Remember Sudan

In fact, don't just remember it. We need to lead our leaders. Every day means more death and horror.

Not sure where you stand? Here's yesterday's Washington Post's editorial. EthanZ has more, and recommends Doctors without Borders.

Tiny game

.krieger is a truly mediocre first-person shooter with a single level of boring game play., although with some moderately impressive graphics. So why mention it? Because it's all done in a 96K file, which is equivalent to packing for the summer and fitting it all into your wallet.

Subservient President

Remember Subservient Chicken? Here comes Subservient President. (Note: You must be able to prove that you're a manager at Halliburton to play.)

Video blog

I've blogged a video reply to Charles Cooper's article at CNET.

Real Player (7mb...Possibly not working. Sorry.)
Quicktime (11mb)
Windows MediaPlayer (3.5mb)

Why videoblog it? It's an experiment. (PS: Don't forget Dan Bricklin's reply to Cooper.)

Chris Lydon captures a lot of truth about the Convention, including by interviewing Jay Rosen.

Hummer salute

I am, of course, the last person to see the FU Hummer salute site.

From an Arab-American

From a reader who requests anonymity, and who gave me permission to post this version with identifying info removed:

As for your Tuesday night scorecard: My scorecard matches yours.

When Barack Obama started speaking, I got goosebumps. But further into his speech — rich with concrete details and a human no-catch-phrase voice — when he had the compassion and, more important, courage to cite an Arab American family as part of HIS e pluribus unum, he won my heart forever.

David, life has been at best disheartening or worse, terrifying for Arab Americans since 9-11...

...More at Loose Democracy

Bricklin on event blogging

Dan Bricklin has a post on what we're starting to learn about event blogging. Dan's doing a service by turning this into a topic...

In passing, Dan responds to Charles Coopers' post at CNET. Dan says that we're only at the beginning of learning about event blogging and about the relationship of blogging and journalism. To this I would only add: Cooper is judging blogging as if it were wannabe journalism. What I was doing at the Convention wasn't journalism. I'm not sure what to call what I was doing, except maybe "blogging." Was it worthwhile even thought it wasn't journalism? I dunno. Sort of for you to judge. As always.

President Kerry

The problem with visionary speeches in politics is the same as with sales speeches that talk about benefits: If the vision is big enough, it's always the same speech. In marketing, you end up saying "SAves time, drives down costs, boosts profits," which works out to the single, unified benefit: "Make more money." In American politics the speech becomes about family, flag and freedom. If the vision is sufficiently grand, the same speech can be given by George Bush, John Kerry, Ralph Nader and your crazy Uncle Bob.

I liked Kerry's speech because it wasn't visionary.

By giving us enough details about what he will do, he gave us a real sense of our country's path and his reason for running. Did you come out of the speech thinking that he's a flip-floppy guy driven only by ambition? There goes $80M of Republican advertising, down the ol' drain.

One of the stupid TV commentators - I swear that in the first three minutes after the speech one of them was commenting on Kerry's rate of sweat - said that he failed to explain his Iraq policy. Bull! He said exactly what he would do, although he steered clear of the important details of how exactly he will implement his plan. But we have 100 days and three debates for that. I thought Kerry - and his Media Engineers (credit where credit due) - hit exactly the right spot in the Empty Vision vs. Policy Wonk spectrum.

I now believe Kerry will win the debates in the way that matters: Convincing the undecided that he deserves their trust and their vote. The debates are beginning to smell pretty darn delicious at this point. Mmmmm. I mean, is there anything that Democrats look forward to more than seeing W wiped in his own flop sweat?

By the way, there was a delightfully active - and delightful - conversation in the comments during my disjointed realtime blogging of the speech.

John Kerry (Live blogging)

Hated the hokey salute..

He's being likable and relaxed. Great smile

"Trees are the cathedrals of nature"? Separation of trees and state!

The work of our generation isn't done yet. I like it! This speech hears so much better than it reads!

A plea for complexity. My favorite topic. I'd love to see W's rejection of nuance bite him in the ass.

"The future doesn't belong to fear. It belongs to freedom." Perfect.

"The flag belongs to all the American people." Continues the Convention theme of the unity of all Americans, odd in the bitterest, most divided election in my life. And it's the right theme.

Family values theme isn't working for me. Not that that matters. Falling into predictable patterns of American political rhetoric. What next? "Good jobs at good wages"?

The fact that signs had been distributed saying "Help is on the way" sort of breaks the illusion, doesn't it?

Still, Kerry sounds damn good to me. Sounds not only presidential, but like a guy who should be president. I haven't even noticed his hair in the past ten minutes.

We'll get to pick our own doctor? Ooh ooh! Can I have Dr. Doolittle?

Great Lincoln quote. Just contributed $150.

Go Kerry. This afternoon I thought we were going to lose. Now I think we can win.

