Into LXtra Time
Apr. 11th, 2009 01:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceemageOK, I'm meant to be winding myself down to sleep, trying to avoid the usual convention curse of staying up too late on the Friday and wrecking yourself for the rest of the weekend. Let's do a brain-dump and see if that works.
I drove down to Eastercon on Friday afternoon, and it took less time than expected. On check-in, I noticed a sign suggesting that people who wanted to use the hotel wifi should register with Ops so that we could see if we could get a group rate. I went and duly registered, but it looks as if there won't be enough interest to make it viable.
In the meantime, I tested my 3G mobile broadband set-up on site, and found that it was just as good/bad as at home. That is, the connection was fairly solid, but I had to ratchet the video quality down a notch in order to preserve the audio quality. (This is a fairly easy trade-off to decide on when you're going to be mainly covering panels and the like, where the video is useful, but the audio is essential.)
I then chilled out for a bit, before hooking up with Steve Green and heading to the Mimosa room, where our first LXtra event was being held - the Fan Guest of Honour speech from Bill and Mary Burns (actually an interview by Greg Pickersgill). Thankfully, the room wasn't being used for anything the hour before, which gave me plenty of time to get set up, including doing some realistic testing of the all-important sound levels.
We had a good turn out in the LXtra chat room - apologies to anyone I've missed, but I remember seeing S&ra Bond, Rob Jackson, Robert Litchmann, Ian Maule, Bill Mills, Cheryl Morgan, Curt Phillips, Steve Rogerson, Geri Sullivan, Kat Templeton, plus a few other un-named ustreamers.
I tried to leave the laptop up front alone as much as possible, and followed the chat room on my iPhone (yes, I am an Apple poseur fanboi) in case there were any problems. The feed did require resetting a couple of times, and I think we lost the final few minutes of the session. But everyone felt it was a really high-quality panel, both for Greg's effective questioning as well as for Bill and Mary's responses. Geri Sullivan declared it the best Fan GoH session she'd ever seen!
The room was then cleared for a "Burns Night" celebration, so I went out into the lobby to see if I could entice anyone to come and talk to us. Jim Mowatt came over and we indulged in one of those somewhat bizarre conversations that conventions seem ripe for, about the difference between fast zombie movies and slow zombie movies. James Bacon then stepped over to see what we were doing, and very kindly (since I'm sure a con co-chair has many other calls on his time) sat down and chatted to us for a while, before rounding up a bevy of young ladies to prove how many beautiful women there were at the con. And that's when the battery power decided to run out on the laptop...
Despite the various teething problems, I think the first evening of webcasting from a British convention (that I'm aware of, anyway) was pretty successful overall, and I appear to be harvesting a surfeit of egoboo at the moment.
I drove down to Eastercon on Friday afternoon, and it took less time than expected. On check-in, I noticed a sign suggesting that people who wanted to use the hotel wifi should register with Ops so that we could see if we could get a group rate. I went and duly registered, but it looks as if there won't be enough interest to make it viable.
In the meantime, I tested my 3G mobile broadband set-up on site, and found that it was just as good/bad as at home. That is, the connection was fairly solid, but I had to ratchet the video quality down a notch in order to preserve the audio quality. (This is a fairly easy trade-off to decide on when you're going to be mainly covering panels and the like, where the video is useful, but the audio is essential.)
I then chilled out for a bit, before hooking up with Steve Green and heading to the Mimosa room, where our first LXtra event was being held - the Fan Guest of Honour speech from Bill and Mary Burns (actually an interview by Greg Pickersgill). Thankfully, the room wasn't being used for anything the hour before, which gave me plenty of time to get set up, including doing some realistic testing of the all-important sound levels.
We had a good turn out in the LXtra chat room - apologies to anyone I've missed, but I remember seeing S&ra Bond, Rob Jackson, Robert Litchmann, Ian Maule, Bill Mills, Cheryl Morgan, Curt Phillips, Steve Rogerson, Geri Sullivan, Kat Templeton, plus a few other un-named ustreamers.
I tried to leave the laptop up front alone as much as possible, and followed the chat room on my iPhone (yes, I am an Apple poseur fanboi) in case there were any problems. The feed did require resetting a couple of times, and I think we lost the final few minutes of the session. But everyone felt it was a really high-quality panel, both for Greg's effective questioning as well as for Bill and Mary's responses. Geri Sullivan declared it the best Fan GoH session she'd ever seen!
The room was then cleared for a "Burns Night" celebration, so I went out into the lobby to see if I could entice anyone to come and talk to us. Jim Mowatt came over and we indulged in one of those somewhat bizarre conversations that conventions seem ripe for, about the difference between fast zombie movies and slow zombie movies. James Bacon then stepped over to see what we were doing, and very kindly (since I'm sure a con co-chair has many other calls on his time) sat down and chatted to us for a while, before rounding up a bevy of young ladies to prove how many beautiful women there were at the con. And that's when the battery power decided to run out on the laptop...
Despite the various teething problems, I think the first evening of webcasting from a British convention (that I'm aware of, anyway) was pretty successful overall, and I appear to be harvesting a surfeit of egoboo at the moment.
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Date: 2009-04-11 12:58 am (UTC)It's 28 years since I attended my first sf convention on Easter weekend in 1981. That was Minicon, and I didn't miss one until 2006. Then I also missed 2008 and this year, meaning I've been to only one of the last 4 (including this very weekend). So it's perhaps understandable that I'm missing it rather a lot.
But I've pretty much always wanted to come to an Eastercon, too, and I especially wanted to get there this year. I couldn't do it in person, and your video feed is hitting just the right spot. It has me looking forward to the rest of the weekend, and that's a fine thing, indeed.
A surfeit of egoboo? I think not! But you might want to lay in some empty bottles or even an empty keg or two. They could save you from an unfortunate postcon egg o'bu hangover and provide a welcome supply to see you through any undeserved sparse days that might be lurking in the misty future.
"Pretty successful overall" -- indeed it was. Thank you. You rock.