Thoughts of a Random Gamer

After a couple of weeks of solid material, we now return you to regularly schedules articles from Priestbeast.

I apologize for not having my review of Far Cry 2 completed but graduate school started back up again and that means less video game time.  I’m sure lots of you understand the dilemma between work, school, and video games.

In the stead of that review, I wanted to relive some of the Inauguration proceedings.  Now, I will lay it out there that I am for Obama and I am excited by what he might do for the United States.  So having said that, I will try to make this post fair to both sides of the table.  I mean, what side doesn’t like technology anyway?

When I finally realized that the inaugural proceedings were going on in Eastern Time and not Central Time, I rapidly turned on the tube, feverishly hoping that I did not miss the swearing in part of the proceedings.  Unfortunately I did.  All of the major news networks fully brought it to my attention that the chief justice who swore Obama in, fumbled over the words to the oath set forth by the Constitution.  Wish I could have seen that. They were so worried about whether the oath was completed correctly that Obama and chief justice Roberts had a re-oathing private ceremony in the Map Room of the White House yesterday.  What is kind of scary is that the botched attempt had Obama saying, “I will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully.”  Kind of a dangerous little slip up in some ways, although with no wrong intentions.

Obama’s speech after being sworn in sent people’s hearts around the world soaring, while sadly the stock market went down a bit, but what else is new?  People were able to watch the proceedings from TVs not far from DC, to TVs that probably don’t get the best reception in little known parts of Kenya, where Obama’s father was from and I bet freezing parts of Siberia and Alaska too.  It was nice to hear Obama mention how the world wide community was connected in that moment.

When the cameras were zooming out to look over the crowd that had gathered to see Obama in DC, it almost looked like the Inauguration process had met with some sort of million man, woman, and children march.  However, most estimates put the crowd size at well over a million.  But how could everyone see Obama?  To people standing a mile away he would be just a spec of color against other specs of color standing in the middle of a stage.  But everyone involved in crowd control and the inaugural proceedings had that under control.

Massive billboard like structures were erected so that people would be able to watch some sort of close-circuit proceedings of what was going on up on the main stage.  These structures showed not only video, but many also had close-captioning.

Picture of a TV billboard, showing the crowd stretched to the Washington Monument

Now, I was not there so I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that they had some sort of speaker system set up so that not everyone had to just read the captions while they were standing by the Washington Monument (a long haul from the porch of the Capitol building).  In this picture it would appear that there are.

CNN and other news stations also employed the use of cameras on long boom structures to reach out over the crowd and look up and down.  Many times they would show off by cutting to a camera further back in the crowd only to zoom almost completely right up to Obama.  It’s amazing what video camera’s can do, especially the high definition ones that they must have deployed for an event such as this.

Now, when you have a million people descending on a single location such as D.C. it also causes a lot of havoc for the wireless phone companies such as Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T.  Temporary cell towers had to be erected from fear that when everyone called their Favorite 5 or sent pictures to everyone in their contact list, that the system would crash.  Apparently this increase in strength comes from temporary towers called COWs and COLTs.  COWs are Cell on Wheels.

Doesn't look like a light truck to me

A COLT is a Cell on Light Truck and supposedly each can handle 1500 extra callers, while only a fifth of those calls can go through simultaneously. Fortunately I heard nothing about service crashing during that time.

To appease a bit of the chemist in me, I must also mention the fact that the President was safely protected behind many panels of bulletproof glass.  A marvel of materials, chemistry, and engineering.  Luckily it was not needed.  He also read from his nice little teleprompter, which seemed to be located on his left side, as he often turned his head in that direction to read.

These are just a few of the technologies deployed for the inauguration.  I cannot even begin to conceive what the Secret Service, FBI, CIA and everyone involved in security were using that day.  They had cars prohibited a long ways from the inauguration site to make sure nothing happened, and they all communicated during the ceremony to make sure nothing went wrong.  My thanks goes out to them and my best wishes go out to President Obama.  Bring us into the future with safety and prosperity.

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