Blogging reality

Because the Kerry speech is so important, I've decided to see it the way it's meant to be seen: On TV. Yes, I've come home. And, oh are my feet and back glad.

Sure, I felt guilty skulking out of the Fleet. But not enough to stay. At the Convention I can't hear what the speakers are saying, and I've absorbed so much atmosphere that I'm pooping victory balloons. So, what do I get out of being there for another night?

I'm sure you'll tell me.

I've seen the official excerpts of Kerry's speech, released by the Democrats. How were these excerpts? Hmm, what's another word for "boring"? Oh, yeah, I remember: "Bush wins."

Bricklin on AP on Blogging

Dan is once again providing thoughtful commentary, this time on the AP's article that says that bloggers are "feeling their way." No kidding!

Wednesday photos

View from Blogger Blvd

Rebecca Blood and Dave Winer in Bloggerland

Edwards pauses while the crowd cheers

Press banks on the floor

At the DCCC & Google party

Rebecca Blood sees the sign of the end of blogging as we know it

Bloggers party. Can you spot the garofalo?

Granny D, not walking across America

Jessamyn West, with Christian Crumlish in the shadows

More Convention weirdness

Last night, in a self-reflective capstone to the list of weird media moments at the Convention, Melissa Fitzgerald — CJ's assistant, Carol, on The West Wing — came by to talk with the bloggers. She was there to promote Environment 2004's ecological agenda. Why come to the bloggers? Because we're the future of the media, etc. etc.

Being a celebrity, um, camp follower — and having utterly failed to satisfy my children's requirement that I come back with photos of The Daily Show correspondents — I interviewed her. What's her political background? Her parents know Gov. Ed Rendell and she's been around politics all her life, and she's happy to be on a show that has social relevance. Ok. Then she told me what issues she's here to support. As one of her Environment 2004 handlers had said, she was articulate: She rattled off the mercury in the fish and the Clear Skies Act oxymoron stuff. After she'd made her way pretty far down the list, I asked her if she thought anyone in the stadium disagreed with her. No, she said, but some people may not know the facts.

So, here was a multi-level disconnect. She's a good actor, but she failed to read my face that was practically screaming "Stop the list! You're telling me stuff I know." But, so what, it's not like my time is so valuable that I can't afford to spend an extra 45 seconds listening to an actor on one of my favorite shows. But, what does she expect me to write about in my blog, other than the meta crap I'm writing right now? Melissa Fitzgerald came by to tell us that Bush sucks on the environment, a point of view I'd ignored until it came from Carol on The West Wing?

I spoke with her handler afterwards, mainly because I was recounting the interview in rather arch terms to Steve Soto, who I've gotten to know and like a great deal, not realizing the handler was standing next to me. I tried to say that if Fitzgerald wants to further her cause among bloggers, she should find something interesting to say, but I'd been so rude in my overheard comments to Steve that the handler was in no mood to listen. And I don't blame her.

I'm being snarky and I don't mean to be. I love her on the show and I'm happy she's hitting the hustings for a cause she cares about. It was just a failure of sympathetic thinking by the PR folks, which is hardly a big deal.

Melissa Fitzgerald visits the troops stationed in Blogonia

From the floor

The bloggers' credentials allow us to go onto the floor only if we get an hour's special dispensation from the media papal office. So, yesterday I did a tour just as the post-dinner speakers began at 6:50.

My view was skewed by the fact that, as a visitor, I had nowhere to sit, although I did ease my aching dogs for a few minutes by perching in the press galleries that flank the main stage. The galleries have about ten vertical rows of blue-marble formica desks that look out over the floor. Surprisingly, the section to the left of the stage has no view onto the stage and there are no video monitors. I watched the press people sitting there as Jesse Jackson spoke; they might as well be listening to it on their car radios. They do have an excellent view, however, of the glitzy signs hung by the major media, marking their elevated press booths: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox, PBS News Hour...the stadium is ringed by these brightly lit re-programmed lite beer signs.

I looked up to the 7th floor Blogger Boulevard. You know how when painters depict a crowd scene, you can see every whisker and wrinkle on the people in the front, but the further back you go, a daub of paint suffices for the eyes, and then for entire faces? Well, we bloggers were where the artist loads a brush with a bluish color and does a hundred people with each jab.

Meanwhile, on the floor, delegates sat in their designated seats. A minority are wearing outfits selected to increase the odds that they'll be shown on tv...cheese hats, red white and blue pants, hats with entire dioramas on them. And, of course it works. TV cameras are everywhere, bending over the delegates like herons fishing for fish either too slow or plump to ignore. We civilians are there to serve.

