Inauguration and Technical Competency

One of the joys of owing your own business - taking a break when it's important.

I watched the entire inauguration. I thought the opening prayer was a little over the top, the benediction touching, and President Obama's speech inspiring. But the thing that the cameras kept coming back to, the anchors kept coming back to, was the crowd, the undulating mass of people excited and eager and hopeful. The whole event was something amazing to behold, and I'm looking forward to the coming year.

But hey, you're not here to read a political blog, so here are a couple tech items to chew on:

• www.whitehouse.gov (above) did a complete switchover at exactly 12 noon. A well-planned, successful technical execution? That's pretty inspiring.
• Opening speech at the Inaugural Luncheon stated that the Recipes PDF was the most popular page of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Services website.
• Both the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Services site and 2009 Inauguration site have been having load issues all day
• Preliminary numbers are coming out at about 2 million - technical and logistical nightmare
• Security services numbered almost 40,000
• Despite every cell phone network going into today with the jitters, it appears that the networks held just fine.
• Amazing number from CNN.com like "3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute"
• And despite some reports that Twitter is running smoothly, I've hit several server timeouts during the day so far.

And yet the day is not over. First, the parade, then parties and balls and galas, oh my!