Television Tuesday: Emmy Awards Roundup

The Emmy awards were last night. Did you notice? I did, even though I didn't get to actually see most of the telecast as Verizon Fios decided that NBC would be the one channel my DVR would NOT receive last night, but only between the hours of 8 and 11pm. What recorded on my DVR instead was three hours of blue screen. Every. Other. Channel. Worked. Just not the one showing the biggest television awards in the world. So off to the Internet I go – except NBC decided not to have a streaming broadcast, no doubt to appease advertisers. I spent a good 20 minutes searching for a streaming broadcast and found one site that would let me view it, but only after I filled out a survey for car insurance including all of my information, or downloaded a game to my computer and that was not going to happen. I wound up listening to it instead, woefully believing that I could watch it all later on my DVR. Boy, was I wrong. Still, I figured NBC would have clips up on its website this morning, but alas, only of the acceptance speeches and the Community promos for Infiniti (which were funny because that cast is very funny, but come on already!). Basically, it was an epic fail night for Fios and NBC as far as my household was concerned.

Ergo, rather than my typical blow-by-blow post mortem, I'm forced to comment in brief (Ha! Brief. Right.) bursts of flawed and slightly delayed opinion.

Twitterific

I came late to the social networking realm. It took me a long time (read, most of my early life) to work my way out of the desperate (and natural) urge to fit in with the world around me. By my mid-20s, I learned to not only embrace my tendency to be more than a little left of whoopee, but to trumpet it too. So when my sister got on my case about joining Facebook, I pshawed and scorned until I tried it, and then I proceeded to saturate myself in it. For the first few weeks, I was drowning in the thrill of finding people I'd regretted losing touch with, while enjoying not "friending" those people I was glad to be rid of. Petty? Maybe, but that's one of the pleasures of Facebook. I can be petty and no one will know about it. Now, I never got involved with Farmville or Mafia Wars. For me, Facebook was (and is) simply a place to reconnect and chat and share without having to be in the same room.


I had a reluctant attitude towards Twitter in the beginning too, though that was more out of ignorance and confusion. 140 characters? I haven't spoken in only 140 characters since I gained the power of speech. And it's not like I need another venue at which to talk. Jeez, I barely shut up as it is; I even talk in my sleep! But I kept hearing how important it was for book promotion (rock on LSFW and NJRW!). Then I was noticing great conversations from the people behind blogs I read like Smart Bitches and Dear Author (see sidebar for link) that I was missing because I wasn't on Twitter. And you know how I hate being out of the loop…

Notes From Pool Side

I know, I know, I've dropped the blog baton again. Bad Krum.

These last few weeks have been busy or boring depending on which day I was on. We've been experiencing consecutive vacation weeks at work shorting my department by one since mid-July. Typically, this means the remaining two people not on vacation are swamped with heavy volumes of work, which raises tensions and stress levels and other things. During the short interval between manager and asst. manager vacations, I was sick with the cough that wouldn't die and desperately wanted my lung to be outside my chest. Add in my birthday the first week of August and cap it all off with Major Work Drama as just before my spontaneous vacation (thanks M&S!) my P*****account at work exploded first with one problem, sussed out over a couple of days, then with another that blew up (for me) at 4pm Friday. Not. Fun.

The end of July brought the Romance Writers of America national conference in Orlando that I did not get to go to, (next year in Manhattan baby!) so I was a tad blue about that. Then Dorchester Publishing announced it was going full digital with print-on-demand trade paperbacks available for some titles after digital release. This is a BFD in romance publishing especially, so the Internet, it has been churning around my little hobby (as my mother sometimes thinks of it.) Speaking of mothers and vacation...