Like, awesome, man

Parties attended: 1 (good); No. of bottles of vodka consumed: 1 (virtual, curiously non-alcoholic); Nights danced away: 1 (good)(but will regret it in the morning)

Tonight attended UK educators' party in which Usual Suspects met pleasantly together on Bluesky's island. Initial impressions were mixed as appeared we were going to spend party sitting round mystitool table, which is not my idea of rollicking abandon. However soon emerged that actual party was at beach bar complete with barstools, louche poses, glitter dance ball and soulful palm trees.

Had dressed up for occasion in what turned out as a sort of Helena Bonham Carter ensemble, lace and freaky hair, and felt that party had enjoyably retro 70s feel, but that is probably because the 70s was when was at uni, and just getting nostalgic flashback.

Bar dispensed bottles of Jack Daniels (always a fave, never tire of that drunken collapse animation you get after 3 sips), beer (my first tipple of the evening) and vodka (bottle or glass, obviously went for the whole bottle). Not that drank vodka in RL, in 70s or now, if going to knock back RL alcohol, it should at least have a proper taste (pref. of fine wine or malt whisky).

Kattan and Plymouth led way in disco dancing, at some point people started doing fairy dances (where you leap up and twirl round), and the chat seemed v. amusing at the time. Added later During banter, someone made joking remark, which remark I alluded to in earlier version of this post, as if it had not been a joke. If had allowed brain to intervene between self and keyboard would have realised that could not possibly be true. Consequence was offending someone that certainly would not want to offend, and having a general lord-I'm-useless freaking-out moment. Many lessons to be learned here, including 1) think before blogging, especially about friends; 2) don't blog at 1am when v. tired and therefore not firing on all mental cylinders. Just sort of thing I might tell to my students. Oh dear.

Conference cavortings

Conferences attended in RL: 1 (good); Conferences attended in SL: 1 (good); No. of feet aching after 90 mins dancing in RL: 2 (bad); No. of feet aching in SL despite dancing in 6 inch heels: none (good)

Hmm. Yet more "doing so much have no time to blog". Spent last weekend doing moderating and other stuff at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference, which appears to have been success - must have been 200 avatars in one or other of the conference tracks at many points - in fact probably most of the time. Took zillions of photos (well, possible exaggeration, actually about 100) and so will do some sort of blog entry if mostly consists of pictures.

Am currently at RL conference (LILAC, on information literacy) and tomorrow will be presenting session on SL and information literacy with Ishbel and Pancha in RL and Maggie and Lulu in SL. Well, that's the idea. The pics show us planning for this session.

.

Spent good deal of today preparing for tomorrow and a) failing to get pc in conference room to work b) trying to get t-mobile stick to work with my laptop; c) trying to get local wifi to work with SL with anyone's laptop; e) getting Edinburgh Uni VPN to work (hurrah, it did).

In fact in end the situation will be that Pancha will be logging in to SL via Edinburgh (we are in Cardiff) and projecting to the screen, meanwhile we will also log in on the lecture room pc (which turns out to work with passwords other than the ones we've got, but is somewhat sluggish to say the least) and I can login with my 3G stick which is slowish but if I don't move around too much the graphics are OK.

Our hope is that at least one of these 3 will remain operational long enough for virtual Maggie and Lulu to wave, smile and type in their deep thoughts about information literacy and SL.

You can tell Ishbel, Pancha and I are into this type of thing since we look like a laptop convention, Ishbel's is the coolest, i.e. a mac, which is automatically cooler than anything else in the room.