Abulafia Digital – October 19, 2010

Second Life Sex?

There are some posts that have some residual hits in your blog, but that never really fade away. 2 years ago I wrote one post about Sex in Second Life and how it sucked (not the sex, but second life)[in portuguese, google translation]. The curiosity is that this post never really got much traffic, but for the past few weeks that I haven’t been posting much here, it is beating even my home page. Go figure!

Sex is always a good topic for this persistent traffic, but this movements in pageviews are a bit strange. Is Sept. the sex in second life month?

Aging

As I’m getting older, I realize that I have less to say, but have much more to learn and listen to.

ECCS10 – The tools to prepare and run a conference

Now that ECCS’10 preparation is almost finished and we approach Monday morning, I find myself wondering about the tools we used to prepare this conference. I can say the workload would have been much higher if we didn’t have some online colaboration tools. Here is the list of what I think made a significant contribution to success.

  • Dropbox. Dropbox by itself made the life of the team much easier. There was always someone editing some file, sharing some logo of a sponser or archiving emails from participants. I think I’ve seen the Growl notification from Dropbox more than the times I breathed.
  • Google Docs. The capabilities of simultaneous editing made this another power presence on our daily routine pre-ECCS’10.
  • Skype. Meetings made easy. Even during summer when part of the team was three thousand kilometers away we had a way to get work done.
  • On a smaller scale, Inkscape, Textmate and Photoshop where very important.
  • A final note to Drupal. It’s been perfect for what we needed with the versatility to add some other things. Just the right platform.
  • A negative note: The Myreview system for the submission process. IT SUCKS! BIGTIME! Someone needs to develop something that doesn’t require a course in rocket science to work with. Myreview needs an easy to use interface for admins, chairs and reviewers. A general overhaul is needed.