Tommy Collison

Last night, I was in Tipperary Institute, in Thurles, giving a talk on the merits of business blogging (MiniD!).

I had a Keynote presentation all ready to display to the 20 or so people coming, planning on hooking my MacBook Air up to a projector. Keynote is the Mac version of Microsoft PowerPoint.

I arrived in the lecture room, and saw the projector was up on the roof. Even with a chair, I couldn’t reach it. Jumping down, I decided to go to the reception and ask what the set up was.Turns out, the lecturer’s computer was the only computer allowed on the projector.

If you had a laptop?

Nope, couldn’t use it.

I went back and booted up the projector and the computer, looking for powerpoint, thinking I’d email myself my Keynote in PPT form, and play it from the lecturer’s PC. I look up, and see what I’m doing is being beamed up onto the wall. How is this?I kneel down and pull the CPU toward me, push it onto the floor and turn it around. I see a VGA cable snaking its way out of the back to the PC up the wall. I follow it onto the ceiling and into the projector.

Bingo!

I pull the cable out and grab the adaptor for my Macbook. I plug the cable and the adaptor together, and plug all of that into my MacBook. Looking up, the start menu had been replaced by the gleaming Mac dock.
**

The moral of this story is basically I live to break the rules others set. The scary thought comes in from a discussion I had with Klara this morning. I was telling her about it, and she just said:

“But what if someone just had no rules? You’d be screwed then, Tommy!”

It’s true, I would!

That tweet stemmed from me trying to get the MBA to talk to the projector. Half-praying, half-just-saying-it-enough-times-that-it-just-had-to-work