Today was the first Nano Show; a bi-monthly series of science lectures presented simultaneously in real life at NPL and in Second Life. A real life presenter, in front of a real life audience in the NPL auditorium discusses Nanotechnology related topics, while an audience in Second Life, listens and watches the presentations in real time, and all having a chance to participate in voting and questions at the end.

All in all it went successfully, and hidden amongst a tower of cables and computers I came out ok! The set-up was - and is - quite hectic! The speaker, and thier Second Life avatar use and are logged in to the main Auditorium computer on the main screen. Then there’s a moderator taking questions from Second Life attendees and managing the presentation slides on his own computer.

Then there’s me… managing the audio, from three microphones - one for the speaker, one for the moderator, and one for the real life audience when they ask questions, all feeding into Second Life as and when required. I’ve also got 2 laptops, one showing the second life audience for the real life audience to see on a TV, and a second using Wirecast, to record everything as it happens from the computers, and two video cameras.

Here are some photos taken before, and during the event of the real life speaker and audience!

More Photos >>>

I’m not sure if this is comparable to Myles‘ Kingston University network outage incident of 2006, but it must come close…

Last night while investigating my databases within my site’s admin area, I happened to click on a button entitled ‘Check DB’, expecting to find some sort of lovely report about the health / condition of my database. However, this was not the case, and found my site broken… as it would have seemed I corrupted my databases…

…after making a support request the issue was thankfully resolved after a few hours, however I later found out my faux pas was more wide spread than previously thought, and I had actually taken down everyone’s databases and emails on my entire server, which I’m guessing is quite a few…

Three years to the day since ABC1 was launched, two and a half years since I launched the unofficial abc1uk website, the channel has come to an end with Disney pulling the plug and so with that, the unofficial website has had to close too.

It’s been a good couple of years with the site, with it being the first large scale site I’ve had to manage and deal with, and then a year later after teaming up with Myles, we recoded and redesigned the site to make it into the monster it became!

I’ve had online interviews with stars from ABC1 TV Shows, namely Sabrina Lloyd from Sports Night and Sherri Shepherd from Less Than Perfect, the site gained a whole heap of users and members to it’s forums, and it really did become a mini community with Disney having a look around the site on a regular basis!

Sadly though that is now all over, but there are always some people I would like to thank, namely;

Myles Noton, for to whom if it wasn’t for him the site probably wouldn’t have become so big and rich in features, and thus popular.
John Thackery, for providing hosting and tech support, and being there in times of crisis!
Joyce Rubin at Disney, for patiently providing as much information as she could on news about the channel and shows
The interviewees; Sabrina Lloyd and Sherri Shepherd, and their agents, to take the time to answer a few questions
And finally the visitors who took the time to keep visiting and who joined the community, and stayed with us when things sometimes went bad!

This month a few of my photos from NPL’s Work Life Balance Day (some of which you can see here) were published in the September Issue of the Company’s Newsletter NewsNet, within the special feature pages for the event.

Featured Images:

I’ve created a new section to display photography I take at events which arn’t in keeping with my photography on the original section.

So, from today;

You can still find my normal photography here at www.lloydengland.com/photography

As well as event photography here, at www.lloydengland.com/photography/events

Enjoy!

So a little over three months since me and Myles spotted an episode of The Bill being filmed with Louisa Lytton & John Bowler near our flat, the episode finally aired on TV a few nights ago, and after close expection lo and behold, there was me! Driving past the pet shop which was the main focal point of the episode!

My five seconds of fame, shown here in a screencap from the episode.