One of the people I met during BlogOn whose blogging I admire is Sean Bonner, but I do remember being puzzled when posted to the irc backchannel something about how “the cameraman is an ass.” I posted “Hey, that’s Scot Hacker. He’s a friend of mine and he’s a great guy.” The reply was something like “Tell your friend to get over himself.”
I never really understood what that was all about until I read Scot’s blog entry this morning: birdhouse.org: My Mega Power Trip.
I really enjoyed talking to Sean face to face and I’m friends with Scot, so in a way this is just embarassing for me.
As an observer, though, it’s interesting to see this play out on weblogs
BlogOn techie backchannel flap aftermath
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4 responses to “BlogOn techie backchannel flap aftermath”
X – I’m sorry this is embarrassing and to be honest I think it’s gotten blown monstrously out of proportion. Clearly Scot and I recall the situation differently, and it’s doubtful either of us is going to buy the others story. Regardless of what when down I walked away from it shocked that someone would be so rude for no apparent reason, and a girl who was sitting nearby who I’d spoken with earlier leaned over and said “what a jerk” after seeing whatever just happened. That’s when I posted to the comment to IRC. Even that I would have been happy to write off as “he’s probably just stressed or in a bad mood or something” until his reaction to Susan asking to plug a laptop into the projector to put the back-channel on the wall. I maintain that there’s a way to tell people “no” politely, and I don’t believe that’s what went down. Luckily, this is America and if I think someone is being a jerk I can say it – perhaps next time I meet him it will be under different circumstances with no tripods, plenty of power outlets and grilled tempeh all around.
That would surely be an improvement.
Clearly the experience was different from your different perspectives.
It’s fun for us bloggers to expect to plug in ubiquitously and snark our way through a conference and it’s easy to forget that some people are on the clock and functioning as our servants.
Scot works hard, has incredibly high integrity and is also in the early stages of family life and I’m sure he was doing all he could be the civil under the circumstances.
Anyway, I do believe that airing things in public is healthier (light and air are hygienic) and I’ll try to buy both of you guys a frosty beverage of your choice next time we’re all in Berkeley or L.A.
power trippin’
I have stated that the camera guy was an ass. I’m willing to revise that to that he was being…
Heh – I’m tired of the whole thing by now, I think both Sean and I have vented enough spleen.
It was interesting to read the backchannel IRC log last night, since I wasn’t reading it during the event (too much going on while webcasting to do that too). There were a lot of complaints about the network dropping out I noticed — I don’t think anyone realized a few key points:
– This was the first event ever held at UC Berkeley where the general public had access — real logins — on the campus WiFi network. The authentication schema for guests via AirBears is still beta, and you guys were stress testing it.
– When I asked them, nobody at AirBears could give me a sense of how many people can share a single WAP. Typically you get a FEW people in a room using WiFi. At one point, we thought there might be a couple hundred of you on WiFi all at once, and we had no idea what would happen. We had also heard there was a theoretical maximum of 200 on a WAP, but that the practical limit was much lower. I don’t know how many people were on, but it was lower than 200, and still I see there were a lot of problems with it.
– Whether those problems were due to the number of people or unrelated network issues, I don’t know. I say this because at one point the webcast laptop’s connection to the mothership deteriorated badly, and the webcast started to break up. But the webcast laptop was hard-wired, not on WiFi. It’s possible that the entire building’s networking experienced problems, but I’m not sure how to diagnose that.
It was weird to read about people’s experience with the webcast dropping out for some, while another person in Germany said the stream was solid as a rock. I’ve never been able to explain differences like that, but it’s not the first time it’s happened. I thought it was funny/odd that some people thought they’d get a better experience accessing the .mov file directly rather than as a browser plugin – there is zero difference, and the browser is not getting in the way of the steam in any way. For those of you looking for the direct rtsp link, all you have to do is open the .mov file in a text editor.