Amazing Dedication Rita, thanks John for your kind encouraging words, and Graham
you were the star of the show, taking everyone on voice tours of eco simulations
in Second LIfe.  This was for a conference on environmental sustainability,
so they were really putting the twos and twos together.

I wrote a report on the way back on the plane.  I'll send out this first
version so you can see what fun Buth and I had in Alexandria running this
particular session.



Today was a case of if anything can go wrong it will. The Alexandria Library is
about a ten min walk from my hotel. There was no point at arriving at the
conference hall too early because the rooms would all be locked until just
before the start time of my session, though once I got into the center, wireless
Internet would available from anywhere inside. So I left my hotel 45 min before
I was due to present, carrying two laptops, wires, a USB mic, web, cam,
adaptors, etc. Though the presentation room was locked when I got there, I got
out my computer and booted it, and waited for someone to open the door to let me
in.




At 20 min before the start of my session, someone came around with keys, so I
got into the room, plugged the laptop into the mains, the one with webcast
software installed and ready to go, and discovered my first problem of the day.
My a/c adaptor had not been working well, I was having to massage it over the
past week to get the charge light to hold, but today it didn't want to charge at
all. I worked with it for a couple of minutes, decided to leave it for a while,
and started Skype to keep my appointment with Jose Rodriguez who had kindly
offered to backup my stream at http://www.webcastacademy.net/listen.




Jose was online and on task. He informed that he was streaming at that moment
on Sandbox B. I was expected to take A since I'd been planning to demonstrate
streaming at my unWorkshop but working with the charger required two hands and
was taking valuable time. Nevertheless I managed to keep up some kind of
chatter in the Skype stream, and Jose reassured me that all was well there.
Meanwhile I turned on the other computer which I planned to use for Second Life.
A technician arrived and helped get the projector on my webcasting laptop
projecting onto the wall. I looked for Nick Noakes in Second Life but didn't
see him, so I left it and went to the webcast academy chat room and texted to
the people there. Sasa and someone else were listening to the stream but unable
to Skype in, so no voices were joining Jose and I. With battery depleting on
my laptop, I worked the charger every chance I got, trying to find the magic fit
for plug in socket that would get it working. Graham
Stanley offered me a teleport to a space called Egypt in SL. I completely
forgot about Twitter.




My battery was a quarter low when participants started showing up fifteen
minutes into start time. I asked the first to arrive, Ule from Germany, to take
over talking with Graham in Egypt. Only three or four others followed and I
tried to explain what I was doing to them while also addressing the stream. It
was clear they were most interested in SL and they came around behind that
computer, while the EdTechTalk chat displayed on the big screen. There wasn't
much in Egypt so Graham moved to Boracay and teleported us over. Ule passed the
chat to the next person and Graham was very welcoming to each newcomer. Bobbi
arrived in World and we teleported her to Boracay. Graham was by now speaking
to us, voice having started working by magic in SL, and we started
voice-chatting with Graham there. I moved the USB mic connected to the
Worldbridges stream to the speakers of the SL computer and the F2F participants
were able to talk to Graham in such a way that the conversation was
clearly audible in the Webcastacademy stream being maintained by Jose,
according to feedback from Jose.




The SL computer now had the attention of the F2F audience so we switched the one
monitor projector to that computer which was configured for hi res. This caused
the projection screen to split down the middle but I didn't notice at first. I
was still text chatting in the EdTechTalk chat room, working out who could and
who couldn't join us in SL and trying to talk those who could to the location if
they could get to SL, offer friendship, and get a teleport. This took us up to
the top of the hour, 7 am GMT.