Every open pore is filled with people who have no seats but are not allowed simply to stand. We are required to keep moving by the guards stationed so that one will always be within prodding distance. Rather than falling into the brownian motion characteristic of parties, we form shuffling streams. First we walk north, then we walk south. Tiny step, tiny step, maintaining the requisite two-inch Margin of Personal Comfort. Pause to take a picture or, God forbid, think, and a Stream Keeper will stick his paddle into the waters. "Keep moving, sir. We can't have you standing still." No no. That'd be a security risk because it's well known that terrorism begins with stillness.

Jesse Jackson spoke and the delegates cheered, waved and stood with the spontaneity of people bursting into song when the lights go out and a birthday cake is brought in: We know what's required of us. Likewise, when Wyclef Jean sang a dreadful, rejiggered version of a popular song, delegates stood and did the shoulder-dance the middle-aged do to embarrass their children.

It's hard to convey the hyper-unreality of it. It's a roundelay of media, by the media and for the media with as many overlays of social complexity as a high school reunion where everyone has to dress up as how they think people saw them. One's attention has no place to wander except into cynicism. Yet, the delegates are here playing the media game because they've worked damn hard and care so much. Union people, teachers, local organizers, veterans...the event may be calculated down to the fonts used in the electronic displays, but the delegates are here participating in the media event because they are believers and heroes.

We don't have the vocabulary to assess a single cheer during the Jesse Jackson speech. Cheering for Jesse, cheering for the TV, cheering for being together cheering. How do we apply terms like "sincere," "authentic" or "manipulated"? Whitman's barbaric yawp now has four orders of abstraction layered on top of it, and sixteen more reserved for the analysts.

The studied, impassive and total silence of the press bleachers as Jesse tells us "Hope is on the way, hope is on the way" is no less complex.

Kerry prospect

Beyond convincing us that he's a sincere, good, strong, caring, brave person whom we actually like — which is purely a technical problem that his Media Engineers undoubtedly have prototyped successfully — I want Kerry tonight to put some substance into the phrases we've had drummed into us for three days. For example, I want him to list ten things that his administration will do to make us safer. And after each one, I want him to leave four seconds of silence so we can think to ourselves, "Holy cow! You mean we're not doing that already? What's wrong with these bozos? $200 billion sunk into Iraq and we still haven't ____?"

Howard Dean said in one of his speeches the other day that Kerry has assured him that the first bill to come out of the Kerry White House will be health insurance. Great. But why did we have to hear that from Dean? More like that! Strong shmong, heart shmart ... tell us what's on your to-do list, John!

That's what I want, anyway. But I'm not undecided, so I don't count. (See previous post for more whining about this.)

Edwards retrospect

I didn't see the Edwards speech on TV, so I'm not entitled to have an opinion about it. Worse, I had to follow along in the transcript in order to parse the few sound waves that managed to drag themselves up to the 7th floor Valhalla where the bloggers sit in judgment. Nevertheless, I hereby judge him absolutely, and in four categories:

1. Content. I like the Two Americas theme and the recognition that race matters in this country. With these, Edwards uttered truths we all know but that need to be said flat out instead of studiously ignored...as with Kerry's focus on the middle class. And I appreciated the few policy details Edwards served up; at this point, I am duck-billed by the platitudes.

2. Role. Edwards role was, it seems, to help the Party step into its asbestos underwear, including laying the Negativity Trap for the Republicans. Since the entire campaign is focused on the Undecided — come on, people, what more do you need to know?? —I wonder if the Democrats really can win without going negative. I dunno; I'm just a nosebleeding blogger. I thought he and the Convention overall have done a good job neutralizing the Democrats-are-girlie-men meme.

3. Performance. Eh. He's not a fiery orator that yokes your ankles to a chariot of rhetoric and drags you around the arena three times. He's an intimate speaker, and you can only achieve intimacy in a 7-story sports stadium by being a sophisticated phony. So, I sort of don't care. But I do care if he can reach those Undecideds in whose hands my children's fate rests. And I don't understand those folks at all. What, are they in a coma? Are they too thoughtful? Perfectionists? Slightly retarded? Will someone please explain it to me?

4. Swim suit. Oh yeah. A perfect face in which you can read nothing. No clothing can do that face justice and makeup can only detract from it. Every night before I drift to sleep, his is the face I see. It's a tragedy what being VP will do to that punim.

Google directions to fictitious places

I looked up "Valhalla" in Google to see if I'd spelled it correctly, and above the entries, Google offered to show me a map of Valhalla...Valhalla, NY, that is. Still, it took me aback.

Are there other fictitious places for which Google provides above-the-results maps?

John Edwards (live blogging)

John Edwards - The forgotten Osmond Brother - knows how to build applause by waiting it out. And he knows how to accept applause while looking embarrassed at it.

He opens with sentences that serve the purpose of pumping in the key phrases: volunteers, respect others, valor, what he's made of. It's how you make the character argument.

Trying to set the terms of the rest of the campaign, reject negativity. Great if it works. Doubt it.

