- Jan 4, 2007
- 2,572
- 0
- 76
just wanted to say hi, today was great.
I work near Times Square in an office building and we received an email at 11am from our IT that our bandwidth had hit 100% usage due to excessive streaming of news video sites and to please cut back
- and this is no small company. close to 1k employees at this location with a strong relationship to online media so what one would think is a pretty solid amount of bandwidth - but i digress.
the internet issue was inconsequential, for some colleagues and I had planned to check out the speech at a restaurant/bar across the street. but initially we decided to scope out times square and see how it was, since my experience there on Election night was an event to remember.
it was a nice vibe, good people, and the cheering of a group united in positive thinking and a hope for a better future - for a time when a burden that we carried for eight years was finally released from our existence and obligations as a nation. but with all that great emotion stocking the air and crisp giant video on screens surrounding us - the audio was no good. So my colleagues left and I stayed. Stayed to see the swearing in and take in the roar of the crowd when that final oath was taken and the mission both completed and just began.
i took it all in, got choked up, and then got serious -
i sprinted 5 blocks back to that restaurant across from the office, and i spent it listening to obama's acceptance speech - in a normal neighborhood pub, with an attentive crowd of colleagues and strangers all standing quietly save for brief sparks of applause and the sniffles of tears, necks strained up to see the tv and watch history unfold in the same direction that their gazes traveled - upwards and forward.
and what should be realized is that we did not elect a perfect president or person by any means, but someone with a sense of thoughtfulness and intellect, resolve and empathy and an ability to make the right decisions more often than not. a someone that is unique in the history of american presidencies not just for the color of his skin, but by the emotion and anti-establishment wave created by millions of people that have invested something into this moment as much as any other moment in our young history in a nation. and that power has changed our country for the better before, lest we forget our recent history.
in fact that investment by people seemed to take so many previous moments and assimilate them, build them, meld them together and carry them forward in this one giant expressive moment that was not only a movement forward, but a rejection of the regressiveness that has handicapped us as a nation for the last group of years - and that we were lucky to have witnessed today -
and all that collaborative process of people combining with history to form progress is what we have to work with now, above and beyond the direction we can get from the right kind of leadership in place - although one should not understimate what inspired leadership and a people inspired by leadership can bring - as obama noted by the words washington chose to read from Paine before they crossed the delaware....
those two entities can build greater things than any one could on its own. combine these two things with a grassroots technologically driven information superhighway that does not allow just the very few to control the flow of how we learn about the world and events around us, that makes the strange not so strange and allows communities of all sizes to mingle and relate.....
and that is all we could really ask for at a time like this
I work near Times Square in an office building and we received an email at 11am from our IT that our bandwidth had hit 100% usage due to excessive streaming of news video sites and to please cut back
- and this is no small company. close to 1k employees at this location with a strong relationship to online media so what one would think is a pretty solid amount of bandwidth - but i digress.
the internet issue was inconsequential, for some colleagues and I had planned to check out the speech at a restaurant/bar across the street. but initially we decided to scope out times square and see how it was, since my experience there on Election night was an event to remember.
it was a nice vibe, good people, and the cheering of a group united in positive thinking and a hope for a better future - for a time when a burden that we carried for eight years was finally released from our existence and obligations as a nation. but with all that great emotion stocking the air and crisp giant video on screens surrounding us - the audio was no good. So my colleagues left and I stayed. Stayed to see the swearing in and take in the roar of the crowd when that final oath was taken and the mission both completed and just began.
i took it all in, got choked up, and then got serious -
i sprinted 5 blocks back to that restaurant across from the office, and i spent it listening to obama's acceptance speech - in a normal neighborhood pub, with an attentive crowd of colleagues and strangers all standing quietly save for brief sparks of applause and the sniffles of tears, necks strained up to see the tv and watch history unfold in the same direction that their gazes traveled - upwards and forward.
and what should be realized is that we did not elect a perfect president or person by any means, but someone with a sense of thoughtfulness and intellect, resolve and empathy and an ability to make the right decisions more often than not. a someone that is unique in the history of american presidencies not just for the color of his skin, but by the emotion and anti-establishment wave created by millions of people that have invested something into this moment as much as any other moment in our young history in a nation. and that power has changed our country for the better before, lest we forget our recent history.
in fact that investment by people seemed to take so many previous moments and assimilate them, build them, meld them together and carry them forward in this one giant expressive moment that was not only a movement forward, but a rejection of the regressiveness that has handicapped us as a nation for the last group of years - and that we were lucky to have witnessed today -
and all that collaborative process of people combining with history to form progress is what we have to work with now, above and beyond the direction we can get from the right kind of leadership in place - although one should not understimate what inspired leadership and a people inspired by leadership can bring - as obama noted by the words washington chose to read from Paine before they crossed the delaware....
those two entities can build greater things than any one could on its own. combine these two things with a grassroots technologically driven information superhighway that does not allow just the very few to control the flow of how we learn about the world and events around us, that makes the strange not so strange and allows communities of all sizes to mingle and relate.....
and that is all we could really ask for at a time like this
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