So I am back from the VRA conference in Kansas City, MO. I have to say that this was the absolute worst travel experience I’ve ever had. Not because of the conference itself, or the hotel, or anything like that- mostly just because I was sick the entire time and having a head cold while traveling by airplane is pretty much a guarantee that you are going to have some extra issues. In this case- my hearing was so messed up that I could barely carry a conversation with anyone while I was there.
On the technical side there were also some issues. Our hotel had the most ridiculously restrictive internet access I’ve ever experienced. They had real crummy wireless (two of my fellow presenters could not get their machines to work on wireless), had denied access to many useful sites including http://mozilla.org/ (WHY???), and most importantly were blocking port 1935! So I’m doing a live video tools demo and the port used by Flash Media Server to stream content is blocked- not good. Thankfully, through some dialogue with the technical coordinators and the hotel, we were able to get 1935 opened up for our presentation. Oh- and the machines they had available for us to use were installed with FLASH PLAYER 5!
The presentation itself went well. I was on a panel talking about different video delivery methods with three other universities. I had about as good of a time as possible considering my condition and we received a lot of positive feedback.