Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Smart Board Support

Your incident has been logged as Incident # 49440.
----------------------------------------------------
Howdy,
Incident number 48334 and incident number 48389 are now also incident
number 49281 and the problem seems to be solved. I broke down and
called tech support, which is a nightmare with most companies. But I
got Howard on the line in only a couple of minutes. He talked me
through the solution. All is well. I am one very satisfied customer.

Oh, these incidents are also incident number 48546, because when I
sent a message to you telling you that 48334 and 48389 were the same
incident, you replied telling me that this was incident 48546. I
suppose this message will also generate an incident number. I have
learned something very important from all this which I will pass
along to others. If you have a problem with a Smart Board, don't
contact tech support by e-mail. Call them. Unless you need a five
digit number generated. In that case, e-mail will do it.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Oh, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once?

Readers of the recent two posts below may notice that I attended an AECT and an ISTE event on the same evening. And there is one of the joys of Second Life. Two organizations schedule events I want to attend on the same night. What to do? Attend both of them. Popping back and forth between them is a simple teleport.

ISTE Machinima Theater

Those of you stuck in the flat old 2D web can view the growing collection of International Society for Technology in Education machinima on the ISTE machinima page hosted by Knowclue Kidd, (the real life Marianne Malmstrom). But those of us who have made the move to the Metaverse got to enjoy the films (including a production by your humble narrator) in a luxurious drive-in theater on ISTE island in Second Life on Thursday.


Corinne Fleury (rl: Christie Thomas) and Kittygloom Cassady (rl: Jennifer Ragan-Fore) came up with the drive-in and populated it with a collection of good old tail finned pollution spewing beauties. (Fortunately, the atmosphere of SL is not effected by greenhouse gases.) The videos were all well received, admittedly by a pretty uncritical audience. No Oscars are anticipated, but for a bunch of first time machinimists, we did pretty well.

AECT Dance Party in SL



The Association for Educational Communications and Technology hosted a dance party on the roof of their building on Eduisland in Second Life Thursday. It was well attended, particularly including many folks new to SL. For those of you who have not been to a dance in a virtual world, all I can say is try it. Virtual dancing struck me as a silly idea when I first heard of it, but I have been to a number of SL dances since then, and have enjoyed every one. The ability of Second Life to host such social events is one of its charms.

MaryLee Sewell was clearly into the music that night. MaryLee is the avatar of the real life Marry Herring, president elect of AECT, and a very graceful virtual dancer. Ize Mesmer (rl: Cheryl Comstock) gets the credit for organizing the dance.

AECT is planning a series of presentations in SL. I am currently scheduled to give one in the summer.