ksagarsee

[10:33] Jeanette: hey cute boy

[10:33] Kyle: hey hey!

[10:33] Jeanette: I’ve been doing the chicken dance

[10:33] Kyle: haha

Tonight we’re having our friends the Yazels over to make homemade pizzas and just hang out. We haven’t seen each other in a few weeks and to be honest, I kinda miss ‘em. They have an ADORABLE little girl named Kali who’s a little more than a year old and Robin and Jeanette are due at almost the same time. They’re one of the coolest couples I know and so much fun to hang out with. I’m glad I have great friends like them.

Hey, just a quick question for anyone out there… Is it weird to have homemade pizzas and baked potatoes for dinner? We did it all the time growing up, but my lovely wife thinks I’m a weirdy.

I recently read an article here about a conference that was held in Second Life that really sparked my interest. To recap the article, they had someone speaking at Cornell and had the video fed into Second Life where remote visitors could come and participate in the conference and the discussion. As questions were asked in SL the speaker was able to answer them in the conference.

The first thing that came to my mind was the Church IT Round Table. The big complaint I hear is that with the growing amount of people who attend, we’re headed more toward topic focused rooms, which could end up hurting the synergy that is created by having experts and “newbs” on subjects in one room.

Using Second Life we could do something pretty Innovative. Here are some potential sweet points about doing the CITRT or ANY conference in Second Life as well as Real Life

• Larger groups are able to participate and do so without the added travel costs
  
• Still able to interact via voice and text chatting
• A fun way for techy guys to show off their nerdiness. And by nerdiness I mean Avatars (”Ooh look! He has wings!!! SWEET!”)
• If they can do one person doing video in a room, why couldn’t we do multiple people? Then we add video chat! (I’m new at this whole Second Life thing, so this may or may not be feasible)
• Record said video(s) so that others can visit later and watch them in SL
• Anyone can build, anyone can create content. Very cool.

I like this idea. A few years ago a friend of mine got me hooked on World of Warcraft. People LOVE virtual worlds. They will spend hours and HOURS in a virtual world… why? It’s an escape, you can relax, you have anonymity… pick your reason. People like virtual worlds.

Lifechurch.tv has their entire building constructed in Second Life. You can go there Sunday Morning and watch their service. I prefer real people to virtual any day, but it’s a great way to meet new people who probably wouldn’t come to a real church. I’m impressed by that, and would like to check it out this weekend.

If you decide to give Second Life a try, add me as a friend and we can learn about this stuff together.

My name is Daureke Schmooz.

What do you think would be cool about Second Life conferences? What would suck?

Yesterday one of my buddies who’s in High School asked me to write a “Testimonial” about him for his English class. He said he needed an “Adult” to write it, and evidently I fall in that category. I asked if it had to be about something real and he said not necessarily. The following I wrote in about 15 minutes. I doubt he’ll ask me to write about him again.

Brandon Sweeney may very well be the worst person I have ever met.

There was a time not to very long ago when I was minding my own business at work, rescuing kittens that had been abused by their previous owners when Brandon screwed it all up. I had just found a little tabby cat that had lost his left eye due to a stupid kid with a BB gun. I was smuggling her away from the abusive home without the owners’ knowledge when Brandon called my cell phone. Of course it was the one time I forgot to mute my phone before breaking and entering someone’s house; and when my Boys II Men ring tone went off it woke the family whose house I was in. The little boy who had shot the cat came out of his bedroom rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with one hand and cocking his BB gun with the other.

If it had just been the little boy who had woken, I think would have been able to get away and save the cat with little problem; but when he woke up, so did his dad, and he was more than just a little upset about me being in his house.

The dad started swearing and swinging the fireplace poker that he had picked up on his way through the living room, and the little boy started shooting me with his BB gun. I almost made it through the kitchen window, but my foot slipped on the sink and I fell and hit my head.

When I came to, I was in the hospital with a lot more bruises than I had before I had passed out and a policeman standing at the end of the bed.

The poor little kitten still continues to live in that horribly abusive home, and now I’m in prison.

Thanks a lot Brandon. I hate you.

Innovate was here at GCC this last week, and there have been a ton of blogs posting notes from speakers, so I’m not gonna add to the glut of sweet information. We all learned a lot and saw some sweet stuff; that goes without saying, but what did you take away from it?    

Whenever you go to a conference you end up coming home with a notebook full of ideas, and an arm load of swag. The notes get shoved in a drawer, the business cards might get added to your contacts in Outlook, and that sweet pen you snagged at the booth with the weird Caveman back drop falls to the back of your pen cup (incidentally your pen cup is from a conference from 2 years ago).

Of all that though, it always seems that the only thing you actually use is the coffee mug with the name of the conference or one of the vendors on it.

Sure we were all encouraged by the speakers and those around us in our fields, but what are you going to do THIS WEEK that’s different? It would suck if we did a conference, and had freakin Guy Kawasaki come and all you got out of it was to use 30pt font in your power point. You paid waaay too much to have just come away with that.

I want to know, what was your coffee mug? What was useful to you NOW?

So do something different today, and leave a comment on my blog telling me what your coffee mug is that you brought home.