At about that time Buth and several others arrived, and we had to explain what
was going on to the newcomers. At about that time the mic on my Skype chat
simply stopped working. I became aware of it when Jason kept dropping out and
trying to reach me. He would call, I would answer, but he couldn't hear me. I
called him, he answered, hello? Hello? And then he would ring off. I tried
troubleshooting, couldn't find the problem without being able to focus on it,
was trying to give the newcomers some clue of what we were doing, and prevailing
on Buth to get into Skype on her laptop and tell Jose what was happening.
Meanwhile the battery on my Skype computer was getting worryingly low, I still
couldn't fix\the power supply, and I decided to switch it off so I could do a
controlled shutdown rather than lose power and not be able to retrieve my most
recent files later. This removed me from the stream and EdTechTalk text chat.
Meanwhile Graham was taking the conference delegates
around Better World, a water conservation simulation, and they were greatly
interested. At one point Graham suggested they fly to another part of the
island and the delegate at that moment on the keyboard held down the up button
and soared into space. We didn't realize what he was doing till he was well out
of earshot of Graham. He was very much enjoying the sensation of flying but I
had to take control and get teleported back to where Graham was.




Meanwhile there was a request in the F2F audience that we show them Elluminate
so I decided to start it on my Second Life computer. I launched Mozilla and was
surprised when I typed in the Tiny URL that an IE window was launched
separately. At the same time a McAfee notice came up demanding action. This
was a month-old computer and McAfee had been bundled with it free for one month.
In fact, this was Bobbi's computer and she had noticed before I borrowed it for
my trip that McAfee was about to expire and she had installed Avast on it but
had not removed McAfee. Now McAfee was informing me that it was no longer
protecting my computer and that another program (Yahoo Messenger) had wanted to
visit the Internet and would I like to type in my credit card details right then
in the middle of my unWorkshop. This being an unwanted distraction at that
point I tried to dismiss it and close the IE window but that window froze and
the browsers ceased to function. I discovered later when I
had a chance to look at it that McAfee had basically blocked my browsers from
accessing the Internet (though SL and IM chats continued to work) and only when
I removed the program completely was I able to browse the Internet again. But
at this moment in my presentation I went to the Task Manager and tried to find
IE to kill it. It was open and frozen on my computer screen but it wasn't
listed under applications running, so I switched to processes, found explorer
listed there, and zapped it. This turned out to be windows explorer so I lost
my task bar. At that point there was nothing to do but reboot, goodbye to
Second Life. I informed the SL crowd of that. Graham had gone to breakfast by
that time anyway, having taken everyone to Camp Dharfur, on our way to what I
had wanted to show them: Meteora.




We were now at the top of the second hour, and had half an hour to go in the
unWorkshop. We still had Buth's computer in Skype and the Webcastacademy text
chat. So while my computer was rebooting I decided to make her computer the
room display from the projector, and meantime to run Elluminate from one of the
6 other computers in the room. One of the participants was talking to Jose, who
was still doggedly streaming the proceedings via Worldbridges. We hooked up
Buth's computer to the projector and hit the key combo that should have toggled
screen modes. However we got an error at the projector, illegal resolution (not
just a 'no signal') and Buth's screen display disappeared! We toggled over and
over, no projector display, with Buth's screen now unusable. The participant
was still chatting with Jose, Skype sound being unaffected by the problem,
however we had to explain to the stream that we were going to have to go off the
air for yet another reboot.




With 15 minutes left in our presentation our face to face participants had
nothing to see except as they were milling about behind us watching us try to
recover. When my computer came back on I adjusted screen resolution down so
that it now synched with the projector and no longer gave a split screen and I
returned to SL. Richard was there, having found us via the Worldbridges stream.
His voice in SL was working well but he was hearing his echo because I had no
headphone on my SL computer, so I decided to plug in the USB mic there because
there is an on-off switch on it which would allow us to mute our mic while he
was talking. This new computer had the new Vista, and of course Microsoft in
its wisdom has changed the interfaces for configuring sound from the familiar XP
way, so I was having to figure out how to get at my mic controls and disable the
onboard one and configure my computer to accept the USB one. This took another
pregnant couple of minutes but meanwhile Buth had
restored our presence in the Skype event and in the EdTechTalk text chat, and
technicians were working on getting the third computer into Elluminate and
projecting that onto the screen. They left when that was done but we discovered
that whereas we could now text chat in Elluminate we could neither hear nor
speak there. We had Elluminate on our overhead projector, text only, we were in
the Skype stream, and we were talking to Richard in Second Life at Camp Dharfur,
and to Graham who had by then returned.




