Be Prepared

Today was the day I gave my talk on Enterprise Perl at the LinuxWorldExpo conference. As always when speaking at these conferences I was well prepared. I had my talk on my laptop and a copy on a USB memory key. Also, as my laptop is looking a bit long in the tooth and isn’t as fast as it could, I started up OpenOffice, opened the file and suspended the laptop before I left home. The plan was that I’d just need to switch on my laptop when I got to the conference and everything would immediately spring into action.

Well that was the plan.

As I was sitting in the audience of the previous talk I tried to start up my laptop, only to find that in the hour and a half since I had suspended it the (fully charged) batteries had run down and I had no power. So when the previous speaker finished his talk I had to leap up and plug my laptop in as quicklyas possible as I knew it would take a few minutes to boot up and start OpenOffice.

Then the second problem became apparent. For some reason the projector didn’t recognise the video output coming from my laptop. I’ve connected this laptop to projectors all over the world and this is the first time it wasn’t recognised immediately. This is, of course, why I always take a copy of my talk on a USB key. I was able to borrow the previous speaker’s laptop and give my talk.

The talk itself seemed to go well. I may have misjudged the audience slightly. I gave a rather high-level management overview of why Perl is good for Enterprise systems, but I think that at least some of the audience were looking for something a bit more technical. A few people were kind enough to speak to me afterwards and tell me that they found it useful.

So apologies for the late start to anyone who was there. I hope you still found it useful. I enjoyed myself and I hope I get invited back next year.