Marathon Man

On Thursday, April 23rd, ASUG BITI team members ran a 1 hour webcast, as part of a 24-hour marathon by Craig Cmehil, SAP Community Evangelist.  Craig intended to host his extended “Friday Morning Report” back in February, but was sidelined for several weeks with a back injury.

Craig planned to highlight the mission of Doctors Without Borders, a non-profit global health care initiative.  I offered to take over the show for a period, giving Craig a break, and focusing on a range of social causes that leverage web technologies.

Our agenda was posted on the ASUG site.

Below is a video capture as I watched Craig, and prepared for my segment.  I was hoping to get my image online, but decided that the additional channel of Ustream video could have interfered with the main connection.  During the ASUG portion of the show, Craig and Marilyn Pratt were online with audio, and I was able to share Craig’s Ustream video feed through our Webex channel.  My desktop image and audio were also patched into Craig’s show viewers.

At the beginning of the show Craig shared a view of 24 1-Euro coins he planned to use to mark transitions each hour.  As I was not aware of this beforehand, I scrambled through my desk and came up with a dozen or so dimes.

At hour 2, I filmed my first “token passing”

Hours 6 and 7 if you want to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEPS4YFx9mc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xPV4DKrtkQ

(just cut-n-paste the URLs)

I have to admit I didn’t stay online with Craig the full 24 hours.  I jumped off to get to a Scout training session Thursday night, and slept for a few hours.  I was back online around 4AM Friday morning my time, or 10AM Central European time.

Here’s an image I captured with 30 minutes to go.  I asked Craig to “make a funny face” and caught the silly gesture reflected along with his monitor readout showing the amount raised at $4,200.

Friday was also Arbor Day – this shot captures Marilyn Pratt on screen from the U.S., with about 20 minutes to the end of the show.  The reflected trees on the left of the image are from Craig’s home office window.

My final tally of hourly coin drops:

The hour 20 video of my tally.

And the hour 24 video I shot, a little after the end:

There is an MP3 file of the audio I recorded. Warning – it is around 45MB!

There is also a Webex recording [ASUG only]. A special media player is required.

If you have donated, please make sure your gift and any company matching gift is communicated to Craig via the donation site:

http://www.firstgiving.com/fridaymorningreport

Thanks to all who participated.  And special thanks to Kirsten for having a backup laptop ready for fault tolerance!

It was really cool to be the “remote location” for Craig’s show.