Simon Harris
Hailing from deep north-east England, in a town that time forgot, Simon joined YSTV in late 2006 with an intent on Making Technical Stuff Happen™. This plan quickly showed its worth, as Simon was elected Deputy Technical Director under the watch of Nick Howell.
When Nick abandoned his technical officership in favour of joining the computing team, Simon took up the mantle of Network Engineer for the next two years. As the campus video network was rapidly falling apart at this time, leaving very little network left to engineer, he proposed the creation of the drains, an IP-based streaming solution that put YSTV's web livestream on the TVs instead. Plus, he got to stay on the key list, which given that YSTV was his second home at this point, was handy.
He also wrote FaffoCue, the stopgap software to move YSTV's autocue solution away from the Acorn Archimedes-based NaffoCue and to something that could run on a Windows laptop. He was relieved to find out they're not still using it.
Not content with the technical side of YSTV, Simon shifted more into production roles toward the end of his tenure. He co-produced the awesome new titles for Your Answer's Rubbish, which premiered in series 2. This began a great production partnership with Mark Friend that resulted in award-winning comedy thriller Man Man. He was also an early advocate for producing more pre-recorded shows, and relying less on live output.
Since leaving the society, Simon has pilfered rehabilitated a small handful of YSTV's ancient computers that have fallen out of use and were just taking up space. He has:
- the original Clock machine (Acorn A3010), including its software
- an Acorn A5000 (it has a genlock card in it, so may have been a graphics machine before Graphics PC)
- the Power Mac G3, to assist with archiving its footage