In the “olden days” when I used to go to conferences, the availability of a data projector and the right version of PowerPoint could be a bit of a lottery, and so I always used to take along a set of slides printed on transparent foils so that I could fall back on the VuGraph machine. Yesterday, I found myself having to fall back on PowerPoint as my Research Techniques and Tools presentation from Flowgram failed mid lecture! Unfortunately, the PowerPoint was used to create the chapter slides so it didn’t have images of the web sites and much of the impact – and my audience – was lost.
As the point of the presentation was to extol the virtues of Internet technologies for research productivity, this rather glaring failure of Internet technology was rather embarrassing!
But at least I had a plan B and next time, it’ll be a better plan!
