Jackson Harpers Web Log

On Monday I gave a presentation on Mono. Sunday night I was up until two in the morning writing my slides. The presentation was in Burbank so I left early to beat the morning traffic and ate breakfast in Burbank. I decided to look at my slides while eating, turned on my laptop and fsck failed. (For those that don't know this means I have serious hard drive problems and can't start my computer). If I was to summarize my feelings in one word it would probably start with an F and end with an UCK. So over my relaxing morning coffee I ran fsck.reiserfs --rebuild-tree and just prayed that my presentation would be OK. To add to the suspense my battery was most likely running low, and the guy in the cafe wouldn't let me plugin anywhere. So the rebuild tree chugs along for thirty minutes, and I drive to the meeting with it still running, checking the progress at stoplights. It completes and my presentation seems to still exist. phew. I find a nice comfy seat, get a coffee, and go over my slides. Scrolling through my slides I hit slide number 7 and open office crashes. uh oh. Try again, same result. Can't delete slide 7 because OOo crashes as soon as it renders it. Thirty minutes of 'Save As' and 'Export' later I get the damn thing to work consistently. Ok time to enjoy the coffee. The day goes by and things start getting further and further behind. So I revamp my presentation making it a lot trimmer. Finally its my turn, time is really tight between presentations so there is no real setup time. Plug into the projector and of course get nothing. Reboot and its sending power to the pins now (note I specifically rebooted earlier in the day to make sure this was set in my BIOS). I just start without slides. X starts and the projector stops loving me. I am getting 640x480 output for a 1280x1024 screen. Time is way too tight to screw with it, so I continue on slideless. I think slides are lame anyways, and you hold the audience's attention way better without them. This is the last time I even bother to use them. Overall I would say my presentation went really well, but I was continuously let down by the current state of technology, as usual. Whatever happened to things working?