First online party with friends experience

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In this post I thought I would talk about my first online party with friends experience. Because I did my first one with some friends recently.

In addition, I thought talking it about this would be very relevant for a lot of others at the moment. Because it might give you some ideas about how you can set things up so that all your family can take part.

Of course, you can also use the below to give you ideas about how to part in online Data Platform and Azure conferences in a more relaxed way as well.

Setup

Usually, when I do meetups by myself I use my webcam in the office and wear my headphones. However, because it was to meet up with our friends I had to set something up for us to use together.

With this in mind, I decided to get the laptop working with our TV in the lounge. Afterwards I connected that I placed my Logitech 922 HD webcam in front of the TV and adjusted it, so we were both in view.

Now, my webcam does have a microphone built into it. However, I wanted to make sure that the audio was as good as possible.

With this in mind I connected my Blue Yeti Microphone that I used to record my ‘SQL Server related services in Azure’ video.

You can read about my experience filming that in detail here. In addition, you can watch the video itself here.

Finally, the time came to join the meeting. So, we joined our friends in Zoom, which is a very popular video conferencing solution. You can find out more about it in detail here.

At first all seemed well as we could see them. However, we could not hear any of them at all. It turned out that Zoom was trying to use the headphone on my Microphone instead of our TV.

After I fixed this everything else worked fine, and a good night was had by all.

Final word

I hope you enjoyed my post about our first online party with friends experience. I have to admit I found my first one fun and it was good to see everybody.

More importantly, I hope it has given some of you ideas about how you can keep in touch with friends from luxury of your own sofa with others sat beside you. Instead of you all joining up using multiple devices.

Because I feel it is important to keep in touch with people at the moment. With this in mind, feel free to comment if you have any thoughts about this post or your own tips.