Trying to beat the Big Lawyer rap.

And into the Two Americas, a narrative central to populism that we've forgotten. Of course, it requires Americans to vote for the sake of others - the way it ought to be, but necessarily a tougher sell than "Tax breaks just return your money to you."

"What's the first thing that goes? Your dreams." Not much applause, but I thought it was affecting.

Some specifics about tuition tax breaks. Excellent! I've been hungry for a few damn details.

"Moral responsibility" for eliminating poverty. Yes! We need to have this discussion elevated to the moral plane. And he goes after minimum wage. I wish he'd said how much working fulltime for minimum wage amounts to - around $11,000 a year. "Not in our America." Damn right.

He is setting the table. Now it's bringing race into the discussion. This is just what he should be doing: define the terms of the campaign, and leave plenty of room for Kerry to plop the main courses onto the plates he's set out. (Hmm, if I worked on it, I could probably come up with a worse analogy.)

Terrorism: Well, this one's already on the menu. I hope Kerry does the Clinton thing of listing 40 things he's going to do to make us safer, steps Bush has not taken. "I'm strong, we're strong, and together we'll be strong" is not doing it for me.

Appreciating our soldiers: The Democrats make a believable support-the-military party, IMO.

Details about how we can be safer. Why the hell aren't we doing this stuff already? I like details.

He's telling us about a hypothetical mother. This sort of stuff loses me. It goes all sentimental. I can't tell if it works. It just makes me wince.

We don't have to fight alone. Yes.

Hope is on the way. I always like a good call and response. Plus, I do believe and have believed that this year it's all about the hope. Hope vs. fear.

We choose hope over despair. Damn. I want him to hang W with fear, not despair.

There's been a lot of talk at this convention about "one America." Unusual rhetoric f or a party in an America more divided than any time since the Vietnam war.

ESP Journalism

At 8:50 this evening, CJAD, 800 on your AM dial, reported that John Edwards accepted the party nomination and recounted what he said in his speech. Only problem: It's now 9:50 and Edwards has yet to give his speech. Apparently, Canadian Press jumped the gun with the transcript - explicitly embargoed - circulated by the Democratic PR folks, and CJAD ran with it.

Not surprisingly, it made the top listing at Google News.

Foolish, naive blogger boy! 53 years young and I didn't know that real journalists ignore the explicit embargo. For example, the NY Times site also ran an article about the speech before the speech, although they said "in remarks prepared for delivery" (The CP article skips the qualification.) But don't you usually see that locution in print articles that had to be put to bed before the event actually transpired? What's the ethical justification of running embargoed news in real time on your web site?

Sheesh. All part of the weird set of conventions that constitute delivering the "news" in a "timely" way..

Bricklin's ESP

Dan Bricklin writes about the experience of blogging events with an acuity that is eerie.

Gets me to thinking someone should do the Five Stages of Large Event Blogging...

A photo

Here's blogger Aldon Hynes, with Christian Crumlish's reflection to his left.

Objective Rhetoric

At this point, thirty years after New Journalism and Post-Modernism, you'd think we wouldn't still need to have this argument, but, here goes: Objectivity isn't objective. Or, as my friend AKMA puts it, "The only people you can trust to be objective are the ones who know that objectivity can’t be reached." If you need proof of this, look no further than the lead article in today's Boston Globe.

I have no quarrel at all with the article. In fact, I read it with interest this morning over breakfast. Glen Johnson does a fine job reporting on the second night of speeches at the Democratic Convention. It is, by the canons of professional journalism, objective and balanced. And it makes perfectly clear what others have said: Objectivity is a form of rhetoric. What's perhaps especially instructive is that its content is another form of rhetoric: the big-tent political speech.

"Kennedy Leads the Attack: Convention speakers rip Bush in shift of rhetoric," says the headline. Keeping in mind that reporters don't get to write their headlines (yet another type of rhetoric), it nevertheless reflects the article's upshot. It begins:

The second night of the Democratic National Convention featured harsher criticism of the Bush adminstration, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy accusing the president of making the world a more dangerous place for Americans and the son of a Republican icon countering the president's stand limiting stem cell research. Tereas Heinz Kerry told her own story even as she extolled her husband's virtues, declaring, "By now, I hope it will come as no surprise that I have something to say."

Readers can quibble with what Johnson considers to be significant enough to make it into the lead. No mention of Obama, who lit the largest fire under the crowd, going with the current "master narrative" about THK that she is an outspoken woman (ooooh, imagine that!), and falling for the Democrats' publicity stunt of putting Ron Jr. on stage. But a lead by its nature has to leave out most of the story, so arguments about it are inevitable.

