getting ready

Tuesday, February 24, 2004, at 12:41PM

By Eric Richardson

It's interesting to watch USC preparing for the democratic debate to be held here Thursday. Kerry, Edwards, Kucinich, and Sharpton will be here, debating live on CNN. Business Wire has an interesting release giving all the media instructions. Annenberg will be the post-debate location, so we've been getting emails with moved classes and limited access instructions for the building that day.

From the release, Soapbox will be be providing wifi and voice access to media during the event. I'm curious if that's just an indication of USC's limited involvement (clearly the USC bandwidth could handle adding reporters for a night), or just that it's easier to contract everything out rather than worry about setting up one-time systems. $350 for a press member to get a phone line for the evening. $145 for wireless internet (a steal compared to the $350 for hard-wired ethernet).

The DT had an article today about how USC's putting protestors in a little bit of Trousdale just south of the auditorium. You have to register two weeks in advance to protest, so it'll be interesting to see if a lot of groups did or if people will show up intending to protest and then get the boot from DPS.

I have classes Thursday afternoon, so it'll be entertaining to see the swarm of satellite trucks that descend on campus then.