6196 comments
2357 subscribers
Follow me on Twitter (@sachac)
Subscribe! Feed reader E-mail

MIE mishaps

I’m starting to think that my class finds me amusing. They laugh
whenever they see me get stressed out.

Today was supposed to be one of my easy days. Prof. Shepard was going
to do a demo, and all he needed was a Net connection. The audiovisual
people sent the confirmation last week. Great. Wonderful.

Except that the room didn’t actually come with a computer and Prof.
Shepard didn’t have a laptop. Ack!

I ran to Rosebrugh Building and borrowed a laptop from the
undergraduate office. I lugged the heavy Dell bag back to Bahen as
quickly as I could, and frantically set it up.

It booted into Windows 98. Had a bad feeling about that… Checked out
the TCP/IP settings and saw far too many entries. Not good. Felt
around the box. No Ethernet port! No Ethernet cable, either. Panic
panic panic.

Would’ve nearly hyperventilated in front of the class, ‘cept had a
hard time breathing because the A/V guy was a heavy smoker. Waaah.

Ran out again, grabbed a patch cable from my lab, and borrowed a
laptop from one of the students sitting near the back. Still didn’t
work! Panic panic panic. Rebooted. Checked ipconfig and realized I
missed a “0″ in the IP address.

Fixed the error. Got Google to show up. Whee! Did whirl-around of joy.
Class laughed. Remembered I was in class. Tried to, err, grin in a
dignified manner. Went back to setting everything up.

Student in question was big fan of Mozilla Firefox and had even
bothered fixing Start Menu. Good for him. =) Brought up demo requested
by professor. Was trapped by seating arrangement in front part of
lecture theatre. Could not go back to my seat. Tried to inconspicuously
lean against wall.

Realized red blouse and bright orange skirt not conducive to
inconspicuous hiding. Tried not to fidget as would have been even more
distracting.

Saw professor switch back to browser and bring up Javascript-heavy
application. Just _knew_ there were going to be cross-platform
problems. Thanked lucky stars knew exact command name to call up
Internet Explorer. Saved the day again.

‘Course, still responsible for things not going as smoothly as
planned. Meep.

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/3067

On This Day...

  • 2011: Working with FTP sites — One of the Drupal sites I’m working on is on a web host that allows only FTP access, not SSH [...]
  • 2010: Week ending October 10, 2010 — From the other week’s plans: Work [X] Organize Idea Labs: Run report for external Idea Lab Take a break! Sent spreadsheet [...]
  • 2008: Week ending Oct 12 — Text: IBM’s Innovation Jam was a lot of fun. I focused on it because it was a great opportunity to connect [...]
  • 2008: Sewing: Red jacket, V8343 — I’m working on a red jacket now. I’ve been meaning to pick up a red jacket, but I’d never found [...]
  • 2007: Setting priorities — For once, my random Emacs symbol is strangely apropos. There will never be enough time in the day, and it’s easier [...]
  • 2007: Through the fear — I’m not afraid of heights, just falling. I _enjoy_ the challenge of speaking in front of people or turning up in [...]
  • 2007: Taking portraits of people — Ian Irving was kind enough to not only introduce me to a wonderful little cafe (Lou’s Coffee Bar at Runnymede [...]
  • 2007: Chapter is taking shape — After a little bit of [[http://sachachua.com/notebook/wiki/2007.10.12.php#anchor-2][thinking about Org and Planner]], I’m starting to feel more comfortable with the chapter that I’m writing. I [...]
  • 2007: How I came to love Emacs — Riffing off P.F. Hawkins’ post on how he came to love Emacs, let me tell you my story. =) I wasn’t [...]
  • 2007: Switching mindsets — One of the interesting side-effects of writing this book on Emacs is that I get to stretch my brain by trying [...]
  • 2007: Circus school — The static trapeze lessons I’ve been taking are tons of fun and great motivation to exercise more. (11 straight days [...]
  • 2006: Stretch — I love looking back at the day and knowing that I finished everything I set out to do. I can get [...]
  • 2006: Emacs and a British voice — There’s something about deep, deep cultural programming. Anything spoken with a British accent just sounds infinitely cool. Everyone uses the default voice [...]
  • 2006: Emacs: Quick way to collect references — (defvar sacha/planner-collector-buffer nil "Buffer for collecting links.") (defun sacha/planner-collect-reference () (interactive) (let ((text (sacha/yank-blog-reference-for-summary))) (with-current-buffer sacha/planner-collector-buffer [...]
  • 2006: Meeting minutes from KMD2004 — Started 2:20 PM Ended 3:00 PM Attendance: Dave Kemp, Sacha Chua Talked about tentative plans for lit review. Sacha will probably choose one [...]
  • 2006: The Constant Connector — I spent some time reviewing all of my blog posts that contained the keyword “networking”. I think you’ll find the [...]
  • 2005: Stepping outside my comfort zone — I get a thrill out of speaking at the edge of my comfort zone. In my Toastmasters speech about rediscovering theatre, [...]
  • 2005: Speech practice — I’ve just realized how amazingly useful a digital voice recorder is in preparing for a speech. I can record myself, listen [...]
  • 2005: Novell usability results — From David Tang of Novell: Extensive usability research, including video trials, is now available to developers worldwide at betterdesktop.openSUSE.org Totally awesome! Good karma [...]
  • 2005: Toastmasters Humorous Speech contest tomorrow — Searching the Net for tips on Toastmasters humorous speech competitions, I ran across Steve Pavlina‘s blog entry about his division’s humorous [...]
  • 2005: Nearly full CPU utilization — This week is quite a challenge. Two major things on my plate: the Toastmasters competition tomorrow and the lab report due [...]
  • 2004: Finished 300 kanji book! — It’s a bit hard to believe that we’ve managed to finish the 300 kanji book that seemed so intimidating back when [...]
  • 2004: Places Ranulf wants to go to — Chicago: 6-31-21 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku. On Omotesando Dori, between Meiji Dori and Harajuku Station. (Near Meiji Jingumae or Harajuku.) Great! I went to [...]
  • 2004: Contact information for Ranulf’s conference — +81-3-348-58492 APR Workshop on the role of ICT in the Youth Programme
  • 2004: Japanese technical vocabulary — Thought I should start blogging the technical words I find on mailing lists. =) Warning: translations are just my guesses… ·ë¶É¡¢¤ä¤ê¤¿¤¤¤³¤È¤Ï¥Õ¥¡¥¤¥ë¶¦Í­¤Ç¤¹¤«¡£ Is file [...]
  • 2004: u-color-cycle.el — Ulf Jasper’s u-color-cycle.el smoothly changes the color of all text in a window or region while you stare at it, mesmerized. It [...]
  • 2004: ssh-copy-id — ssh-copy-id copies the id_dsa.pub file located in your .ssh/ to machine2 using ssh. It sets up the authorized_key file and permissions [...]
  • 2003: ARGH! — Ctrl-c’d my oocalc instead of my appletviewer.
  • 2003: Anonymous quote from Mario’s sig — I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose [...]
  • 2003: Lambda the Ultimate, a programming weblog — http://lambda.weblogs.com/departments