Here’s a short video that will give you some idea of my perspective of the podium down on the floor of the Fleet Center (with apologies for the retro TV theme; I can’t figure out how to have dotmac show a plain, simply, video).

I went off in search of a way of getting “on the floor” after being told, this morning when I picked up my credentials, that I could enter a lottery to do so, and then being told in the Press Filing Room that I could get a 30 minute pass without entering a lottery. They sent me off to the 4th floor, section 3/4, to a special desk set up for this purpose.

What I found when I got there was this sign: “Hold for DNCC Dais Seating.” I have no idea what this means. However there was a line of about 30 desperate looking journalists in front of it, so I decided to try again another day.

This is only a guess, but it worked for me down here in the “unassigned media filing center” on the 3rd floor: disable IPv6 in your Network Preferences. Before I did this, I was getting the dreaded “self-assigned” IP; once I turned off IPv6, things magically worked. Don’t know enough to know why.

By the way, the wired Ethernet access down here on the 3rd floor is fast and reliable (unlike the WiFi, which, reports are, is quite flaky and seems to depend a lot on the location of your lap). Easiest way to get down here from up there is to take the elevator that’s just outside the blogger-area exit; get off on the third floor, and walk to your right until you see “Press Filing” on the door.

It looks like it’s possible to get access to the actual “floor” in some sort of rotating fashion. I’m going to try and investigate this next.

The day I leave the country, my landlords at get to ride Segways. There is no justice.

I’m slowly filling up the DNC Photo Album with pictures. This photo of Barack Obama shows why having a camera with 10x optical zoom comes in handy.

David Sifry, from Technorati is working with CNN here at the DNC. Apparently this requires many, many computers; witness his command post:

As I am sitting behind him in the Fleet Center, I presume this means (a) I am the Shawn Murphy of “CNN on blogging” — the guy in the background while the Minister of Finance is delivering the budget and (b) I am the blogger who is charged with blogging the guy who indexes the blogs. I feel very Mobian.

There are non-Mcdonalds food options in the entrance of the Media Center. They appear to have cases upon cases of Red Bull. What is Red Bull, anyway? There are also salads, breakfast cereals, and what looks like fruit salad.

Here’s what I’ve found so far, here at the Fleet Center.

There’s a large temporary stucture beside the Fleet Center. You will know it by the yellow tubes running out the side and the snack bar at the front. This is the (or at least a) Media Center. Large news organizations — NBC, USA Today, AP, Reuters, NPR, and the like — have sectioned off areas here, filled with monitors, edit bays, and other tools. Other than the hallways, there doesn’t appear to be any “unassigned” space here. But there is plenty of WiFi. I post this, for example, using the open WiFi of the Washington Post (thanks!).

In the Fleet Center proper, the third level does, indeed, contain an “unassigned press filing center.” I peeked inside the door: it looks like the boiler room on the Queen Mary. There are desks and (it is said) wired Internet up for grabs here.

Way, way up on the seventh level (take the escalators, or the elevator), in section 320 (look for the signs over the doors), is the “blogger area.” There’s WiFi up there, but if you have a Mac you have to do a little voodoo to get it to work (the DHCP server doesn’t appear to work with Macs: manually assign yourself an IP address in the 10.128.21.* range and things might work; maybe Panther only). There’s also power. Which I’m going to need in 38 minutes or my iBook will die.

The bloggers are very friendly.

On the ground level there is a Mcdonalds and Dunkin Donuts.

Watch the elevators: if you get off on the wrong floor, you may get castigated by the Secret Service (I saw this happen).

I came downstairs to get something to eat so as to avoid collapse. And I found my brethern news service:

Here are the bloggers, doing their blogging. In the Fleet Center: