We held our usual Friday night conference call yesterday evening at 7:00 P.M.

It was interesting as usual and one of the interesting things that happened on the call was that someone started to play music on the call. Of course, I don't know whether it was done intentionally or whether it was an accidental thing but that isn't the most interesting thing about the music.

The interesting thing is that it didn't interrupt the call for more than just a minute or so until we all figured out that we could talk over the music and it was still perfectly audible to everyone. Of course, it was still a bit of an irritation but even more importantly I could audit it all right out of the audio when I converted it to MP3 format for the podcasts and the audio recordings which you can access by clicking on the link in the left hand column of this blog.

Someone from the Los Angeles area called in and needed to find out what he might do about a summons he had received. Another of our students by the name of Anita also lives in the Los Angeles area and was on the call. She agreed to meet with the caller and give him as much help as she can. She is working on 5 cases of her own right now and although she isn't expert at handling them yet she can give the new fellow some pointers and help with his problem. It is always good to be able to get some help from someone local you can meet up with and chat about the problems and learn from each other as well as from our lessons.

Everything went very well indeed inspite of the brief moments or so of music. A great many conference calls do get actual hecklers from time to time who are really bent on making a wreck of the call. It is comforting to know how to get rid of that kind of problems simply, quickly and easily.

I see that Sony now has a brand new free service called IVE. It is an instant video conference system that not only lets you chat with anyone using your computers and webcams but it also lets you call any phone anywhere just like Vonage does.

Other services such as Yahoo Instant Messenger, AOL, Skype and others have video conferencing but adding the ability to call others in the way Sony is doing it has some very unique features indeed.

I've finally got my video equipment all set up but still have some minor things to do before I can actually get the video castion going the way I want it to go. Then of course I will have to write dialogs and do the actual filming. It is entirely possible that the first video cast I manage to get done might be at our next J-accuse meeting the 1st week in December. I'm planning to do a short 10 or 15 minute video of Richard Cornforth doing a talk then.

conference calls

Richard Cornforth