Here (PDF) is my presentation from Open Nordic 2008.

My experience at this conference – the audience was interested and had good questions, by the way – was rather unnerving. As is my wont, I was sitting in the audience listening to the speaker before me, fiddling with my own presentation (I have found that starting for or against the previous speaker when you are late in the day in a conference helps the audience anchor what you are saying. Plus, sitting in on the previous speaker gives you an idea about what the audience wants.)

Anyway, I had saved my presentation, and when the other speaker had finished, I pulled out the power cable from my Lenovo X61 Tablet laptop to walk up and check that it would work with the projector.

And then my laptop just died. No sign of life, no reaction when cycling power, no reaction when taking out the battery, nothing. Dead as the proverbial doornail. My guess is a short in the motherboard or something like that – the newer Lenovos operate on a 90W power adapter and I have a feeling that they are pretty cramped in there, with more power running around than you would like.)

Well, for once the backup system worked, as did everything else. Knut Yrvin put up his laptop (running Linux, incidentally), I logged on to my account at Foldershare.com, and lo and behold, the presentation which I had saved just minutes earlier was there in all its glory. Downloaded it to Knut’s’ laptop, opened it (in OpenOffice 2.4), and it ran like a charm.

Backup and interoperabilty, folks. It’s the new black.

I can’t recommend Foldershare highly enough. A life-saver. It can sometimes be tricky to install on some corporate networks, but boy, what a tool. Get it. It is free from Microsoft and, to quote Jerry Pournelle, It Just Works. Get It Now.

Now I just have to hope that my hard disk can be salvaged – while I have backup of my documents and email, there are some files and programs that for various reasons (mostly sloth on my part) were not backed up. As for getting a new laptop, that may take a week or two, but since summer is coming and I am mostly working from home anyway, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.