An audience of two

Tuesday October 02, 2007

Twitter@CEC
If you're going to CEC and your mobile phone provider doesn't charge you ripoff rates for text messaging, consider signing up for Twitter. This is a service that in effect merges blogging and instant messaging, optionally delivering updates (known as "tweets") to your mobile vis SMS messages. It's been called "microblogging".

Once you've signed up you look for people to follow. In each case you can decide whether to have their updates go to your aggregator on the net or to your phone. The benefit at an event like CEC is that you'll be able to send brief texts like "I just went to the Sun Update Connection breakout - you should check it out", or "Groan, this is sending me to sleep - see you at Starbucks afterwards"

It's yet another of those services that you'll either like or loathe, get addicted to or completely fail to see the point of, but when you're visiting Vegas with 3,500 other geeks it's certainly worth investigating beforehand. There's a suggestion on the CEC Facebook group that the organisers may use the service to send out updates and reminders. If you want to follow me, I'm http://twitter.com/davetong and I'll be Twittering throughout CEC.

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Tags: suncec2007 twitter

Iliad again.
I read User Friendly every day.

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Tags: friendly password user

Let's stop now - update
Looks like YouTube finally has its act together - the videos are showing up under the tags now. Plus they are showing up on Technorati too. That makes me wonder whether Technorati is in fact innocent and it's our blog server that's hosed. It has been giving me Permission Denied almost every time I try to do anything (a refresh and repost works).

Update: Nope, looks like people on the Technorati comment board are complaining too.

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Tags: google suncec2007 tags technorati

CEC Videos: Connected
Connected is the last of my old STS/CEC videos. It was so heavily mucked around with by the A/V people that I gave up fighting, and I'm not sure if this original version was ever seen by anyone outside the immediate group. The group was called CNS which stood for Connected Network Something. I agreed to work with Kier Gombart to make the video, but timing and location issues made things difficult so he just sent me a Windows Movie Maker project file of people he'd shot in around Broomfield.

The song we decided to use was Connected by the Stereo MCs. One of the repeating lines in the song is "I ain't gonna go blind", so Kier took lots of shots of people putting on and taking off sunglasses. I must have had about 15+ minutes of that footage. Some of it ended up looking pretty good though.

The premise of the video was that an important client's system had crashed, triggering a mass panic. By using NetConnect, and in particular the SharedShell tool, the engineers were able to fix it quickly. The surprise was that the client was in fact a lingerie retailer, Frederick's of Hollywood. The tagline was a minor double entendre: "NetConnect helps keep your front end up".

I took a great deal of flak over this - more so than the previous videos. I suppose some of it was deserved (check out the names of the engineers in the chat session) but much was not. It was interpreted as suggesting that the group's director was surfing for porn (perhaps taking the "I ain't gonna go blind" line a little too far). Whatever; pretty much everyone in the movie quit or got RIF'd soon after - including the director, whose name I can't even remember. The A/V people bitched and moaned about the amount of effort it took to write over the engineer's names and put the CEC logo over the Frederick's page (and do a better job of it than I did, I must say).

I wanted Jason to really look like he was kicking and whacking the server hard, but since he was technically responsible for it he was a bit reluctant, even though it was just the rack that he was hitting, not the system in it. For those who don't speak Spanish, basura means trash.

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Tags: connected suncec2007 video