Not Think Week's finest hour!

So much for the idea of being able to watch the Dawkins/Grayling discussion on Ustream tonight!  I had a premonition that it would be impossible to watch it after the 700 tickets for the event went in 7 minutes.  Something told me that the online webcast might be fairly popular.

It was an interesting exercise in people watching though.  I was on the site in good time waiting for something to happen.  The scheduled start time of 8.10 p.m. came and went and up to that time there were only 4 people logged in to 'the crowd' as it calls it.

At last!! It said that the show 'should now be live'.  Hmm. 

I can imagine the same idea went through the mind of a lot of others, one of whom was chatting to me about it via Google.  Do I need to set up an account and log in?  So in a hurry, you go through the saga of giving away your deepest secrets, then bottle out.  Wait a few minutes and notice that a few more are in the crowd. Maybe they are watching it and I'm sitting here missing out.

So . . . reluctantly I had another go, set up the account that I will probably never use again and went back to the ThinkWeek page, along with 22 other crowd members, just in time to get "Owing to unforseen technical problems it is not currently possible to webcast this event."

Its tempting to complain that this could not possibly have been 'unforeseen'.  In fact, yes - I do complain about that.  I just feel terribly disappointed.  Half an hour later I can tell that there are at least 21 other disappointed people waiting patiently in case it comes live after all.  21 is the tip of the iceberg though.