I started off this whole crazy DNC thing with a photo of my kit. Here are some notes on the tech behind the blog, and how it performed.

As detailed here, my mostly-trusty 12 inch iBook suffered a hard disk failure just over 7 hours before I was due to fly to Boston. Fortunately, brother Johnny’s 15 inch iBook was waiting and ready back in Charlottetown, and that’s what I took with me. It worked like a charm: I’ve used a lotta laptops, and this might be the best one yet. The screen is really big and bright, the battery gets 4-5 hours of life per charge, the keyboard has a nice feel, and the WiFi works great (I was often able to pick up distant WiFi networks that my PC-based blogmates couldn’t even see). There was some problem in the Fleet Centre with the special blogger WiFi and the Mac that meant that the Mac couldn’t get an IP address from the wireless access point via DHCP; this was quickly solved by entering a manual IP address (in the proper range) and hoping that you didn’t conflict with someone else.

WiFi, by the way, really is everywhere. As I type this, I’m sitting in Terminal C at Logan Airport, paying $7.95 for 24 hours of access. The hotel restaurant and lobby at the Sheraton Braintree has WiFi too, with 30 minutes for free and $10.95/day after that (with the same fee covering in-room wireline access). The Westin Copley Place, where credentials needed to be picked up every day, had several WiFi networks in evidence, some of them for-pay or protected, others free. Even walking along the shore from the Moakley Courthouse to the Fleet Center yesterday I was able to stop at a park bench and see 5 WiFi access points.

Because I knew that I would be far from the stage, and remembering my experiences trying to shoot photos from far back in the crowd back in January during the New Hampshire Primary, on the way through Moncton on Sunday I picked up a new Canon S1 IS. This turned out to be a dreamy wonder of a camera: the 10x optical zoom came in handy many times (especially with the “image stabilization” features that helps decrease the effects of shaking hands when zoomed in all the way). The ability to shoot video came in handy a couple of times as well, when a still photo wouldn’t tell the whole story. I bought a set of NiMH batteries at the same time (the camera only comes with alkaline non-rechargeables), and didn’t ever bump up against the need to charge them in three days of shooting. I’m really looking forward to taking more pictures with this camera. You can see all the photos I’m taken so far right here.

My Nokia 3285 cell phone performed well, with a signal almost everywhere other than the subway. Even inside the Fleet Center, where presumably everyone and their brother was on the phone at the same time. The only drawbacks of the phone were its size (it’s really too big to fit comfortably in pants pocket) and that because it doesn’t sync with my Mac’s address book (and because my own iBook died), I didn’t have access to the names and numbers I needed. My next phone will be smaller. And it will have to sync.

The one thing I felt lacking was some way of recording audio. The camera records audio when it’s recording video, but it’s hard to pass the camera back and forth like a microphone, and the video files can get huge. The iBook can record audio, but it’s not portable enough to record on-the-fly interviews or background. The two radio reporters I was interviewed by both at Sony mini-disc recorders, items I’ve also seen used by our local CBC reporters. I’ve always held off on investing in one of these because they record in a proprietary format and can dump the digital audio directly into a Mac; I may have to bit the bullet and get one if I want to do more audio work.

From insightful brother Mike:

You are now officially part of the problem.

Today’s episode of The Bloggers As The Story, Reinvented edition, goes like this…

First, a clip in the Baltimore Sun:

Food for thought

Peter Rukavina, a Web consultant from Canada who’s behind www.reinvented.net, wrote this from Boston:

“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.”

Later yesterday afternoon, Rukavina expressed a broader concern:

“This is not a national town hall meeting; it’s more akin to a televised debutante ball. I’m afraid that politics here in America is so abstracted from reality that it is, in fact, impossible to understand on a level other than the superficial.”

And that, Dube suggests, may be what the bloggers can do best, scratch the surface, but deeply.

Closer to home is Page A17 of today’s National Post where, frighteningly enough, they reprinted (with permission), my Matt Rainnie is the Devil post from yesterday morning. Here’s a screen shot:

What with all my “whacky” coverage of the convention, I think I’m well on my way to becoming the Bill Bramah of the blogosphere. At the very least, I’m a media whore.

In other Rukavina news, one Josip Rukavina (with whom, to date, I share only a last name) is placed 22nd at the International Chess Festival.

