I Control the Vertical

I was unable to get to Portland yesterday to deliver a talk and be part of a meeting of the community wireless networking group Personal Telco due to car trouble, but we worked out a partial solution. Using an Apple iSight video camera with iChat AV, I was piped in remotely.I gave part of my talk with NetGate's Jim Thompson (the other speaker) advancing slides for me. When that proved a little untenable, we switched to Q&A. They had me piped in via the sound system and the video output from Jim's PowerBook was fed into a projector. Here's me on the big screen. It worked remarkably well despite some bandwidth crowding on their end -- some packet shaping would help, and next time around we could probably do something on both ends to make it be clearer. The big problem with iSight is that the sound range is quite short. It can focus over large distances, but doesn't work well in low light conditions. The sound is best focused at a few feet and gets muddy beyond that. Still, this was a pretty decent thing to try, and I'm inspired to see if it could be a model for more interesting meetings in the future with remote speakers.