Sarah Palin at Elon UniversityShe's no Tina Fey

I got Sarah Palin duty today at Elon University in Elon. I can't and won't be partisan since I work for an FCC licenced house of unbiased
repute. Really, we try to give everyone a fair shake. Let's just say we leave the leaning (left or right) to our cable cousins. (And do any of you ever agree 100 percent with a cousin, or even your Mom and Sister for that matter.)

Anywho...I arrived at Elon University's baseball stadium at 9:15 and hauled my gear past the Secret Service Bomb dog and set it in its spot on the riser over 2nd base.

My Camera, Tripod, 2 bags of equipment, and a portable microwave transmitter stayed in that spot - the security sweep zone - for the next 5 hours while I milled around outsite of the forbidden area.

But we were forward thinking and we had a second, and even third, set of gear to shoot with out in the common area where 1000 or so of Sarah Palin's closest freinds and at least one not fond fan stood in line waiting to stand in the sun for the next 5 hours.

And since my digital camera is dead I don't have pictures to prove it, but our local paper does and thanks to their nifty embed feature here are some excellent pictures of the day.



Enough with the great pictures. Hank "Bocephus" Williams Jr was the opening act for Palin, and I don't think it's partisan for me to say I love me some Hank Jr.

Hank picked and sang his way through a melody of his classics, including the reworded ones for the McCain/Palin campaign.

During Palin's speech it got rowdy once when an Elon Poly-Sci student who favors Obama got boisterous and needed the assistance of the local law enforcers to be compelled to leave. What am I saying, he was cuffed and stuffed.

Overall, Palin said the same 20 things everybody's already heard before. At least that's the response I got from the 10 soccer moms, 15 high school students and 5 overly exposed (by the sun) men I interviewed after the event. But those who attended were still more than thrilled to have been in the presence of that Governor from up there near Russia.

For our part, from a journalistic standpoint, we put together a Live Story at 5 and at 6 about what Palin said and how people reacted.

Technology-wise this as a good day too. We used our Portable Digital Transmitter to link us to our Sat Truck. We sent a Live Video Feed of Palin's Speech into our Sat Truck which was turned around and fed into space and down to earth and transmitted live to the internet. We also used the portable unit for our 5 and 6 o'clock lives. Without that unit we would have had to stay much closer to the truck AND the riser for the Palin Speech was a good 500 foot cable pull.