- A bit late. “ug”

-Friday was a 21 hour work day. All for a failed experiment in editing golf to look hip, quick and cool.

-Saturday started at 10pm (back to Pacific Time). Lasted 10 hours.

-Sunday started at 11am (goodbye to Pacific Time). 3 hours of sleep can feel like a hangover without the fun of drinking beforehand. Sunday’s work ended with me finishing the last piece of televised video for the Open (or what’s known as the rollout) less than a minute before it aired on ABC. There is a certain amount of critical timing with creative works that can only come from television; regardless of what you think of TV, when you are editing video that is set to air live for an audience of over a million people, the surreal suppression of stress around the 2 minute mark is a huge high if you end up making air within the window. There is no undo and once “published” there is no “editing” if you notice a mistake. I only write this to help explain the adrenalin rush I live with when I work on a live television remote. I don’t do them often enough to be jaded by the experience… just enough to feel the rush every time I’m amount to anonymously embarrass myself to the viewers of sports television.

-Flight @ 7am. Airport over an hour and a half away. Cab picking me up at 3:30am. What to do..? Sleep? No, but instead I will stay up, drink, blog, and watch UK telly till the cab arrives.

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I just finished a grueling remote for the British Open (or the Open if you’re in the UK).  While working I overheard a network bigwig comment about a feature:

“I thought the music at the end was a bit too sugary…. You know. conscious clearing.”

My initial reaction to the last two words was one of inside laughter, but honestly, at the time I didn’t understand the meaning. Why those two words? Then it finally hit me.

Those two words are the nerf around the bullet of criticism; as long as you end a negative comment with “conscious clearing”, then you aren’t putting direct blame on the targeted person, but on your guilt ridden self for not being able to live with the thought of not mentioning the critique that is ripping you apart. Before this concept spreads, I want to over use the hell out of it. By the time this crappy communication style reaches the west coast, I want people to already be humorously using this phrase as if it was a killer joke from Office Space.  Some examples to get you started:

“Looks good, but shouldn’t you use a better looking font… conscious clearing”

“Your voice really bugs me… conscious clearing”

“I think you are a horrible boss… conscious clearing”

“You could use a wax or shave down there… conscious clearing”

“You are the most pointless, worthless person I’ve ever met. May you take a deep dive in a shallow pool… conscious clearing”

Biggest abuse of the umlaut, and it must be stopped, or just mocked.

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- Regardless of if my parents would make me walk a mile to get to school, even if in rain, I find myself okay with calling and requesting someone on the ESPN compound take the time to pick me up. My reasons for this follow:

• The weather can change on a dime from just gray and cold, to gray, cold, and horizontally raining during the time it would take me to walk. Arriving to a job site, soaking wet to the bone in a suit on a cold day to sit in an air conditioned room for 12 hours isn’t reasonable… not for someone whose been doing this for a decade, and not for someone whose only just gotten started.
• I didn’t choose to room at a house more than a mile from site.
• I didn’t choose to not allow me a rental car. The overnight editor staying here has one… so I will happily wait for someone with one to pick me up.

- After watching the first day of the Open, golf remains a mystery to me. Maybe it’s because Royal Birkdale is a fucking hard course. When you see it from a wide shot, your first thought would be wonderment over the lack of groundskeeping that’s not occurring just outside the greens. And the number of sand traps, or bunkers as they call them, is really absurd. Teamed up with the uneven greens, and this could almost be a the ultimate mini golf tournament.

- Saturday ESPN live coverage starts I think at 7:30am on Saturday. The tease will play then (I did nothing for this tease btw, but it’s really good), followed shortly by a recap of the first two days which I will start editing Friday night. My tease will air on Sunday (and probably look very similar at parts to Saturdays)

- I watched footage of a pro golfer smoking while playing.  As if you needed more proof that golfers’ aren’t athletes.

- You learn something every day; for me, it’s Mickleson… not Nickleson

- After the shitty weather and ridiculous course, two of the 140+ golfers playing quit today.

- I know understand why Tiger decided to opt for knee surgery over playing here. No matter how good you might be, you won’t look good playing here. The wind, rain and course have seen to that.

- Turns out another pro golfer decided instead to play a tournament in Wisconsin. We shot a funny piece with another pro standing on a hill, battling high winds and sideways rain while expressing disbelief that his colleague would forgo the experience for 85 degree calm weather.

- The next two nights look like killers for me and the workload. If I get a chance to update this, don’t feel cheated if it’s an entry with only one word… ug.

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- Golf is extremely boring to edit or even watch.

