I spent Tuesday and Wednesday following around Jacob Zuma (presumably the next president of South Africa). Sherwin, the SABC correspondent from New York was in DC for the week. He was in constant contact with Zuma's press liaison, who told us exactly when and where we should be each day. Of course, plans quickly changed. Zuma was suppose to meet with Condeleezza Rice at the state department. So we got there early to film his arrival. We waited and waited, but he never showed up. Sherwin got a call saying that Zuma was on his way to the White House to meet Bush. We rushed to the White House and got there just in time to film his arrival. He was detained at the front gate and almost not let in, because he didn't have ID. When Zuma was finally let in, his body guard pulled me aside and told me not to use the footage because it was embarrassing to the president. Oh well, I used it anyway. After the White House meeting, we got a quick interview with him and went back to the office to file a package.

Wednesday Sherwin and I went to the Ritz to film a story about Zuma's meeting with Richard Branson (the owner of Virgin Airline, among other things). They were meeting to discuss plans for Branson's charity to help with health issues in South Africa. We waited outside the room while they met and talked to Branson's personal assistant. She had a cell phone, two Blackberrys and a laptop. She didn't have time to chat because she was constantly talking on the phone, e-mailing on the laptop and answering messages on her Blackberrys. After the meeting, we interviewed Branson and Zuma together, then hung around the hotel suite eating their delicious baked goods and drinking coffee. They hadn't even touched the food!

Emily, Kat and I went to Eastern Market today. I've lived in DC for years and I have never gotten over there. It was fun! I spent most of the time looking at bikes, but I walked around with Emily and Kat for a while while they looked at home decor and the like. They went into the food area and got a bag of homemade fettuccine, which we just had for dinner. After Eastern Market, we went back to Costco. We were there yesterday, but Kat had to return something. I got some new thermal pants to prepare for the winter. We went for a jog this afternoon. Then Em and I watched some TV before falling asleep on the couch. Now Emily and Kat are watching some dumb movie and I'm bored.

I spent Monday and Tuesday in Chicago. I flew in on Monday with Susie, the MEP consultant who is producing the video. We went straight from the airport to a company which manufactures the glass on oven doors. There we conducted a few interviews and I got some b-roll of the factory. I got some ok shots, but the manager was very touchy about certain things being filmed. We had a huge deep dish pizza for dinner at Gino's East. After dinner I walked up and down the Magnificent Mile. It wasn't really that magnificent, just a bunch of shops. Tuesday I attended a meeting to learn about the PickensPlan from T. Boone Pickens. The presentation was interesting, but there wasn't much we could use for the video. The trip was easy and I enjoyed being in Chicago without freezing my ass off.

Today I went out to Fredricksburg Virginia for a Newshour project. It was another long, grueling day of interviews and b-roll. At least I had it easier than the correspondent. He flew into DC early this morning and took a flight back to New York at 7:30pm. The best part of the day was shooting at a local Italian restaurant called Basil and leaving with our arms full of fresh Italian food. It is definitely worth eating there if you are in the area.

Emily and I were in Boston last Friday and Saturday. We went to shoot the opening of the Greenway park, which is located where the highway use to be before the Big Dig. We got into Boston on Friday, filmed at the produce market near city hall and had a very nice dinner of homemade pasta in the North End. Saturday morning we went up and down the Greenway filming the events, including the official opening of the park. We spent the afternoon in the North End, which is like the little Italy of Boston. It is filled with delicious restaurants and pastry shops. We had lunch at an Italian restaurant that was so small the host had to stand outside. We had to squeeze in with all of our camera gear and wedge ourselves between the wall and another couple. At least the food was good. Neither of us had been to Boston before, but we had a great time. I would have liked to stay longer and see more of the city. Hopefully I will get up there again soon.