Instead consider this only in terms of the conflict of rhetorical forms. When Ted Kennedy was sitting on his porch in Hyannis putting together his speech, he undoubtedly thought about how to structure it in order to crank the crowd up. His speech doesn't begin with a lead, any more than mystery stories begin with a declaration of who done it. He thought more like a composer than like a journalist. He used phrases that he thought would pull us forward and up. He had no information to convey; he wanted instead to express the state of the country from his point of view in a way that would move a crowd of 35,000. The result was, in my view, a speech he could be proud of, although not the best in his career.

Now listen to the speech through Johnson's ears. (Yes, I'm being presumptive.) Johnson's job was not simply to transcribe events. For that, we could just read the transcript or watch the rerun. He knew that Kennedy wasn't going to reveal some new fact — "This just in! Osama is W's godgather!" — so he was looking for significance elsewhere. He noticed a pattern among the speeches that gave him the lens through which to present Kennedy's speech: The Democratic speakers are being more negative about Bush than they were last night. It's an interesting, defensible observation. But it's an artifact of the reporter's desire to come up with a lead. It was neither the substance nor the intention of the speechmaker ("Fire up a crowd, in part by attacking Bush" is different from "Democrats go negative on second nioght"), and it wasn't the effect ("We really need Kerry to be president!") that the night had on the crowd. That's not a criticism. It's merely to point out that rhetorical forms, such as objective journalism, make unnatural demands, especially when applied to other forms of rhetoric.

Objectivity is, as Heidegger says, a peculiarly modern mood. It is a form of discourse and, as such, structures thought, frames the questions, determines the content and the rhythm of a piece of writing. It's a useful form of rhetoric, long may it wave. But it is not what it represents itself as: A privileged way of expressing the truth. The newspaper article about Kennedy's speech can be accurate or not, fair or not, but it is no more true than the shouts of those in the Fleet Center who found it heartening.

There literally can be no objective account of a political speech, for in every case the account must transform a different rhetorical form, and that requires an act of literary interpretation. And what in human experience escapes all forms of rhetoric? Rhetoric ultimately means the structuring of experience through and in language, whether spoken or not. And even if you can find something we experience outside of language, the imposition of the rhetoric of journalism would be even ruder.

danah boyd in Salon talks about blogging, journalism and objectivity. A snippet: "Properly evaluating the role of bloggers at the convention requires escaping the most obvious framing paradigms." Go, danah! Bloggers look to the media like home-office media because "media," "publishing," "journalism" and "broadcasting" are the framing terms the media naturally brings to public writing. But that frame gets in the way, I believe, of seeing what's actually going on.

If so little is happening, why am I so tired?

I'm not going in to the Convention until 11am these days. I don't go out drinking afterwards, which means I'm asleep by 1am. So why am I so beat? Ok, aside from being old, fat and out of shape, why am I so beat?

Crowds are exhausting. Trying to be alert is exhausting. Sitting in one place is exhausting. Being spoken at is exhausting. Being snarky is exhausting. Being exhausted is exhausting.

I'm thinking of covering the speeches tonight by coming home and watching them on C-SPAN. I can't hear what the speakers are saying when I'm in the Fleet Center and there's nothing else going on when the speeches are happening, at least as far as I can tell. So, why should I be there?

Brand new bouncing baby blog

Larry Magid, CBS radio journalist and looong time tech writer, has started a blog. It's just two posts old.

And the opposite end of the rhetorical spectrum, the folks at MeThree are doing the gonzo thang blogging the Convention.

Jerry Michalski recommends the Democratics adopt "light, memory and discourse" as a way of countering the Republican "Me hammer, you nail" thrum.

And Micah Sifry and Nancy Watzman have an op-ed in the LA Times (reg. required) about why Big Corps are throwing parties for the Demos.

Tuesday night scorecard

Ted Kennedy: The speech a monument — and the best Senator in history — would give.

Howard Dean: That afternoon when talking to 1,000 screamiac supporters, he let loose and reminded us why we stood in the snow for him. For the speech to the Convention I would only have stood in light hail.

Barack Obama: The good news for Hillary is that she might get State Department when Obama is President in 2012.

Ron Reagan: Good to hear about this adminisration's embrace of medieval science from Reagan's bad boy. A staid presentation, but every degree of passion would have been taken as a sign of a kink in his psychology.

Ilana Wexler, the twelve year old: Conventions should have a "You must be taller than this to ride" sign on the podium because it's so rare that trotting out a kid — no matter how wholesome, enthusiastic and charming — can make it over the tackiness hurdle. I don't know if Ilana did because the frequency of her amplified voice was above my hearing range. (Seriously.)

Teresa Heinz Kerry: He talk was literate and artfully constructed, but was the point to prove that she's too intelligent to raise her voice? Even so, I thought there was a bit of the "Shove it" Teresa in the multi-lingual opening: Juggling while unicycling, saying, "Yo, Bushes, let's see you do this!" Nevertheless, I'm a total sucker for appeals to new Americans. Does anyone love our country more?

