The Lair

Someone should stop scheduling meetings early Monday morning. Seriously. It’s not like being dragged into a series of technical presentations on a rainy, cold Monday morning is going to do anyone’s productivity any good - least of all mine. Even pretending to be interested took more energy than I had available, and I was doing the second presentation. Clearly, feigning interest at your own explanation of work over the past 3 months is a recommended course of actionsurvival trait.

On that note, why the heck is it that overhead projector thingummies have to become progressively smarter - but not smart enough to realize that plugging a computer in via a VGA cable generally means (*gasp*), you fricking want your LCD contents to be displayed ?. Because fiddling with computer settings is exactly the sort of thing that makes the presentor seem professional and with-it. Well, I can’t complain. The flop-sweat that broke out when my fancy Powerpoint slides refused to show up on the giant projector pretty much woke me up. It took a mixture of swearing, rebooting, pressing various hotkeys and listening to advice both helpful and unhelpful - to actually get the thing working. Of course, this fumbling around would have to happen on the single time that I was feeling too sleepy to actually check if things worked beforehand. Bah.

Next, Powerpoint is teh evil. By their very nature, technical talks of this sort pretty much have a captive audience… Having pretty dancing animations on screen (ok, so I don’t go that far) is a way of keeping people from falling asleep. The audience doesn’t really care about your project, they don’t want to be here when you’re explaining your work, they’re too busy tapping out slides for their own, usually - but since they are here, they might as well be entertained, right ? Wrong. Because pretty soon, things evolve into a kind of arms race with each tech talk developing more involved animations and fancy effects. Ooer. Didn’t see that one coming. The graphics and computer vision guys have a clear advantage in this area. They can pretty much sneak in any image they want into their presentation and say “it’s a good image to test our edge detection” on. Which images they snuck in this time are left to your imagination. (no porn allowed, incidentally)

More meetings, same time tomorrow. Oh joy.