Red Nose Day Fun and Games

Some of the audience, before the show started. Profuse apologies to the folks on the very front row. For some reason I didn’t point the camera in your direction.

Today did not dawn in an auspicious manner. I went into work prepared to put the starting touches to the presentation (only kidding, it was actually mostly written, but I have a policy of never finishing a talk until just before I really need it.). Anyhoo, I plugged in my shiny Sony and got all manner of USB “in and out” sounds. Truly, my machine was playing the hokey cokey with all my devices. A dance which ended with a bunch of unknown USB devices in Device Manager. Oh well. My first thought was my keyboard, but experiments indicated otherwise. USB hub then.

Ho hum. Time for a reboot. So I shut the machine down. And found I had 14 updates outstanding. Arrgh. This of course made my machine unusable for a lot longer than I had planned for. Wah. And when it came back, of course the USB drivers for the Gadgeteer (the thing my Lecture in Rhyme was all about) had broken. After another reboot (five updates that time) I managed to get something to work. By now we were about fifteen minutes from the presentation. No pressure.

Anyhoo, thanks to an awesome audience I managed to get through it all. Even when the demo failed because of lingering USB issues. Fortunately “The Door of Mystery” worked fine, and picked key number 71.

This is the lucky winner. I look a lot more pleased than him, perhaps because I’ve finished the lecture.

There are videos of the lecture, but they are kind of meaningless without the slide deck. I’m going to spend some time this weekend making a “director’s cut” with a narration that will hopefully make more sense.

Thanks to every one who sponsored me, the folks who turned up and had their pockets emptied, and apologies to the three people who wandered into the lecture theatre just after we had started only to have me point at them and shout “NEW PEOPLE. GET MONEY FROM THEM!” Apparently they turned tail and left in a hurry. I hope they’ve stopped running by now….