Five Years

Today, or rather tonight, when today ends, will mark five years since the end of the cable TV ad insertion system which I developed and supported. It is the "nadir" of the year, five and one half years after the Feast Day of Subsidiarity, March 2, which was the day that system went live back in 2000. (And, as I have recently learned, that date is something more, which I shall reveal at the proper moment.) Why Subsidiarity? Because that is how the machinery worked. Our system used technology arising from thirteenth century metaphysics, from the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII and Centesimus Annus of John Paul II, which was quoted in the source code.



It was an amazing time: two thousand days, two hundred thousand spots encoded, sent to an average multicast of 7 headends, two hundred million CUSTOS packets sent back, played over 230 million times with a play rate of over 97 percent...



All gone? Not quite.

The spiral of cue-tones and CUSTOS packets which we flung out into space continues in flight through our galaxy, and so too the memory of the hard work and good times that happened there. Just as Tolkien told the story of how the Two Trees of Valinor are preserved in their final fruits: the Sun and the Moon, so too this system, a "tree" of headends, is preserved in my novel Joe the Control Room Guy and in my little volume about the inner workings of that system, Subsidiarity.

And in my lasting gratitude to my friends and co-workers.

"It was a long yesterday ago."

--Dr. Thursday.

PS Oh, I forgot to add the link to my poem about the company. If you read it carefully, you will discover a complete high-level statement of the inner workings of the place, and a lot more besides.