Q. What is the matrix?
A. A pain in the ass.

Well, at least it’s a pain in the ass that has ended. I would so much like to write “the presentation went off without a hitch,” but there were hitches. We had technical difficulties, for one: the sound dropped off midway through. Strangely, it only happened on AVI clips and not QuickTime 6 (MPEG-4) ones.

I was able to use this as an excuse to skip 2 of the 4 clips that were in the second to last section (Culture & Context). Even though I skipped that 3 minutes of video, and even though we instructed all the 6 groups that 10 minutes was the limit for each section, the two guys in that section took 23 minutes to present — and my lord, was it boring material. Slides full of text and a monotone drone about the Tao and blahblahblah. It was completely unresponsible and it left the final section (me, of course) with about 4 minutes. My partner had 3 video clips which he went through like a champ and I got about 75 seconds.

On the plus side, though the general presentation quality wasn’t anywhere near my standards, the stills/video clips looked gorgeous. I showed presenters how to make captures from the DVD which netted a lovely 960px wide image, while I ripped sequences directly from the DVD to AVI. Then we ran it on a large projector with a 1024×768 native format. Crisp, gorgeous.

Ha, that reminds me. Guess what computer we used? My tower. Kelly was able to secure a laptop from her department for us to use but the thing was locked down (Win2k) in such a way as to prevent my connecting it to any network other than on-campus. That prevented my transferring of the hundreds of megs of files we needed. That meant I had to bring my tower (and get a ticket for parking close to the building.)

I thought about cracking the admin password but I was up all night and busy as it was. Damn, I need a CD burner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 7th, 2002 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.