About the audio, and thanks to Aaron Kostyu

Answering part of Barbara Stratton's questions, the audio access was part of the award the Commission gave LAKE for blogging questions like yours. You may know it as a bill of attainder. When the commission moved to the palace, we tried sitting in several locations and found that the front couple of rows, near the edges have the best sound. When we were banished to the back corner, we found the audio on the recordings was nearly inaudible. Perhaps our readers and listeners noticed that too.

When we mentioned the poor audio quality to Aaron Kostyu, Director of Technology, he informed us of the possibility of a direct microphone feed in the "media nook" (to the right of the door as you go in) to a properly equipped camera. He even showed Gretchen a camera that had the proper features. A bit of shopping later, we purchased a Canon HFR21 that appears to have many of the features needed for effective recording of these meetings.

Because the "media nook" speaker output had never been used before Monday,

Aaron and IT staff turned it on, directed Gretchen to Fouraker Electronics to find an appropriate cable to connect to the new camera, and together they spent some time testing the set up to make sure the output was working correctly.

The little picture is what Aaron usually looks like from the audience. The big picture is what he looked like holding an award he got from Deb Cox, Lowndes County Elections Superviser, for making election results available online in real time.

Thanks to Aaron Kostyu for the audio input!

-jsq