Hugo Awards to be Live Streamed

Renovation has announced on their Hugo Awards Ceremony page that they plan to live-steam the Hugo Awards Ceremony on the UStream Worldcon Events channel. This is in addition to the CoverItLive text-based coverage being provided by TheHugoAwards.org and announcements on TheHugoAwards and by anyone else (use the #hugos tag).

Based on past experience, we should expect Twitter and CoverItLive to be a little bit ahead of the streaming-video feed; they're not likely to be in synch.

Renovation has apparently made the investment in the wired bandwidth necessary to carry the ceremony. It's not cheap; the hotel wi-fi is free but doesn't have the ability to carry the streaming video, particularly when the Tuscany Ballroom will certainly have a whole bunch of other people clogging up the bandwidth with their mobile devices as well. I applaud Renovation for making the effort and investing the money necessary to make this happen.

Arrival

I got up much too early for my taste this morning and managed to get on the road just before 6 AM. Traffic was as light as one could ever hope for on a Sunday morning, and I somehow managed to breeze my way up to Reno in a mere 4 1/2 hours, which I consider quite amazing. The hotel had a room for me already, and told me that I won't have to change rooms on Tuesday even though I have two separate back-to-back reservations, although I'll have to go down that day and check out/check in and recode the room keys.

As I was moving a load of my stuff in from the car, I heard my name being paged to return to the front desk. When I got there, I found that Lisa had arrived earlier this morning and was waiting for me. We were going to move her stuff from her van, but she noticed that I was very much in need of a meal, so we went to the Atlantis' Manhattan Deli. We both had the matzoh ball soup, which was okay, but pretty meh compared to the nice place in Toronto near the convention center at Torcon 3. No matter how hungry I was, I shouldn't have ordered a full bowl of soup and a full-sized salami sandwich, and Lisa's stomach was complaining from over-eating after the plate of salmon and mini-bagels on top of the soup. Portion sized are quite large: be warned!

We then moved Lisa's things into the room, and she settled in for a nap, which she needed because she'd driven all night, not having been able to sleep. I can't blame her. I then went over to the storage locker (which is so close that I really could have just walked over there; I'd forgotten how close it was to the Atlantis) and got her electric ice chest out of storage so we can have a mini-fridge in the room once she wakes up and connects it. (I'm not sure how the wiring works on it since it's designed for use in vehicles, not on house current, and I don't want to mess anything up.

Once I finish unpacking, I'm thinking of taking a nap myself. I'm very tired, with much less excuse than Lisa. But now we're in and everything seems okay. Tomorrow will be another very early day because we have to be in Fernley before 8 AM to meet the house inspector, which means leaving here before 7, which for me means being up before 6. Expect me to be offline much of tomorrow.

1993 Hugo Award Ceremony Video

As some of you know, I was part of the ConFrancisco committee in 1993, and as far as I know, we didn't shoot video of our major events like the Hugo Awards ceremony. However, if you know of anyone who did record the Hugo ceremony from 1993, could you contact me? Someone is looking for a copy of that ceremony, and in particular the Best Dramatic Presentation award. That was the first time in many years that something other than a theatrical motion picture won BDP: the episode "The Inner Light" from Star Trek: The Next Generation.