Going West vs Going to Sleep

Phew! That was one busy adventure to the other side of this wide brown land (It is wide, and brown, but mainly wide)

TUF 2005 in Perth was the launching ground for our new product, ice. Stilly and I were presenting the keynote, which was based around showing off ice, and talking about collaboration and other reasons why a bunch of customers might want to buy it.

In a stroke of genius\insanity, we decided to let the audience pick the demonstration platform based on random outcomes - we built a giant cardboard die with various operating systems and platforms written on each side - then we'd let a volunteer from the audience roll the dice(die?) to determine which platform we should do our demo on.

ice (the italics belong to the marketing department) works on any platform, so we were pretty confident that we would be okay. But, what I hadn't counted on (those italics are mine), was my crummy laptop (which was acting as the server) deciding that it would be a good idea to hibernate in the middle of the demonstration.

So I click a link to demonstrate applying an active label, and this enormous (5 foot wide) dialog box appears on the giant screen behind me:
"ALERT:Timeout occurred connecting to http://gordo"
and then I make some nervous lame joke about what happens when you let nerds deliver your keynote and try to telepathically scream at Big-Headed Simon to "SAVE ME!"

Turns out that when you create a local user, Windows XP decides to return all your power settings back to the defaults. For a notebook computer, that includes hibernating after 20 minutes of inactivity. Inactivity, appears to be defined as mouse wiggles or keyboard taps - not the CPU running at 20%.

In the end, everything actually went pretty well - Lots of people told me that they really enjoyed our talk, ice has been well received by the Asia Pacific customers, and when it becomes available at the end of the month, we should have plenty of customers keen to upgrade to TRIM Context 6 and get the sexy new interface for collaboration.

Why am I posting so much work stuff? Well, I guess it's where my head is at right now.
Busy Hard Assed Bug Fixin...

Outside of work, we had lots of fun too. Armed with an ipod and a ukelele, the scooby gang escaped the clutches of TUF Man, and found themselves going forward (not backward), upward (not forward) and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom...

Lindsay's account is here, and Stilly's photos are here.