I love messing with customer service representatives. I just got a call from Comcast asking me a series of questions, which I was suppose to answer on a 1-10 scale. The call was to rate my experience with their billing department when I called a week ago. I had originally called because my bill was much higher than expected, so I wanted to test their math.

I started answering with decimal points (for example 3.675 instead of 3) and making her round to the nearest number. Then I went to division, multiplication, irrational numbers, square roots, cube roots and powers. I asked her to answer the math problems to make sure she could accurately rate my dissatisfaction their service. She did ok, but I still don't trust them to bill me correctly.

Yesterday was hectic. We arrived at the Denver athletic club at 7:00 am to shoot our morning breakfast panel. Our guest was Nancy Pelosi and she had other commitments, so it only lasted 30 minutes. I came back to the workspace and edited the videos for Yahoo and Politico. In the afternoon, we had an hour and fifteen minutes to shoot two 2-camera interviews and a live shot. It all had to be done in the workspace and the live shot was between the 2-camera shoots. So we had to tear down and rebuild the set between each shoot. The first interview was with Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. He came in with a whole group of assistants, who proceeded to take up every remaining foot of space in the studio. After Simon's live shot we interviewed Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco. He seemed like a nice guy and I agreed with much of what he said, but I couldn't get past the size of his hair. I wanted to touch it to see what was sticking it up.

This morning our Yahoo / Politico coverage included the governors of Arizona and Montana, as well as a senator from Colorado. The videos made the Yahoo homepage both days. I missed it yesterday, but here is a link to today's video. Tonight we are in the process of packing all of our gear and shipping it to St. Paul for the Republican National Convention. We will go out tonight to celebrate the end of the DNC.

We had a classic media road trip moment last night. We finished at the DNC around 9:00. By 9:30 the "Pimp Mobile" (our huge SUV) was packed full of people and pizza. We were heading back to the hotel. Emily was driving, Steve was getting directions on his GPS and yelling them to her from the back seat. Suddenly, Olly received a call from one of our radio clients to do an analysis of the presidential race. He eloquently answered all of the questions, while balancing a pizza on his lap and ignoring Steve's audible GPS. We gave him a nice round of applause when he was done.

This morning we started our series of 4 camera shoots for Yahoo and Politico. It went relatively smoothly, but the audio people were causing huge problems. They have not showed up to any of the meetings and had no clue what they were doing. They clearly did not test anything before the show, so the microphones were causing feedback the entire time. CSPAN was broadcasting the event live, but they were forced to stop because the audio was so bad.

Emily and I arrived in Denver on Friday. After renting a car, we checked into our hotel and went to the site of the Democratic National Convention. Our workspace is within the vast Newshour complex and we have had to cram in all ten of us plus the video studio. There is hardly room to walk. Meanwhile, the rest of the Newshour space is neat and spacious. Dennis, our cameraman from Moscow, arrived Friday afternoon (without his luggage). We went out to dinner with him, Jen, and Todd. He was so excited about the American food and service that he giggled like a schoolboy every time a waitress came to our table.

Saturday the rest of the FSN crew showed up and we spent a few hours arranging the video set, before going out to dinner. We were all too tired and jet lagged to stay out late, so we were in bed by 10:30.

Today was hectic. We left the hotel at 7:30am and spent the morning trying to get our equipment to work (unsuccessfully). At 1:00 we had a practice run for our Politico coverage, which went surprisingly well. The Politico shoot is going to be our most complicated gig of the conventions. We must set it up from scratch every morning and shoot a panel discussion with 4 cameras and live switching. When we came back to the office, Simon was about to go live on Chanel News Asia. We were having trouble connecting the camera to the live video broadcasting unit. Ten minutes before he went live, we propped up the live video unit on cardboard boxes and used the built in camera (which is used for video conferencing) to shoot.

It was an exhausting weekend. Emily and I took the 6:00am bus to NYC to help Kat move. Her apartment was mostly packed when we arrived, so her and Emily picked up the truck and we started loading. It didn't take as long as expected, but a couple hours of heavy lifting wore us out. Just as we were heading out for lunch, Kat realized that her keys were locked in the apartment. The apartment next door was undergoing renovation, so we were able to climb onto the shared fire escape. Unfortunately her a/c was screwed into the window and we were not able to move it. I noticed a small (12" x 6") window into her kitchen. I squeezed through the window suffering only minor cuts on my arms and ribs and unlocked the door. We ate lunch at a cool little Mexican restaurant near Kat's house in Brooklyn. Then Emily and Kat drove the truck and I took the bus back to DC. We got home around 10:30.

Sunday we unloaded the really heavy stuff from the truck while waiting for Lindsey to arrive. She was suppose to come over at 11:30 so we could make it to my cousin's going away party on time. At 11:20 she still hadn't left the house. So I told her that we were leaving at noon regardless of whether or not she was with us. Miraculously she made it on time. So Emily, Lindsey and I drove to my grandmother's house in Baltimore for the party. Emily had a good time talking politics with grandma's friends. We all stuffed ourselves on grandma's food and her amazing (flourless) cupcakes.

My company hired me out to another company this week to edit a PBS documentary. It is a big project, the show is one hour long, and it is fraught with internal politics. (Section deleted at the suggestion of Jen and Todd)

Aside from the politics of the edit, there was some excitement on Wednesday. The office suddenly got very dark. It looked like the lights had been dimmed, but we quickly realized that the sky had blackened. The wind began to roar past our window. I looked down the street to the left and saw trash and debris spiraling upward. We were startled by a loud noise on the other side of the office. Someone suggested we go downstairs in case the (presumed) tornado hit our building. It was over as quickly as it began. We looked out the windows on the other side of the office and noticed that the roof had been blown off the building next to us.

I had an eventful week... Tuesday Emily and I helped the Newshour team with an interview of the Pakistani Prime Minister. We were there to capture the interview live for the web. We arrived early to get past the legions of security and sat around listening to the crew bitching about how hard their job was (despite the fact that they were sitting around for hours bitching about their job).

Wednesday I was at the White House to shoot Bush signing some Aids bill. I had to get there two hours before the event. After sitting around for half an hour in the press briefing room, they escorted all of the cameramen into the East room to set up. Then we had to go back to the press briefing room for another hour while they checked our equipment for bombs and we were finally let back into the East room to shoot the event. The usual path between the briefing center and the East room was blocked, so I got to see a new part of the building, the basement. The White House, like so many federal buildings, looks so nice and new from the outside, but on the inside they really show their age.

Thursday I was on Ted Stevens watch. He is the senator being indicted for concealingly gifts from an oil company. I had to wait for hours outside of the DC courthouse for him to take the "perp walk". After waiting a couple hours, I walked up to shoot the SEC building for the Economist. The security guards at the SEC didn't care, but the ones at the building across the street had a fit. This lady kept trying to call me over to talk to her (ruining my audio), but I wouldn't come and she wouldn't leave her post. Finally she called her supervisor. I explained that it wasn't a crime to film a building, so he called his supervisor, who brought along HIS supervisor. Finally there were a whole group of security guards (each one managing the one below him) discussing what to do with me. So I let them talk, finished shooting and walked away.

Yesterday, Emily and I got new tires for the car and walked around Costco and the Pentagon mall waiting for them to be installed. Last night, I went to the Nationals game with Aaron, which was a lot of fun. It was the first time I had been to the new stadium. We were worried that the game would be rained out, but it ended up being very nice weather.