We were at the end of our allotted time but the master of ceremonies for the
plenary coming up in Alexandria was with us and enjoying the show, the
technicians had by then returned and got us speaking in Elluminate, and we could
hear what was being said, she was the one who had requested that demo, and she
was in no hurry to make us stop. So, something interesting happened.




We were talking to Graham and Richard in Second Life and to Jose and Moira and
Sasa in Elluminate (Hala had just left). Graham was in no space other than SL,
and as these were separate spaces, I was going to my SL mic to talk to him and
to the Elluminate computer to talk to the others. But Richard noted that when I
spoke in Elluminate, he could hear what I said on his computer. It clicked that
Jose was streaming Elluminate into the Webcast and Richard was hearing that. So
I could talk to Richard as well as everyone else in Elluminate and he could
respond in SL voice. It occurred to me then to include Graham in the
conversation by talking into the USB and Elluminate mics at the same time. This
caused Richard to hear my SL chat and then get the delayed rendition in the
stream so he had to turn that off, but we had successfully patched a
conversation in SL into one going on in Elluminate, and for those in the
unWorkshop it was one of those WoW moments.




I'm not quite sure how we got there. In the past three hours we had had almost
every conceivable meltdown. Starting with equipment failure, power adaptor
failing to function relegating the prime presentation laptop to limited use, we
had moved to browser crash brought on by McAfee malware, that sort of design
being the reason I had declined to purchase the program in the first place, and
subsequent reboot. We had lost Buth's display at about the same time, and had
been working with split screen projection up to then where my computer video
signal was incompatible with the projector resolution (easily resolvable, but
when you are juggling so many balls that some are bouncing on the floor, what
would be more obvious at a calmer moment remains ellusive). With two computers
down we had fought through technical problems with a third computer and managed
to get all computers running in the end and bring the unWorkshop to a close on
an epiphany moment.




Later in a plenary recap session, feedback on our unWorkshop was positive, with
all concerned saying they had learned a lot from Webheads. The only criticism
was that SL appeared to be perhaps too addictive, potentially could take time
away from family, and of course that it would be perhaps inaccessible to a
majority of stakeholders the sustainable ecologies people were trying to reach
in places where the pinch of limited resources is being felt most. Other than
that the participants seemed to be quite taken with the potential, and spoke of
having eyes wide opened.




Many thanks to Buthaina for her competent and timely support!








----- Original Message -----
From: evonline2002_webheads@yahoogroups.com
To: evonline2002_webheads@yahoogroups.com
Date: 2007-09-01
Subject: [evonline2002_webheads] Re: Webhead Fun Meeting in Alexandria, Egypt

>Hi, Vance,
>
>I'll try to pop in some time in between 3 and 5.30 a.m. my end...,
>
>alarm clock set...:-) Will do my best to wake up.
>
>The best of luck,
>
>Rita
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>--- In evonline2002_webheads@yahoogroups.com, GLENN VANCE STEVENS
>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>>
>
>> Now, about  tomorrow, Sat Sept 1, 6 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. GMT,

>/>
>I've got in mind a kind of free-for-all unWorkshop.  It should
>
>be fun.  I've got two laptops.  One of them does Second

>/>
>Life well.  The other computer is set up to webcast (at
>
>http://www.webcastacademy.net/listen ).  I'll try to get those
>
>going from 6:00 a.m. GMT  I'll send a twitter and we're
>
>off.  I'll put a computer somewhere into Elluminate and TappedIn

>/>
>(and I'll try to monitor the webcastacademy chat room, or delegate
>
>the task.  I'll be skyping via the webcast.  Meanwhile

>/>
>people will be dropping by and asking questions which I hope an
>
>online audience can help me answer.  It should be fun, but it's

>/>
>not linear programming, so anyone popping in at any time during the
>
>2.5 hours will be appreciated.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>For more information:
>
>http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens/papers/evonline2002/webheads.htm
>
>
>
>When replying to postings, please delete this footer and any other extraneous
>text from the reply - Thanks!!plying to postings, please delete this footer and
>any other extraneous text from the reply - Thanks!!
>
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