Me on CBS Radio

I'm just full of myself today, but here are links to two interviews with Larry Magid, whose writing on tech I've admired for years, that ran on CBS Radio. I'm at the Convention and unable to hear them, so I'm posting 'em blind. Um, deaf. Ulp. First MP3 Second MP3

If I sound like a moron, technically there's no need to point that out to me. Thank you.

Tuesday so far

I've learned to show up later at the Fleet Center. So, this morning I took a look through the many events scheduled around the city. Unfortunately, the ones open to the public tend to have titles such as "Advancing Affordable Housing Preservation through Tax Credits" and "Hip hop + Politics = Youth Voter Empowerment?" I mean, how could they insult that last topic by ending it with a question mark! Meanwhile, the ones marked private include "LA Senator John Breaux's Carribbean [sic] Carnival with Musician Ziggy Marley" and "Golf/Clambake with US Reps. Bill Delahunt & Steven Lynch, FL Sen. Bob Graham, Hawaiian Rep Neil Abercrombie and NY AG Elliot Spitzer." Get those guys together and they spell trouble! Oh yeah, better hide your copy of the Interim Corn Subsidy Appropriation Bill because they're gonna call Ziggy over to see how to make it into a bong. Party! ...

...More at Boston.com

What's it like?

So, what is the experience itself like?

Obviously, I can't speak for the delegates, protestors, service providers, real journalists or even for other bloggers, but for me it's a lot like going to a sports arena and watching a sport that consists of talking loud.

There I am, seven stories up in the Fleet Center, facing a giant screen which is only partially obscured by a giant bank of giant speakers. At 4 o'clock, when the Convention is gaveled to order by Terry MacAuliffe — a man so clean and well groomed that you want to take him home and dress his anatomically incorrect body in lots of fun outfits — the hall is more empty than full. Speaker after speaker comes onto the screen and mouths phrases that contain the two out of the three words "strong," "proud" or "children." Every now and then, you hear a crowd far below, clapping and yelling. Apparently some of them have funny hats on.

Then, once the TV cameras start carrying it live, it all comes to life. The big names come out, dragging their ant-like bodies into the light. Their smiling visages are projected on the giant screen: A 40-foot Clinton biting a 3-foot lip. You can hear the fourth echo of some of their words, but the rising endings of their phrases are wiped out by the white noise of enthusiasm they've elicited.

Then 35,000 people decide to leave at the same time and take the T from the Haymarket Station.

Last night, after I finally got home, I watched the Tivo'ed version of Clinton's speech. So I can say with some certainty that the main difference between seeing it live and seeing it at home is that at home you get better reception.

USAToday on blogs

An intentionally naive question of mine gave the USAToday its lead for its story on blogging today. They play it as if I'd said "Shove it!" to a venerable, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist. Oh well. It could have been worse.

NPR on blogging

Listen to an NPR piece on blogging the convention here.

Stem cell research research

Three links from Bill Koslosky, MD, about stem cell research. I'm running to the Convention and haven't had a chance to actually look at the links, but Bill particularly recommends this one, which "discloses the fact that stem cell research is really not expected to be used as a therapy for Alzheimer's."

Also a map and an explanation...

Jimmy Carter speaks

In case you missed it, I've posted the transcript of Jimmy Carter's speech last night.

Monday photos

Some photos from the convention, Monday, here, including some more of how well the Convention is protecting all good citizens from the perils of the Free Speech Zone.

The media circle

At the bloggers breakfast, Rod O'Connor, CEO of the DNC, explained that the convention is a "live TV show" as if this were a good thing. Then they brought out Pultizer-prize-winning AP legend, Walter Mears who started a blog for the AP yesterday. A blogger asked why the Big Media have cut back their Convention coverage. "We'd love a convention where decisions are made," he said. But conventions today are just scripted media events.

So, there we have the irony in the space of eating a single bagel for breakfast: The Convention folks think their job is to script an event for the news media, and the news media don't want to cover an event that's been scripted.

Another blogger asked Mears: So why do 15,000 media people show up? Because, Mears said, "it's a great class reunion and a hell of a party."

Meanwhile, I'm sitting on the 7th floor of the Fleet Center, watching the big stage below me as Patti Labelle belts out a hair-straightening version of the national anthem...to an empty house. Presumably, you'll get to see that performance later, if the media decide to run it.

Technorati aggregates blogs

Technorati is aggregating about 10,000 political blogs of all stripes. Nice.

Technorati is CNN's partner in blogging, by the way. Dave "Sweet" Sifry is apparently going to get on-air time as the voice of the Blogosphere, a choice I'm personally happy about.

Blogging crosses over

The credentialed bloggers are sitting in the section of the bleachers designated "Blogger Boulevard." Want to know exactly where it is? Easy: It's on the other side of the Rubicon.