I spent last weekend in Jacksonville with Ted from FutureView. We stayed at the Marriott Sawgrass, a famous golf resort. It was quite an enjoyable weekend. Ted and I were producing videos for Georgetown University, who where having an alumni fundraiser there. Saturday we shot interviews with many of the alumni and I cut together a collection of soundbites. Sunday I made a photo-slideshow for them and Ted filmed their events. They had delicious buffets at every meal and all the free alcohol we could drink. It was so different from working in DC. The hotel staff were incredibly friendly and never asked any questions. In DC, they wouldn't have let us into the building without checking our ID, calling their supervisor and writing down all of the personal information we would give them. They even gave us a golf cart and let us roam the course.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Baton Rouge on a shoot for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Susie (the producer) and I flew into Louisiana on Tuesday afternoon and met with a local MEP representative for dinner. She took us to a popular seafood restaurant near LSU. We ate fried alligator, hush puppies and fried fish. The alligator was nothing special. It just tasted like chicken.

Wednesday we visited a local company which makes some kind of membranes for oil platforms. They gave us a detailed description, but I have no idea what they are used for. We shot an interview and some b-roll to be used in an upcoming MEP video.

Today I shot an interview with Charlie Wilson (the Charlie Wilson's War guy). It took place in an enormous mansion on the Potomac. This was one of the largest houses I have ever seen, but they gave us a small room to conduct the interview and limited the amount of gear we could bring in. It lasted about 30 minutes and will be shown on an Afghani TV station. He mostly talked about the clandestine war he helped fight. The most interesting part was hearing what he had to say about the current Iraq war. He criticized it harshly and said that it was pointless. He also said that if the US government had helped build infrastructure in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union left, we would not have had to invade.

I just got back from the Grand Canyon with my family.

Emily and I flew to Arizona on Thursday. Lindsey missed her flight. She got on the next one and we had to wait a couple hours at the airport for her to arrive. We stayed in a very nice hotel called the Phoenician. Too bad we didn't get to sleep or see much of the hotel. I won't go into much detail on this one.

Friday we drove up to the Grand Canyon. Along the way we stopped in Sedona (too touristy) and at a Flintstones themed roadside attraction (spectacularly tacky). We arrived at the canyon in the evening. It sure is a big hole.

Saturday we hiked into and back out of the hole. It took five hours and was great fun. I have a very fit family and we made the long hike seem easy. But after dinner we were exhausted and went to sleep early.

Sunday Emily, Lindsey and I went horseback riding in the morning. It was a guided trail ride and the guide wouldn't let us go faster than a walk. The scenery was nice, but I would have liked to go faster. Lindsey lost her camera sometime during or after the ride. She was so upset you would have thought her best friend just died. After lunch, we took a helicopter over the canyon. It was amazing! I had never been in a helicopter, but I soon realized that it is the only way to travel. I'm trying to clear some space in my backyard for a landing pad. That way I will have somewhere to park when I buy one. That night before dinner Emily and I took another hike into the hole. This time we only went for an hour and a half. Nice workout before dinner.

Monday we headed back to Phoenix after a brief stop in Sedona. Mom, Dad, Emily and I had a nice lunch at a Mexican restaurant. Lindsey opted to find takeout at another place. But she neglected to actually order any food, so she was quite upset when we left without waiting for her to eat. That night, we were suppose to stay at the nice Marriott near the mall, but were booked into the dumpy one near the ghetto. My mom was clearly not ok with the arrangements. She took care of the situation and we were promptly booked at the nicer hotel.

Yesterday our flight left at 9:30am and got in at 5:00pm. Stupid time change wasted the whole day. Emily and I brought small carry-on bags. Lindsey checked a large suitcase. Luckily her's was the first off the baggage claim. Or so we thought. Soon after leaving the airport, Lindsey got a message that Southwest had a bag with her name on it. We checked the trunk and realized that she had picked up the wrong bag. The bag we had belonged to a woman who was about to get married. Her wedding dress was in the suitcase. Lindsey turned the car around and swapped bags with the poor, hysterical bride.

