[lit-ideas] Re: Of Chickens and Gardens
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2012 09:59:37 +0900
Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Never back down <groan>.
John
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:35 AM, David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> By dint of ibuprofen I managed to get me to my lecture today. It was a
> near thing. In the middle of yesterday's chicken coop building--it's a
> long story involving number one daughter-- the coop threatened to kill a
> tree, simply by falling on it as a wrestler would. I offered, like the
> little boy with his finger on the Dutch pulse, to delay the fall while M.
> came to aid the rescue effort. Though noble, this was not the best
> impulse. No matter how much soaking in warm water and stretching I did
> yesterday, the road ran only one way--downhill towards the slough of
> buggered backs. The critical moment under such circs. is when I swing my
> legs to get out of bed the following morn. Would I be able to stand or
> would it be a hunchback of Notre D. kind of a day? I stood. I delivered
> my lecture on Ian Hamilton Finlay's Garden. I was that man.
>
> I almost wasn't. My history with technology has not been good, so I
> arrived at the lecture room an hour early to check that all was well. I
> found I had been scheduled in a room without computer or projector.
> Fortune smiled; I ran into the room scheduler in the main common area and
> she was able to look up where I could move to, put me in contact with an
> I.T. person, promise to put a sign on the old room's door. Problem one:
> solved. Problem two was that instead of doing a Power Point and shoving it
> into a memory stick, I'd uploaded all my "slides" onto our college's
> proprietary software site, which used to have a projection capability. I
> learned today that they've recently removed said capability.
>
> "Not to worry," says Mr. I.T. "we'll send it to the Blah, Blah Site and
> winkle its blungers." Some such words. All I was noting, thirty minutes
> from "go," was the little line above his hand which said the operation he
> was proposing would be completed in three hours and forty seven minutes.
> "It's the WiFi," says Mr. I.T. guy, "give me your password; I'll do it in
> my office." So he goes off with my password. I take a bite or two of
> lunch and a sip of best tap water. He returns. "There, done." "Great," I
> say. And then I notice that the slides are in a totally different order.
> "Yes," he says, "the program does that. You should have named them
> differently." "How will I know what slide is coming up?" "You won't."
> "So," I say, "I spent hours composing a talk based around slides appearing
> in a certain order, and now you're proposing I give a talk based on slides
> appearing in some random order?" "Or you could go back to clicking on them
> one at a time and then enlarging them."
>
> That's what I did. The fact that I managed to hold an audience under such
> circumstances was, I think, a small achievement. And I didn't even mention
> my back.
>
> Carry on.
>
> David Ritchie,
> Portland, Oregon
>
>
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--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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