This event marks the day that blogging became something else. Exactly what isn't clear yet, and the culture clash is resulting in public functions that are Dostoyevskian in their awkwardness.

Take the breakfast the DNC threw for us bloggers....

...More at Boston.com

The last convention?

Will we ever do this again? Is 2004 the last year we're going to have national conventions like these?

I just came back from picking up my credentials, which meant taking the T down to the Fleet Center, waiting on the wrong line, being directed by a series of five polite cops to the press office, and then being told that bloggers pick up their credentials at the Westin Hotel five subway stops away. My fault for not finding out ahead of time where to go.

But the trip to and then around the Fleet Center was instructive, for it meant following an intestinally-coiled set of fenced-in paths, with uniformed guards stationed every hundred feet, and mufti-clad security people betrayed by the coils plugged into an ear...

More at boston.com...

The photos I posted just below this entry I also posted at Exposure Manager. which has donated space to the convention bloggers. I'm very impressed with it.

Convention snaps

Entering the Free Speech Zone

Inside the Zone

Free speech on the ground

Shut up, kid, you're leaving the Zone!

Jay Rosen and me, wearing our Convention bling-bling. (This is a terrible photo of Jay!)

Early photos

Matt Stoller, who's been helping the DNC figure out what to do about blogging and bloggers, has just posted photos of the site over at The Blogging of the President. Amusing captions and even a "Caption it yourself" contest...

Other early photos are here and here.

Motherboard meltdown

My motherboard completely melted this morning. One minute I'm computing fine, the next my screen is frozen. On a cold boot, it can't get past the opening bios welcome screen. I can't even enter the bios setup page.

Heck, it was almost a year old, so it lasted longer than most of my electronic equipment. And I was in the market to spend a few hundred dollars getting myself back to where I was anyway.

Sigh.

Googlenym

I've blogged before (and now can't find it) about the phrases we tell people to help them find us through Google. For example, I might say, "Just google weinberger and joho and I'll be the first entry." Likewise, chris and gonzo puts Rageboy at the top, and worst and president brings up, well, take a guess.

This morning I woke up with the word "googlenym" on my lips...

What the media don't understand about blogging

I want to try to answer better a question I got asked by Larry Magid who's putting together a 30 second piece for CBS Radio: What don't the media understand about blogging?

To the print and broadcast media, bloggers usually look like little, vanity-press versions of the mass media. That's because the media focus on the A-List. After all, the A-Listers are the ones who have succeeded in the mass media's terms...

...continued at Boston.com

Dave's Convention aggregator

Dave Winer's built a Convention blog site that aggregates blogs from people attending the Convention (not just the credentialed ones). Looks great. Thanks, Dave.

Intel vs. Radeon

I'm having trouble finding information, and information I can understand, about the relative performance of the Radeon Mobility (LY) that is in my current Thinkpad X22 and the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 in the Thinkpad X40. All IBM tells me is that the Intel card uses system memory rather than onboard memory, which sounds like it has access to larger amounts of slower memory. (The X22's CPU is an Intel III M running at 800, and the X40's is a Pentium M at 1.2.)

All I want to know is: Will PowerPoint animations run faster of slower on the X40? Any one of you know anything about that?

Wolfram explained

I just came across a Forbes article by Michael S. Malone, dated 11.27.00, called "God, Stephen Wolfram and Everything Else." It's a good, non-technical introduction to Wolfram. Nicely done.

Critics of Wolfram won't find much to like in it, and I still think Ray Kurzweil's piece is the best analysis/intro I've read, but Malone puts Wolfram into a useful perspective.

Arguments

I didn't have time to read all the Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, but it seems to capture a side of life a little too accurately. And compulsively.

(Thanks to Mike O for the link.)

More foto fun

Here's an image from my new Canon S60, shot on automatic, by someone with no eye and less talent.

Morningglory in the afternoon

I altered it only by cropping it. I refrained — for demonstration purposes only — from tinkering with the color and contrast with my photo-shoppish software, but in general I'm with Tim Bray on the question of photographic "integrity."

I've spent most of my leisure hours over the past couple of days writing a VB script (I have no shame) that does the following with a single button press once you've dragged a photo(s) into it:

Runs imagemagick and produces a copy sized appropriately for my blog and a thumbnail version

Displays the image, and lets me enter a caption and an Alt tag

FTPs the copies to my web site

Downloads and displays the copies to confirm that the FTP worked

Moves the copies into the designated directory on my hard drive

Writes the relevant linking lines of html and copies them to the clipboard so I can paste them into my blog

Don't get me wrong: What I wrote is a horrible, kludgy bit of disasterware that will fail to work in a rich variety of everyday situations. But doesn't every blogger who is hosting her own blogging software go through roughly the same thing? So, why isn't there freeware that does this for us automatically? (Here's where you get to tell me that it exists, it's great, and everyone uses it already.)

