Thursday, December 19, 2013

Of what can go wrong at presentations..

This was a scheduled talk at Tableau's annual customer conference (TCC13). I had done a few practice talks and the content looked decent. Slides and demo of connecting to a hadoop cluster running at headquarters.

The setup of my machine was complicated.
1. Powerpoint  slides
2. Tableau desktop running. Already loaded viz'es. Some of these were complicated and take a long time to load
3. vpn in using the hotel internet. My plan was to to connect Tableau Desktop to a Hadoop cluster running in corporate.

All is well as I walked to the podium, all looked good. I then connected my laptop and connected the projector..... and the laptop mouse froze. It stopped working. I was in deep trouble.

Ok, the only option seemed to be rebooting the machine.
A reboot meant:
1. a 5 minute slow reboot
2. time to vpn
3. time to load presentation and software. i.e a 10 minute delay.
And no guarantee that all the data after vpn will load.


An IT expert came and confirmed that a reboot should help. What do I do???

Thinking... if the trackpad does not work - maybe attaching an external mouse will help...The IT guy got usb mouse. fingers crossed...but it did not work. Only the right click worked - no movement.
Next try: use another usb port..- that did not work either.

I announced to the crowd that I am have mouse problems and apologized.

A good Samaritan then got another mouse - it was a Microsoft usb mouse. Plugged it in - and voila - it worked. With renewed energy - I started my talk. Things started flowing and all was well!



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