It's my good fortune that my VP has been traveling quite a bit and asked me to take her place this week at AO2005: The Innovation Summit @ Stanford ( http://www.alwayson-network.com ). This is AlwaysOn's yearly conference and it just kicked off late Tuesday with a couple of presentations, award announcements, and a panel discussion.
Nothing earth shattering so far but there was a guillty pleasure moment during the panel segment. It featured Sandy Berger (Chairman, Stonebridge International and former White House national security adviser), Jerry Brown (Mayor of Oakland and former Governor of California), and Michael Medved (radio talk show host). The panel was moderated by Tony Perkins, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AlwaysOn.
During the panel, one of two large screens was displaying live chat by those watching a webcast of the event. The chat was obviously uncensored and minimally moderated. The guilty pleasure? Well, the panelists were discussing serious topics in which I, under normal circumstances, would've been extremely interested. Unfortunately, the folks in chat (who I'm not sure realized they were being displayed live) were providing some hilarious entertainment. It was strange hearing a panelist talking about something of global importance while someone in chat was saying "Bring on the dancing girls..." (to which someone responded, "There are dancing girls?". The answer was yes, by the way...). My other personal favorite was when someone posed the question of whether President Bush would fire Karl Rove if he found out that he had revealed the ending of the latest Harry Potter book. Too funny!
I'm not sure if it was intended as such but, for me anyway, the whole session was sort of like my life these days. Serious things to which I should be paying attention but so much other stuff that is entertaining and absorbing that competes with it. Tomorrow's agenda looks very interesting and I'll try to get a couple of posts up if Old Silver (my Toshiba laptop) remains trustworthy.
Glad to see you are having a good time. ;>
Posted by: Gary Potter | 20 July 2005 at 10:28 AM