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discussion: I'm tired
Wednesday, May 19 1999
Today was the big day for my company, whose name, with even the slightest research, you should be able to establish.
Elizabeth Dole gave her cybercast, and it came off without any "challenges." As expected, there was no substance to it whatsoever. Still, it was a great marketing success, about as good as anything our company has pulled off to date. For the first few minutes of her speach, Mrs. Dole read directly from a script that someone in our marketing department wrote for her. As cynical as I was about the whole affair, I had to agree that the interests of the company were advanced by this event. In the bathroom as we were pissing, Marty (the "VP of System Architecture") told me, "I have to hand it to Adam [one of at least two "VPs of Marketing"]. This is big."
And, as brushes with fame go, it was intriguing to watch our own Al asking Mrs. Dole canned questions just like a genuine celebrity news guy. I got a special out of the irony of the long-winded anti-drug monologue Mrs. Dole felt the need to deliver.
I could have attended the actual presentation, in a hotel downtown. I could have sat in the same room with Elizabeth Dole and breathed the same air she was using to manufacture her uncontroversial Republican feel-good pablum. But the prospect of sitting with a roomfull of aging internet-illiterate rich Republicans held little appeal for me. (I guess what I'm saying is that it wasn't a Randomly Ever After Moment.) So I stayed at the workplace. For some reason my computer received a nearly-perfect cybercast while all around me suffered and complained at the hands of jerky video and "network congestion, rebuffering," so those of my colleagues not actually at the event all stood around my computer watching. I set my 19 inch monitor to 640 by 480 (from its usual 1600 by whatever) and it was like watching a six-inch television.
Internet broadcast technology still has a ways to go, that's one fact this event made abundantly clear. Broadcast.com, the company actually handling and delivering the signal, sent out a data type that only the latest upgrade of the RealMedia player could handle. As a result, many people could only hear the audio channel.
In the evening, Kim and I watched the end of Elizabeth and then started on The Horse Whisperer. If there was ever a movie tailor-made for Hoagie, my mother, The Horse Whisperer is it. It combines the wildest of the West, a soft-spoken rugged cowboy (though Hoagie would surely prefer Clint Eastwood to Robert Redford) and a touching made - for - teevee - as - a - women's - alternative - to - Monday - Night - football plot. Though I was especially impressed by the expansive Montana setting of the outdoor scenes, unfortunately I fell asleep somewhere in the middle. When I woke up and went to bed, Kim came after me wanting to discuss the matter. She found it troubling that I was splitting during the most romantic part of a romantic movie when I should have been holding her close and giving her lovin'. I found it ludicrous that I needed to actually discuss my being tired, so I yelled at her (in a childish whiny voice) until she left me alone. I heard her crying when she returned to bed, but I ignored her because I didn't want to stay up all night arguing about my being tired.
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