Do you Skype?

[Alan H]

I recently installed skype on three faculty laptops and the Biochem CORE checkout laptop. I did it because we had a small conference, but unfortunately one of the invited speakers couldn't attend at the last possible minute. He had skype on his laptop.

so what we did was set up two laptops in the room, one pointed at the primary projection screen and the podium, the other pointed out into the room at the audience. I hooked up the one pointed to the audience to a second projection screen. The speaker who couldn't be there connected to both of the laptops in the room, and I set it up so that his face showed up on the second screen. Thus, everybody in the room could seen him. About 5-6 other people dialed in and did "conference calling" with skype and "attended" the seminar. One was in New York (I'm in California) It went quite well.

In the process of doing this, I liked it so much that I installed it on my own laptop. It works like a charm.

for the "Make a Kilt Day" in October I'm afraid this isn't going to work unless I can find space with a blazing fast network. The church's old dual-modem mini-router doesn't quite have the oomph to handle the traffic. If that's where we wind up, I'll videotape the day and make an imovie project out of it and post it.

Back to skype. It's painless to use, and works like a charm. It also EATS time...LOL....the temptation to yakk all day long is strong. We just had a three-way call between Panache and the Wizard of BC and x-kilt (me). With the free version you don't get video in your conference call, that's limited to the "paid" version. However, you can get video with a one-to-one connection on the freebie version.