Tommy Collison

So, today was a big day. I gave a 20 minute presentation to my class about blogging, what it is, and why we should do it

I had a big fight with PowerPoint, because I wanted to use Keynote so I could have my Apple Remote to change through slides. I managed to get Keynote fully unlocked on Mum’s laptop last night by getting a serial, but my own computer still wouldn’t let me save Keynotes I created.

So, last night, at about 10:30, I began my Keynote on Mum’s laptop. I got it finished, but it was late, so I forgot to save it. I also forgot to plug in her laptop, and at about 3am last night, the battery was empty and it shut down. Guess what was lost? Yeah, my presentation. Ugh.

So, this morning, I go to school, verify my laptop is still in the office and went to class. Second period was religion which I’m exempt from. I grab my laptop from the office and head to the GPA. My plan is:

To do the thing in Keynote (from scratch), copy it over to Powerpoint and present it.

Sounds simple, but that was when it began to fall apart at the seams, like a cheap pair of counterfeit jeans.

First epicfail was my forgetting that getting Macs and Windows to talk to each other is like getting Bush and Fidel to have a tea party together. It’s the age-old conundrum of the square peg and the round hole. I needed a special connector-doodah to connect my MacBook to the projector of the ICT room. I looked at home and found one I thought would work but didn’t.

Second epicfail was that I thought I had Powerpoint installed on my computer, but didn’t.

I discovered this about 15 minutes before I began my talk. Thank god my mum wasn’t with me, I’d have been clipped round the ear for the language I used, albeit under my breath. I thought for a moment and then it hit me.

Why did I need powerpoint?

I mean, I’m not one of those freaks of nature who put tons of cheap animations in their PPTs, making the message unreadable. I’m not even one of those people who puts tons of text in their slides, preferring to use PPTs for pictures only (visual aids) and leave the talking to the person. All my slides were literally a heading, or an image. In two or three slides it was both, but no other text.

So I screencapped my entire presentation. 25 CMD+Shift+4 ‘s later, I had my slides in JPG form. Now all I had to do was make a slideshow of the images and play them on the teacher’s laptop, which hooked up to the projector.

I thought this’d be simple, but it wasn’t. At first I thought I’d be able to simply email the pictures. Because gMail doesn’t allow the emailing of folders (from the web interface, at least), I compressed it into a .zip folder and emailed that. Before today, I would’ve sworn Windows could handle standard .zip files like that. Turns out I was wrong.

I began to email the pictures to myself to access from the teacher’s laptop in a minute when I spotted a memory card on the desk.

* Yoink! *

* Steals *

So, now I had all the pictures on the Windoze laptop, I simply put them on slideshow and waited for my class. I also took out my phone and began a timer for when I began speaking. I wanted people to start their blogs in this class so I couldn’t talk for too long. I don’t like eating waffles and listening to one ain’t so great either.

After settling down the class and turning my phone on silent after an earlier text from Liv came in and made the phone go * PING!*, I began my timer and started talking. I talked for 11:08:92 and questions lasted 08:34:54, and then got the class creating their blogs on Blogger. Not out of some perverse gratitude (I was TrustTommy.blogspot.com for 7ish months) but simply because WordPress.com was blocked. Dang.

So, all in all, my first blogging talk went excellently. To be honest, I didn’t really expect anyone to be massively interested as blogging was never a popular school-yard topic among the 13 year-olds, but I found this class to be very good. Actively engaging me and probing the subject of blogging further than I had planned to go. We went through a lot I hadn’t thought important enough to go through – like copyright.

I don’t know how many blogs were set up today because as soon as they got past the registration stage, the school web filter’s sentries shot them down for being “personal websites”. Authority stopping the progress of knowledge and learning, yet again. (Not blaming the school here. As someone who hangs round with the IT teachers, I found out that they have little enough control over such things. They don’t even have access to allowed/banned sites! Sites (like mine) have to allowed remotely, via filling in a web-form with the censor people)

All in all, a success.