Life’s Little Disasters

Disaster struck late last night, just after I finished reviewing my slides for my second presentation at FC06 (I got roped in as a substitute for Stephan Brands in the panel on Identity Management; would that I were a real substitute for one of the word’s top crypographers!).

I’d started preparing my talk at home, and had six pages of notes that I was gradually turning into slides. After I finished the last slide while sitting propped up in the hotel bed, I got out of the bed. In the process I slipped, and while flailing around my arm caught the neck strap (laniard) that is attached to my USB drive. The force wrenched it out of its slot on the side of my laptop, ripping it into two parts: the memory part came apart from the metal tongue, which remained in the usb slot of the laptop, complete with dangling bits of metal strip that had formerly joined the RAM to the tongue. I got the metal out of the laptop, but that was it for my data.

Humpty dumpty was not going to be put back together again. And what backups I have are on my desktop in Miami, not on my laptop. (I do hope I have a recent backupl of my calendar, or I’m going to miss some meeting or deadline…)

So, starting around 11pm, I had to reconstruct an hour’s talk from memory and redo about thirty slides. The resulting version had, I’d guess, about 85% of the content of the original and only a few of the cute pictures. And of course I was pretty tired when I gave the talk in the morning. The audience was kind, but the subject is fairly depressing and I think we had more fun yesterday.

On the bright side it didn’t actually rain yesterday, and the sky looks OK now, although it seems a little hot and sunny out right now to go walking anywhere, and we’re a ways from the beach.