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Wednesday, July 17, 2002

My Baggage Has Returned... I got a call yesterday from British Air in Brooklyn.  My bag, checked onto Northwest for Venice => Boston, went to JFK via British Air.  Go figure.  It's now being Fedex'd to me.  It'll be interesting to see if it ever arrives. *Sigh* 4:48:41 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Demo Improv or Am I Cursed? Ah... A big client meeting early today.  I was up coding from 2:47 am to 6:40 putting on the finishing touches.  Nothing like going up in front of a client on 3 hours of sleep.  Anywy ... We showed off a fairly nice little web site that we built for them (it's a combination of an intranet / public web site for a non-profit organization in the Boston area).  Well, to be very honest,  we showed screen captures.  Given that the last time we demoed for them, my hard disc went south, I did expect the worst.  So I rationalized it as "Apple will save me -- if the room doesn't have Internet access -- the iBook will come to my rescue, none of that ThinkPad crap!" Just in case I loaded screen captures of every web pageonto Gretchen's iBook, made HTML that let me click from screen cap to screen cap and then actually tested it fully on the iBook before getting in the car for the jaunt to Framingham.  Sigh.  *Moans*.  Here's what happened this time: No internet access in the room unless I wanted to do the very, very last minute network config on site (bad idea -- they had no dhcp, etc, and while I can usually grovel towards a network clue by random probing about, I thought that with only about 3 minutes to go before starting, that would be bad). I had tested everything this time.  One small detail...  Just one ... I left the network cable plugged into the iBook while I was testing with the local url i.e. http://localhost/index.htm -- and it worked fine. Without the network cable, Internet Explorer on the Mac, also something I would refer to as "BDIE" (brain dead internet explorer) insists on going online even for localhost urls.  No clue why.  I've seen this assine behavior on the PC but I thought that the Mac would be exempt!  Nope.  It's a cross platform design flaw. So I figured ... try the Work Offline option. Nope!  I got thru 3 slides when it insisted on going back online.  No idea why.  (All of this was, of course, as I'm giving the spiel to the clients). I finished up by quickly opening all the .GIF files in PhotoShop and then moving from image to image.  And, yes, I was embarrassed. Moral 1 of the story: TEST EXACTLY IN YOUR TARGET ENVIRONMENT.  PULL THE NETWORK CABLE, ETC. DON'T EXPECT THINGS TO WORK Moral 2 of the story: HAVE A 2ND BROWSER ON EVERY DEMO MACHINE YOU OWN.  Mozilla would NOT have had this problem. Nor Opera. Moral 3 of the story: Never, ever lose your cool.  Our client?  Despite our looking cursed, they're happy as a clam. "I Give Good Demo" 4:36:19 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This