From the 'conference calls sometimes are good enough' files:

Cisco CEO John Chambers held a press conference in SecondLife yesterday - I wasn't there.

I had intended on being there. I tried to be there. But SecondLife isn't nearly as easy to use as a simple conference call. Worse yet, Cisco had planned on offering the event up as feed on their blog, but during the course of their SecondLife conference,  their blog system was down.

First I tried to connect to the conference by way of a SLurl (SecondLife URL) but though I have used SecondLife before something had mysteriously corrupted my install so the SLurl did not launch me to the SecondLife world.

So an re-install of SecondLIfe became necessary (and that's a time consuming process...try it you'll see).


So with SecondLife installing on one machine I attempted to watch the feed on the Cisco blog on a second machine (i've always got a spare machine ready to go..)...but the blog was down for what I counted as 44 minutes between 2 PM ET and 2:45 PM ET.

I got different error screens over the 45 minutes period - ranging from site not available to the database error screen (captured left).

By the time I finally made it, 'in-world' the conference was over.

So what's the lesson here?

Well if you want to get into a SecondLife conference make sure your installation is up to date before you try and teleport in.

That said though I'm not a Luddite - webcasts and teleconferences (usually) are just plain easier for everyone.