[Later: It sounds like Britt's been thinking along related lines...way ahead of me, as usual.]

Another complaint about the software that came with the Canon.

I've already uninstalled the photo management stuff because it was just too cumbersome. But I kept the ArcSoft Camera Suite because its photo editing tool seemed ok. But, it turns out that when it saves an edited photo, it doesn't save some of the data that ImageMagick needs to work with the photo. (Is it stripping out EXIF stuff?) I learned this by spending about 2 hours trying to figure out why certain photos just weren't being accepted by the program I describe above.

Free the protestors

I haven't seen the "freedom of speech pen" in person, but from the news reports, it looks repellant. I understand the security concerns about the Convention — frankly, I'm literally losing sleep over the prospect of a large scale (= nuke it in suitcase) attack on Boston — but there has to be a better way of honoring the duty to dissent than to put citizens behind double fences topped by razor wire. Isn't this country all about saying that freedom is worth the risk?

Daily Windows debugging and repair log

I started getting the following error message in XP:

JIT Debugging component registration is incorrect.

Please repair the installation of the most recent version of Visual Studio ..Net or Remote Debugging components.

Alternatively, execute the following command as an Administrator to manually repair the JIT Debugging component registration:

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VS7Debug\vs7jit.exe" /RegServer

The program it wants me to run is not on my machine. So, after a little googling, here's a partial fix (or: http://tinyurl.com/95zt). This reinstalls the .NET framework, which you need, apparently, if you're working with VB 6.

This worked well enough that now the error messages I get when I run into Java on the Web are debilitating but not lethal.

Good news with my daughter's XP desktop: After many hours of work, I think I have it almost entirely free of spyware.

After running all the standard spyware removal programs, I finally installed a spare copy of Norton Firewall I'd found buried in a stack of disks. Duh. Then, I believe I extirpated the last of the malware spawners. The spyware removers were unable to remove it because it was a running process. It would run itself even if I booted into safe mode. So, I foolishly waded into the Task Manager's process list and weed-whacked until I found the relevant process. (Yes, this can corrupt your system. I assume you make backups more frequently than you make caca.) It was a RUNDLL thing. Killed it and deleted the file in Windows\System32 the spyware removers had discovered. Now, for the first time in months, the spyware removers report no malware.

For now.

(I hadn't installed a firewall before because my daughter is not an under-the-hood sort of user, and, in my experience, firewalls force us to make decisions based on too little information expressed in too much jargon.)

Bricklin on the Convention

Dan has a lovely piece about blogging and observing the Convention.

I find I have no coherent expectations about it or what I'll write about. I bounce from thinking that I'll react to the Big Speeches to reporting small anecdotes to reading the clips of Mailer's 1960s political coverage and thinking "Take away the talent and incredible insight, and what's he got that I don't got?" I can't even anticipate how cynical or filled with spirit I'll be; I am, after all, perfectly capable of crying at a good political speech. (It's hope that turns on the ol' waterworks. Gotta stay away from hope.)

CNN and Technorati - Partners at last!

Great news from Dave Sifry at Technorati: Technorati is going to be CNN's guide to blogs discussing the Democratic Convention. Plus, Dave is going to do color blog commentary for CNN on-air. This will help pull more people into the blogosphere as readers and writers. Plus, I love the Technorati folks, so anything that makes them happy makes me happy. (Disclosure: I'm on their board of advisors.)

Say hello to my bouning baby camera

After some power shopping with Dan Bricklin (thanks, Dan!) and helpful and generous comments from y'all, I bought a Canon Powershot S60.

There are so many models that are so close in features, that ultimately it came down mainly to two factors: First, the Sony guy at Newtonville Camera said that the Sony DSC-V1 wasn't "mainstream" and I should avoid it. He also liked the wider angle lens on the Canon. (It's great dealing with a store that puts your interests first.) I was leaning towards a Canon anyway because my current Sony's picture quality isn't particularly good, even for a 2.1 megapixel truck. Second, the Canon S500 looks cool and weighs about as much as the idea of it, but I found it too cramped for elderly hand. So, the S60 is it.

I've been taking lots of pretty random photos and I'm basically delighted, with occasional flares of ignorance-based concern. The UI is complex — there is no end to the camera's functionality — but after a couple of hours, I'm pretty well used to it. In Automatic mode, the thing takes brilliant photos: Sharp, colorful, and just pleasing. In Program AE mode, especially if I turn up the ASA, it gets very grainy fast. So, maybe I'm learning not to turn up the ASA. (I should mention that I have no idea what I'm doing.) Also worrisome: I went through a full charge of the battery in well under 100 photos, albeit all with the LCD on and many using the flash. Minor negative: I really dislike the photo management app that comes with it, all because of little, annoying things. For example — prepare for pettiness — the window that shows a photo full size doesn't tell you the name of the file you're looking at e