I’m on a short work-related visit to New York. It’s hot here. But, for once, not as hot as London.
You know what they say about mad dogs and Englishmen? Well, today, sometime just after my lunch, I went up to the roof of our office building, which has a fancy new terrace. It was lovely. And very hot. I didn’t stay there long. You can’t, however, stand atop a New York roof and not take a picture. So I did.
Reviewing these pictures a moment ago, I noticed one that triggered a rather clear flashback to 1994 and to one of the first times my name ever appeared on the internet. I don’t recall who wrote it; it’s gone forever from the internet archive, but it was a sarcastic comment about my online collection of pictures of satellite dishes at British radio stations. There was a reason they existed. I worked for the company that owned the dishes at radio stations, and we had a collection of photographs so that you could describe to an engineer where the dish was if they needed to point it back at the satellite after a pigeon had flown into it (which actually happened). One night shift, I decided to share the pictures with the world on the corporate website.
At some point, it was deemed inappropriate to house the pictures on the website of the company that owned the dishes. So I bequeathed them all to James Cridland’s MediaUK directory where, for a few years, the image was linked to the radio station’s entry. I found the Red Rose picture on the Internet Archive. For this one, you really didn’t need a picture to describe to an engineer where the dish was. Although James credited me for the pictures, I actually took none of them. They were all taken while I was locked in the control centre overnight (which – and it amuses me daily – was located about 15 paces from the front door of the London office building I work in today).