Today I was out shooting b-roll of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The whole time I was waiting for a security guard to stop me. At Fannie Mae, they just told me to get off the grass. But at Freddy Mac the security guard started bothering me. I was hoping this would happen.
He said, "You can't film here, this is private property."
I said, "Not anymore it's not." And that was the end of that conversation.

We got back from the RNC yesterday. We had dinner with Emily's mom, step-dad and sister, before picking up the dogs. Today we slept until 2:30 pm. I don't remember the last time I slept that late. We saw the movie TransSiberian with Kat and Lindsey. It was really good. Lindsey kept getting scared and grabbing on to me. But it wasn't a scary movie, just suspenseful. Now Emily and I want to plan a trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad.

I flew into Minneapolis on Friday. Emily, Malcolm, Denis, Steve, Kate and I spent Saturday at the Mall of America. It is the the biggest mall in the country, but it has the same crappy stores as every other one. The only difference is the indoor theme park in the middle. We rode a couple of the rides and Dennis screamed like a baby the entire time. Emily was laughing so hard that she was crying (on the roller coaster).

Sunday we spent most of the day setting up at the RNC. That night we went to the Minnesota State Fair. It was amazing! They must have had every game, ride and fair food ever made. All of the food was either fried, on a stick or both. We tried the peanuts and chocolate on a stick, pork chops on a stick, enormous hotdogs, cotton candy, fried cheese curds, french fries, mini-doughnuts and fried cheesecake. Malcolm, Steve, Denis and I played all of the throwing and shooting games, but didn't win anything.

Yesterday was the first day of the RNC. The convention was cut short by the hurricane, but all of our clients went ahead with thier events. It was another long and busy day. It is a bit easier than the DNC though, because everything is in one building. We don't have to walk far to get anywhere and don't need seperate credentials to get into the convention events. I was pulled out of our morning shoot to interview Laura Bush. I didn't even have time to change microphones, so I had to record into the on camera mic. I rushed upstairs, found her surrounded by press and secret service and put a camera in her face. She mostly talked about Palin and I got some good soundbites. The interview was shown on Politico.com, Yahoo.com, Channel News Asia, and the Newshour online and TV.

So far all of the discussion at this convention has been about McCain's senseless choice of Sarah Palin. No one knows who she is and she still has not made a public appearance since she was announced. When we call the campaign to find out her schedule, no one knows where she is or what she is doing. She is suppose to show up at the Texas delegation dinner tonight, but she probably wont. I am going to head over there in a minute to wait for her.

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.

Emily and I drove to Florida on Friday for a vacation. The drive was easy; it took about 12.5 hours each way. We stayed at my parent's house in Orlando for the first couple nights. Saturday I went to the gun range with my dad, while Emily went to the mall with my mom. That night we had a great dinner at a Lebanese restaurant for Emily's birthday. Afterward, Diane came over with her dog. We had playtime for all the dogs in the backyard.

Sunday we had breakfast at First Watch before driving to the beach. Our friends Serena and Brad came with their daughter Bella. We hung out on the beach all day and burnt ourselves to a crisp. Emily and I wanted to take them to our favorite pizza place, Shroomers, for dinner. It was all boarded up when we arrived. Too bad. I have been eating there every time I visited the beach for the past 12 years. We tried a middle eastern place off International Speedway. It was also closed. We drove up the road looking for a restaurant, but everyone we tried was closed. Finally we ended up at a horrible Chinese buffet which made everyone nauseas.

Monday Emily and I spent the day on the beach reading and working on our sunburns. It was just what we needed after working hard for the last few months. We saw the Dark Night in the evening. It was great. I usually don't like comic book films, but this one played like a real movie, with just enough campiness, but not too much.

Tuesday we went to dog beach with Turtle and Piggy. They had a great time playing and digging holes. They kept going in the water, rolling in the sand, then jumping on us and making a big mess. Wednesday we drove home and got caught in the rain for 7 hours.

Why can't we be more like the Swiss?