Flashes of Panic

Once I got used to it, I really like Keynote. I wish we’d been able to do the business plan presentation with it. It’s like all the cool stuff from Powerpoint, with all the cruft stripped away. I was able to run the lecture from my MacBook in two-screen mode, with the slides on the projector (one screen) and the “presenter view,” which shows the current slide, any notes, and the next slide, on my own screen, so I always knew what was coming next. Other than a few muffed transitions (I mis-programmed them) and some sections where I talked ahead of my own outline, things went pretty smoothly. I was easily able to click out of the presentation into demos online, some of which were actually running on my machine.

Except, of course, for the usual snoozers. 1:30 PM is a lousy time to have class; one of the women said last week that she found she needed to have her afternoon coffee early to get through this block, even when it’s not me lecturing. If I had time to re-do, I would hack more of my code samples into stuff they could easily download and try out on their own. I did show them how to switch on the web server on a Mac, and hinted at how it’s done for Linux. (Looking now at the default Ubuntu build I have in Parallels—didn’t I mention that my Mac now runs both XP and Linux?—I see that Apache isn’t installed on the standard Ubuntu, so maybe fewer students have a built-in Apache than I expected.) I also gave them the URL for my laptop (a DHCP URL only valid while I was jacked in to that ethernet cable) so they could run my demos on their own.

It turns out I was able to recycle some unused work as an example. I did this site over winter break (not the design, but the infrastructure) in Perl, then discovered that the host didn’t support Perl CGIs, so I redid it in PHP. (Pretty easy, actually; it’s a single HTML template, a CSS file, a couple images, and some plain text files. There’s not a whole lot of code involved.) I used the Perl version as a code example for the HTML::Template module, then the whole thing as a demo for the idea of using the filesystem as a simple database.

I also told them that one of the biggest sites built on PHP was one probably everyone with an open laptop had visited at least once during that class block. Several people guessed Google, but then someone guessed right: Facebook. Whereupon we got one denial… from a student who recently “friended” me on Facebook.

Standing in front of a class and talking requires a tremendous amount of mental energy; you have to be on all the time you’re up there. It’s like performing in that sense, I suppose. I feel burned out and unable to focus afterward.

Now Playing: Blue Pastures from Whiplash by James

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