I’m visiting the Amazon Chennai office for a few days. Because of the strike at Lufthansa, I decided to travel with only carry-on bags, and to keep the weight down I brought my personal MacBook Air rather than my regular work MacBook. I figured that I only really needed something to take notes and log in to Outlook Web Access occasionally. ((If anyone from security is reading: yes, I do use FileVault.))
I was scheduled to give a talk this morning, and I’d prepared a slide deck, based on the material I delivered on my last visit to India. But yesterday after breakfast I reviewed the presentation and realized that it didn’t really hit the points that I wanted to emphasize. No problem: I settled down to put together a new set of slides. Since I don’t have Microsoft Office on my personal machine, I used Apple’s excellent Keynote. I cranked away, and by the end of the day I was happy with the new slides. I checked them again this morning, added a couple of slides, cleaned up my conclusion, and I was ready.
I walked into the room where I was giving my talk, and asked if I could double-check the compatibility of my MacBook Air with the projector they were using. “Oh, that would be awkward… could you just give me the slides on a thumb-drive, and I’ll copy them onto my (Windows) laptop?” So I fired up Keynote, saved the presentation as PDF, copied it onto a thumb-drive, and thought no more about it.
Soon it was time for me to give my talk. I located my slides, double-clicked the file, and Adobe Acrobat launched. (It seemed to be the first time, because I had to accept a couple of licenses.) I selected full-screen mode and started the presentation. We’d just got to slide 5 when Acrobat suddenly crashed, displaying a small dialog box that read “I/o error”. I tried again, without success. Several people huddled over the laptop, trying to be helpful, but after a couple of minutes I just grabbed my MacBook Air, plugged it in, and finished my talk.
People seemed to really like my presentation, but they were even more impressed that I’d managed to crash Acrobat…