Shortly before spring break, KDIC’s website disappeared from the Internet. It was the most recent in a series of technical difficulties experienced by the student-run radio station, but station members remain optimistic about the future of their web presence.
KDIC’s online streaming service, which allows people outside of Grinnell’s geographic area to listen to shows broadcast from the on-campus studio, has been sporadically unavailable since the beginning of the fall semester. Current station manager Emily Stuchiner ’15 credits these technical difficulties to the limited resources allowed by a small staff of students and communication issues which have arisen between KDIC staff and Information Technology Services. But she doesn’t think that the issues that have arisen this year are anything out of the ordinary.
“I think that on the whole, the number of technical difficulties that have existed this year have been really no different from the amount of technical difficulties that have existed in the past,” Stuchiner said. “For whatever reason, it’s just been bad luck … things crash, especially because operating systems aren’t necessarily stable, especially at the high capacity at which we need them to run a radio stream.”
The recent deletion of the website occurred when a staff member assigned to wipe a computer and accidentally wiped another, identical computer which the website’s server was based on. Incoming station manager and current program director for KDIC Evan Bruns ’16 said that despite the current inconvenience, he is looking forward to the chance to rebuild the website.
“I don’t really blame our tech staff for it,” Bruns said. “Honestly, we’re looking at this more as an opportunity to move forward and have a better website than ever, than [as a] setback. Unfortunately it does mean that our website has been down.”
Stuchiner said that she looks forward to rebuilding the website with a simpler, more user-friendly interface, which she says will place KDIC’s website on par with the radio station websites of peer institutions.
Bruns anticipates that the website will be functional again by the end of the spring semester, but explained that KDIC’s first priority is training new members of the technical staff for next year. He attributed the string of technical difficulties this year to a combination of outmoded technology and the frequent traffic through the radio studio.
“We’ve had our fair share of technical problems this year. We’ve had various different failures with the stream,” Bruns said. “A lot of it has been [that] we had a lot of old computers in there and we’ve been trying to move to newer, fresher computers, and I guess the other part of it is just the amount of people who are in the room. Often, people will have a guest on there or something, hundreds of people go through there, and if something gets unplugged, things will just go down and it can take quite a while to get back up.”
Bruns also looks forward to getting new technical equipment next year, which he says will increase the available memory space and ultimately lessen the number of technical difficulties KDIC experiences.
“We’re like a butterfly right now in our cocoon, but soon we’re going to pop out, have a beautiful new website and new technology,” Bruns said.
