discern a mod-<\/p>\n OKAY, that was just MORSE CODE, I’m pretty sure.<\/p>\n Oh, and if you have highspeed internet at home, and have one of those little network switches\/hubs, (or even a router, probably), stick an AM radio on top of it some time and listen to the distortion that comes out of the network traffic you generate. I did this a few years back with a hub (not a switch) and it was sorta cool. If you like glitch<\/a>.<\/p>\n Back to the radio…<\/p>\n …oh yeah, and there’s also all kinds of silliness that may or may not be random commentary from the peanut gallery. F’rinstance, there was a notice that went out to let everyone know that something was going to be announced to the entire shift, and after the codes were sent out (I’ve also got a page<\/a> open with the codes so I can tell what SOME of this stuff is) letting everyone know there’d be a “real” announcement shortly… I heard someone say something to the effect of:<\/p>\n “Neepie heep kebooie – yip yip.”<\/p>\n I’m not kidding. It was pretty clear, and that’s what it sounded like.<\/p>\n There’s even the odd cop who’s voice, tempo, and tone all say “I’m too old for this shit.”<\/p>\n Oh, and it’s true: You really can hear people smile on the radio.<\/p>\n Someone keeps talking about “Ginger Snap” calling (to other units\/groups). As if it was a person. I’m looking through the codes, and G-Unit (oh, HEY!) is the Gang Enforcement people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …and to think I was going to go to bed at 9pm tonight… HA! So, for no particularly good reason, I’m sitting here at 12:13am, listening to the Kern County, California Law and Fire Radio Scanner (open that with Winamp, MediaPlayer, or iTunes, I’m assuming). It’s sort of amazing, that there’s so much going on, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,8,2,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87614143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-hardware","category-people","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87614143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87614143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87614143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87614143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}