Elluminate didn't shine last night!

I forgot to write about my Workgroup's chat session last night. I was so organized in that I booked the free Elluminate room and sent the invitations out to Joyce and Nathalie in lots of time. I opened the room at 7 pm to ensure it was in good working order and then returned at 9:50 pm only to see that the connection had timed out so I had to log back in.
When 10 pm my time arrived, it didn't work for us!! It was loading very slowly for Joyce and when she did get on, her audio was all crackly. Nathalie didn't have speakers, a microphone or a webcam so we wouldn't have been able to hear her anyway. And I must've sent the moderator's link instead of the participants link to everyone, so when they logged on in Vancouver and New Zealand, there were three of me logged on as participants! It was too ironic - here we are all studying 'emerging technology' and we couldn't use it or rather, it didnt' work for us! So we decided to go with MSN! It was great that we could all type quickly and the meeting went well. I initially thought we wouldn't have a very good meeting if we were using MSN and typing on the keyboard instead of hearing and seeing each other. However, when I asked Joyce and Nathalie how they felt about it at the end, they said it was just fine and it didn't matter that we didn't have an Elluminate session after all.