It Brings a City Together

This evening, a good portion of Pittsburgh sat down to watch their beloved Penguins hopefully finally put away the Philedelphia Flyers in their opening series of the playoffs.

Maybe halfway through the first period, we had a glimmer of what was coming. A blast of Twitters proclaimed that Comcast had a bit of a hiccup during the commercials.

Then it happened. Fresh into the second period. We went dark on my Dish Network based television. The Twitter verse exploded and I think I heard crying echoing through the hills of Beechview...

Even Bijou hangs her head in shame...

Was it Comcast? Was it FSN? Is this another dastardly NBC plan to piss off Pittsburgh?

Soon, Twitter had answers...

itsonlyjim Lightning strike hit FSN transmission site in Atlanta. Comcast CAN route VS feed on air but is apparently choosing not to.

Everyone responded, and retweeted to their unconnected friends. The screen was confirmed to still have the feed. So the expected downtown riot did not happen. Though I'd be interested in the stats on bar fights during the outage.

At least Mike Lange didn't fail us.

Nor did the internet.

I MAKE hockey happen on my TV...

Soon, there was another flurry of these "grey area" feeds of the Versus coverage of the game, which was not available to area subscribers thanks to blackout rules with FSN.

burghbaby @unclecrappy I've got a quote for you. "Twitter came through for me when FSN was busy sucking big hairy donkey balls."

FSN was called everyting from an embarrassment to the reason the Pens lost what should have been a shoe in series. (Lets be honest. It is almost karmic...) But they werent' the only ones to get caught up with the digital scuffle...

ChachiSays @comcastcares if you really cared reroute the effing game!

comcastcares @ChachiSays We are not permitted. We do not own the rights to the game. It would be a big legal issue

So props for that rep to stand up to a pissed off city when I hear they weren't even able to start to respond to the angry phone calls...

It's one of those events where you can see how this new medium comes through when our conventional means don't. Rather than sitting here, staring our our blank TVs, speculating what happened for maybe 20 minutes, information got around. Instead of calling one or two friends, of which I received from a coworker not in the loop, everyone passed along info, asked questions, and got answers. And in the end, all of the speculation was confirmed by FSN themselves as they apologized well into the third period.

Geek Party!

So yeah. I took a couple days off from the world of blogging. And somewhat twitter. Things are pretty crazy with keeping in touch there, surviving Christmas, work dropping bombs, and some
freelance coming back to haunt me.

But Friday night, I did get a chance to go to the Party de la Kownacki/Turiano out in Highland Park. I didn't know much of what to expect, but worried as 40 people RSVP'd for his shindig. Oh man.

So we set out, Will driving, bringing along Veronica and his friend Mel (that's a girl's name). We get there and I quickly realize this is like a Podcamp Jr. Without the learning. More or less everyone we've hung with from Podcamp/Bootcamps was there (sadly, the SIDT guys weren't in attendance). Even our future mayor of Pittsburgh was there! Dawn Pa-POO-ga was there. Some STBD cast members. Locobone from Erie himself. The Woy. The G-Spod guys (who I talked with forever about our shows), and plenty more.

It was a great time. Lots of food, lots of talk, a few people I've never seen before that were...interesting. It was great to have so many people that are always communicating via blogs and Twitter in a such a loose setting. The highlight of the night, of course, was Norm leading us i a round of Walking in a Winder Wonderland via multiple Twitters. By far the geekiest thing I have ever been involved with.

So it's safet o say I've had a great fill of Christmas parties this year, between the crazy work party and this one. Here's to 2008...