Wednesday 11/15/2023
Did my laundry. Took a shorter walk than usual. Took a tech squad call: printer won’t print, turned out to be out of ink. Edited the video of the Appreciation Fund event of a few days ago.
About 5 David G. called. He’s to run an event tonight, a lecture on Eichler building style, but his daughter is having an operation and he wants to visit her about 6pm. Sure, no problem, I can run an event.
So I do run the event and while I have run these things multiple times before, I fuck this one up. Here’s what I wrote to my AV committee later.
She had powerpoints on a little Microsoft Surface PC. I had her start Zoom, join the meeting, made her co-host, had her share her screen. This all went smoothly. Her slides up on the big screen and going out to Zoom users.
She mentioned she had a video in the powerpoint, but I didn’t think what that implied — audio. So I let her share her slides withOUT ticking the little box on the share dialog that says “share audio”.
So she’s in her talk, and gets to the video, and clicks Play, and no sound. I immediately knew what was wrong, but fixing it, live on stage, turned into a clusterfuck. What was needed was conceptually simple: Stop the share; Share again; and this time click “share audio”.
Alas, she was just not able to get to the zoom meeting window, under the full-screen display of her slides. Somehow in trying to find it, she managed to leave the meeting. Then she couldn’t find the Zoom app to click Join, so she got a web browser and signed in to zoom.us on the web, and from there you can click Join, but it didn’t seem to recognize the meeting ID at first…
After about 10 minutes of f***ing around on stage with the audience fidgeting, she/we got back into the meeting and shared her slides, but still not with sound, so she gave up on the video.
I must say the lady was very chill and calm about the whole thing, kept her head amazingly well, and was nice about it afterward
So that was my nightmare evening. The talk actually went pretty well, there was a good Q&A session afterward. But there was 10 minutes of sweat in the middle.
Codgerville 