Plip's Weblog

Phil Winstanley - British .NET chap based in Lancashire. Enjoys tea and tech. Working for Microsoft.

I didn't sacrifice a chicken

So it seems god (whichever one you happen to believe in) hates me.

I do presentations at usergroups and conferences, and invariably things go wrong, but with me, they're usually so wrong that I have a heart attack just before or just after a session.

Whilst in Finland in August I was giving two sessions on Atlas security and Atlas performance, just before the session I accidentally deleted all my source code and has to recreate it from a camtasia recording I'd made and during the session the projector failed on me for a good fifteen minutes so I had to entertain the audience by using nothing more than a sock and parts of my anatomy.

Last night I was giving a talk to the VBUG .NET Usergroup in Newcastle. This time I was going to be prepared, everything would work fine, I'd rehersed my session, I had instructions for every one of my demos, I'd triple checked each demo on the train, then in my hotel, everything was working fine.

I was happy, relaxed and really looking forward to the session. Then it happened, I got to the venue, and booted up my laptop, up comes the login screen and I tap my password in and wait, then wait some more, followed by a little more waiting followed by ... the dialogue which comes up when you log onto a machine for the first time (you know the one setting up start menu, setting up preferences blah blah).

Windows (XP) has lost my profile completly, I looged in but my desktop wasn't there, my documents were not there, my code was not where I'd left it, everythign was gone.

I shat myself.

After reconfiguiring my desktop (I run with my start bar up the left), changed the font sizes, sorted out the resolutions, moved all the documents around on disk from my now "old profile" (which had 30 minutes previously been my current profile!) to my "new profile", reimporting all the settings into VS.NEt that I use (Mike Taulty very kindly shared with me his VS.NET presentation settings), recreated all my desktop shortcuts that I'd need for the demo's, gotten the system working through the projector, I was still crapping my pants a bit. This all happened in the 10 minutes before the session is due to start.

I then recalled, I'd made the buggest mistake I could have made, I'd not sacrificed a chicken.

Edit: When I got home and logged in everything was back to normal - WHAT THE £"$!@%$$£%$£$%£ !!!!!

 

Posted: Oct 26 2006, 09:15 AM by Plip | with 3 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,

Comments

Joel Hammond-Turner said:

Have you got a domain set up at home?

My guess is that whilst on the road the lappy decided to only use the local machine accounts hence wouldn't let you authenticate into the domain account as normal.

Alternatively, I suppose it's possible that where you were might have had a domain configured on the wireless lan, and your lappy was defaulting to that rather than your normal domain.

All speculative, of course! =:-)

Then again, just think happy thoughts that you survived the experience with your code intact!

My next question is: How far would you go to ensure you had the resources you need for a presentation? Duplicate on CD? On a pendrive? Second laptop? Remote access to your desktop machine at home?

# October 26, 2006 11:30 AM

JonR said:

that happened to me once, courtesy of novell netware and some utterly indifferent/inept IT "support". i lost everything! thankfully my external backups were only a week old!

# November 9, 2006 4:43 AM

Aaron Seet said:

This can happen if you happen to assign multiple user accounts (be it domain or local) to the same user profile path, like I do.

Once logged on as one, the user registry hive is loaded from that path and locked. It remains locked even after logging off. so if another user account that points to the profile path logs in, it won't be able to obtain a lock to the hive and therefore fall back to a default user profile.

# November 29, 2006 5:03 AM