- British plumbing sucks.  The upstairs toilet won’t flush.  I think it’s an issue with the mechanics of the water tank, but upon visual inspection, it’s more complicated than US toilets, which can be manually forced to flush with ease.  I’ll compare it to the toilet downstairs tomorrow to see if I can see what’s different, which is definitely my most favorite idea to do with my time not working.

- The tease is voiced by Gary Oldman, which is cool. I watched the Saturday tease already (I’m here to edit the Sunday one).  The tease is all about how miserable the weather is here and how hard it is to play golf.  The script and Gary’s read are both very taunting of the pussies over the pond (my words, not from script)

- I’m starting to wonder if the pilgrims really came over because they heard about a place with better weather than England.  Trust me, it’s really shit here.  Not extreme, but just a constant downer today.  At least in California I knew there was blue sky above the smoke… here I start to wonder.

- It looks like a loophole in commercial music licensing might be tested here.  Since the show will be on ABC, and while they have a deal with the music industry, as long as a piece looks like it was edited live in the tuck with commerical music over it, it’s okay to use.  The problem is they want me to edit videos, but make it look like it was switched live.  I told them with a bottle of rum at my side, I could edit really serendipitous pieces that wouldn’t cut perfectly to the music and might fool people into thinking it was a truck’s work.

- British coke sucks.  And the pigeons are huge.  And they drive on the other side of the road.  So do the trains.

- Oh, one last thing.  To unlock the front door, I have to use a key.  Okay, so far so good.  To lock the door once I’ve come inside, I use… a key.  Seriously, England is over 1000 years old, and they still haven’t discovered convenience.

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8 00 am - Get picked up to go to Breakfast, then the airport

10 00 am - Get dropped off at the airport, proceed to lounge to get wasted

noon - stumble to my gate (after remembering to grab cash as United isn’t giving away drinks for flights over the Atlantic)

1 00 pm - wheels up, ian out.

2 9 cell batteries for my laptop provide power the for the entire flight to London.

10 30 pm - wheels down in London

11 30 pm - wheels back up for Manchester. Middle seat with a large man sitting next to me. Arm rest between us couldn’t go down.

12 30am - arrive in Manchester. Grab pounds from an atm and a cab from outside

2 00 am - arrive at the TV compound in Southport. $206 cab ride with a chatty cabby

3 00 am - Aimee offers to drive me to the house I’m staying at with a stop off at the store for supplies.

3 45 am - Arrive at the house. What the fuck? It’s a family home, but the family is on holiday. Two of the bedrooms have photos of teenage girls all over the wall. One of the bedrooms is pink. The last is very small, yellow, and is the least decorated to remind me I’m staying in some strangers home. I’m in that room.

They left no notes for us. The fridge is empty, but the freezer is full. The back door is resistant to unlocking. There is a filing cabinet in my bedroom with a lock, but it is left unlocked. Their mail is pilling up in the entry way.

2 of the bedrooms, including mine, have computers in them. The computers boot up without passwords. They both have internet via wireless. I can not find the router anywhere. Try to connect with my laptop. The wireless is locked. What the fuck?

5 15 am - Crack the wireless network with the help of the computer in my room and a handy program called WirelessKeyView. Just to stick it to the strangers that own this place, I printed copies of the key for my house mates.

5 30 am - finishing writing this entry.

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I’m in the middle of a long and boring software maintenance on my laptop that keep me from using the web while installing programs, so naturally I’ve taken very long breaks away from the slow progress bar to surf. But at this stage in the process, I’m deliberately without the flash plug in for Firefox, and the web is a very different place without it.

It’s almost like I took my bat home and watched the rest of the kids keep playing, unaffected by my exclusion protest. Every page loads with a bar letting me know I’m missing something. Boing Boing teases a funny/interesting/mindblowing video that I can’t see, but instead I’m reminded about my browser shortcomings. The damn shaded green puzzle piece has become the modern manifest of a childhood school bully that kept me from the playground. If the sympathy vacuum for a crippled web experience were translated to the real world, handicap signs would be really funny. Youtube’s error message doesn’t even cover someone with my condition; they think either I have java turned off, or an old version of the Flash player. And while the lack of the haunting puzzle piece is refreshing, the lack of acknowledgement to someone with my condition is isolating.

I’ll be honest, I know dick about HTML and PHP, but I really know Flash (I bet on the wrong horse in 1998, so sue me). That being said, I see the resentment in Flash only websites (even google warns you), so with all the Flash haters out there, I just want to report that the web is complicated and web life without Flash is definitely crippled at best.

(note: written while drinking)

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Well, I guess this blank slate would be my blog…

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