This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Eric Gunnerson.
Original Post: TechEd and tempting the slide gods...
Feed Title: Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium
Feed URL: /msdnerror.htm?aspxerrorpath=/ericgu/Rss.aspx
Feed Description: Eric comments on C#, programming and dotnet in general, and the aerodynamic characteristics of the red-nosed flying squirrel of the Lesser Antilles
About 4 or 5 weeks ago, the C# team was working on our TechEd presentations. There's an organized (ish) process to get all the speakers to get their slides done in a timely manner, but we decided to add a bit more rigor on top of that process, so that we wouldn't be “behind the 8 ball” and could avoid “starting down the rhino” on our way to “communicating with the masses”.
One of the general checkpoints was to make sure our draft slides were turned in so our track owner (Brian) could pass them on to our technical reviewer (Dan), so he could review them. But in this case, Dan had already signed off that our process was fine with him and he would be getting slides earlier, so turning our drafts was largely a pointless exercise.
I joked that I was going to turn in a presentation with 28 slides, all of them having pictures of kittens on them. I then thought better of it, saying that if I did that, I would show up at TechEd for my talk, do my introduction, hit the space bar, and then hit space bar, only to be confronted with...
Kittens...
I should have known better than to tempt the demo gods.
The first problem was when I got an email on 4/12 that said, "Thanks for getting your final slides done early". Which was interesting, since I hadn't gotten my slides done early. My kitten comment was coming back to haunt me. Or, to be more correct, it was coming back to haunt the whole team - Anders' slides were okay, but all the others were the draft ones we had put out weeks earlier. Which means that if I had sent in slides with kittens, they would have been my final slides .
A few emails later, I thought I had the problem resolved, but when I showed up at the convention center yesterday morning, I checked in with the slide team and there were no slides for my talk. I took them a new copy of them yesterday, but I'm showing up to the talk with my laptop and with my slides on a USB memory stick.
Previous Topic