Go, Josip, go…

I received an interesting email this morning from the Library of Congress; they said, in part:

The United States Library of Congress preserves the Nation’s cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library’s traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites. The Library has selected your site for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to the Election 2004, and we request your permission to collect and display your Web site.

The Library has developed two previous Election Web Archives, in 2000 and 2002. These Election Archives are available along with our other Web Archive collections through the Library’s Minerva Web site. The Election 2002 Web Archive illustrates how the Library catalogues archives and makes them available to researchers either onsite at the Library or through the Library’s public access Web site. This will give you an idea how your archived site may appear on our Web site.

Because of the content value of your Web site, the Library may have contacted you for permission to collect and display your site in other Web Archive collections. If you previously granted permission, we thank you for your participation, however, each new archive, including the Election 2004 Web Archive, requires separate permissions from each site owner. At this time, the Library requests your permission to collect your Web site located at the following URL…

I consented.

The tunnels of “Big Dig” — the project to bury the elevated expressway through downtown Boston — are closed during evening throughout this week, presumably because they pass near the Fleet Center, and would thus be a terrorism conduit.

Tonight, when heading out of the Center to make my way home, I noticed a “shuttle buses this way” sign in the corner of my eye. Hmmmm, I thought. Perhaps I can save the walk-subway-shuttle hassle and go direct. Sure enough, there was a special shuttle for my hotel — the Sheraton Braintree.

I made my way through the various gates and checkpoints (I had to show my credentials to be allowed to get on the bus), and ten minutes after I boarded, the bus (from the “Peter Pan” company, no less) glided down onto the “closed” expressway, allowed to do this because of a special “we’re an authorized bus” sign in the front window. We carried a Boston Police officer aboard for the entire trip — there’s one assigned to every bus.

And there was no traffic. None. We had the expressway to ourselves. This is, I hazard a guess, every Boston commuters dream. And I got to live it.

We made it to Quincy in 15 minutes flat, and I was walking in the hotel’s front door 30 minutes after we left the Fleet Center. Amazing.

And so it ends. Or at least starts its fade to black. I’m about to close the iBook here at the Fleet Center and head back to my hotel for the night. In the morning I head out to the airport and make my way back to Charlottetown. I’ll now doubt have more to say about what this experience has been like.

By the way, “that’s 30 for now” is the sign-off line that Ken Bosveld used for his column in the Waterdown Review, my old hometown paper, and the vehicle I used to attend my first political convention, 20 years ago, when John Turner beat Jean Chretien to become leader of the Liberal Party.

You will notice that a common theme here today, when not considering issues of civil liberties, has been a sort of naive wonder at how, er, “unreal” this convention seems.

I think the root of this has something to do with the fact that I am trapped inside a mental model that sees society’s governing of itself as a sort of scaled up version of an honest, thoughful conversation between two people sitting on a park bench.

Two people sitting on a park bench, I reason, can pretty effectively manage their park bench relationship, especially if they’re open-minded, more so if they are like-minded.

You scale up from that to a town council, and so on until you get to national-scale governing.

Where I break down, and the root of my naiveté, is my assumption that as you travel up this scale you don’t, of necessity, depart from the real, observable, understandable world of the park bench and enter a world of far more fluid, complex, neutrino-like forces.

It is the management of these forces — which by their nature are difficult to manage — that events like this convention are designed for. This is not a series of one-to-one conversations. It’s not even a series of one-to-many conversations. It involves using the battering ram of television to attempt to bash into the minds of enough people, in a seductive enough way, to move the pendulum in your direction.

Several readers have suggested that I get out on the floor and “talk to real delegates” by way of mitigating this primal flow with some real conversation. But real conversation is irrelevant here — what one person thinks is no longer important, for it is only as part of the collective that their nature can be shaped.

My friend Oliver says, somewhat in jest, that I should “just look for the chi” when trying to understand the measurement of “energizedness” here. And in a way he’s right: “chi” — “the vital force believed in Taoism and other Chinese thought to be inherent in all things.” it says here — is maybe what I’m talking about.

This is a butter sculpture. We are the butter. The convention is the sculptor’s chisel.

Looked at through that lens — which is indeed what the mainstream media are doing in abundance and with considerable enthusiasm — the Democrats are doing a decent job. The butter is taking shape. Dip in.

It says here that I’m a “liberal dem.” Who knew? Like the shirt says “label people, not jars.” Or was it the other way around?

Here’s some video I just shot of the “energized” Democrats here at the Fleet Center (see this post for the reason for the quotation marks).