This morning I signed in for the Scientific and Medical Network virtual conference, held because the venue had cancelled the annual conference due in May.   The conference director was situated in France, one of the speakers was situated in Scotland, and there were people from all over the world attending, I think about 90 in all.

It should be a rule that using such technology should always be tested say half an hour before the event to make quite sure that glitches have been discovered, and that there is enough technical knowledge available to run it. The main speaker should not have to do this because you can’t concentrate on two types of things at once. People make comments on the message pad and you may have to deal with that you can’t do that is same time speaking. I would definitely recommend the Zoom client because it is free of charge at least for small usage and it actually works. You have probably read about hackers but for small groups who is going to bother?

I like the fact that you can pass messages to an individual while the speakers speaking and also you can write to everybody for example to support something that speaker is saying. You can see all the other participants if they put their video on. Some people seem to forget that they could be seen as one woman had her head in her hands, and someone else bought a meal which they proceeded to eat in front of the camera and someone else appeared in their dressing gown which I didn’t think was very appropriate but they got the message.

We had two talks, one in the morning lasting two hours and one in the afternoon which was run from 4 PM to 6 PM. The first one was about the coronavirus and the opportunity to use it as a wake-up call for our true nature and the second one was about electromagnetic fields during which we learned who the real villains of the peace were of course the industry but they chose not to experiment with the safety of particularly 5G, while knowing that it was dangerous.

In their minds, the death or injury of a few million people is a price worth paying for the potential profits. One of the attendees was an astronomer worried that the 50,000 satellites around the Earth would interfere with investigations of space because they would be far brighter with reflected light then very distant objects. He said that they the astronomers were trying to come to an agreement, a compromise, but I can’t quite see what sort of compromise could be made. A satellite is either there or it is not.

My experience of attending the Zoom meeting was that it needs one or two sessions to get used to the idea especially communicating with other people while something else is going on. You need to be thoroughly alert to get the most out of the meeting. I have two screens and I use one for participating in the meeting and the other one for doing research. For example when someone mentions a website I go and look at the site in question and put the information on the group message pad just to make sure everyone gets it.

I also like the fact you don’t have to actually travel. It’s nice when you get there but sometimes the journey out and the journey back can be tedious so some of the benefits you get from the meeting are lost. Transport to the meeting and back plus the accommodation can be more expensive than the registration fee so it’s nice to save the money. I’m not that desperate to meet people in person though it is nice to have a change of scenery.

Also, instead of having to wait before you do further research on the topic you can do it immediately. A note about two screens. If your PC has two suitable plugs for the screen then you can have two screens. The software is already there. Once you have had the experience of two screens you will never go back to one screen.

Anyway, that’s enough for the day, the time is 7:30 PM, the light is fading and the birds are singing their hearts out.