September 30th, 2008, 11 Comments »
We had a couple of no-shows at the planned post-BarCamp hockey pool, so we weren’t quite quorate. I thought I’d take one more kick at this particular can and suggest a virtual pool, run in real-time over Skype.
I was thinking next Monday, October 6 between 5:30pm and 7:30pm. I know four games will have been played by then, but I don’t think that particularly matters.
I figure Skype is probably the most ubiquitous, simplest tool in which to run the draft. If you’ve got another suggestion–I guess Twitter would be a possibility–fire away.
If you’re interested in joining said, uh, Automagical Virtual Hockey Pool, leave a comment.
If we get enough, I’ll run it. If not, I’ll watch the 2008-09 season with a stake in only one, meagre, non-playoff team. And if there’s a torrent of interest, the maximum number of participants is 15. All other rules are as on the BarCamp wiki.
11 Comments »
May 16th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Among the sundry telephony options available to us for having conference calls with our clients back in North America, the best option has turned out to be SkypeOut. We wear headsets for the output, and use one of our Mac’s internal microphones for the input. Our 150-year-old limestone villa is kind of echoey, so we’ve started taking our meetings from the pool deck.
Mind you, it does get a little weird if the local basilica’s bells strike the hour. It just adds some charm to the conversation, I think.
We recently encountered a farcical situation when calling a client. They have a phone system that requires you to enter a three digit extension. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, you can’t do this using Skype.
I hastily surfed around the web, and discovered the DTMF Tone Generator applet. It’s very old school (compatible with “HotJava 1.1, Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0″), but it worked liked a charm. I just unplugged our headphones for a second and dialed the extension in the web page. The computer heard itself, and connected us to our client. We are l33t f0ne phr3aks.
8 Comments »
