A week ago I went to an international conference where I had to give a presentation. I was confronted with an unpleasant surprise when I wanted to deliver my presentation.

Glass surface
The conference was held in an expensive hotel in Majorca (Spain). The rooms had a fast Internet connection. Only when I checked out I discovered I had to pay for the connection. There was a luxurious desk in the room, unfortunately covered by a nicely looking glass plate. As could be expected my optical mouse did not work on the glass plate. I always bring a cordless optical mouse for a number of reasons: I prefer a mouse over a touch pad and I use the mouse during my presentation. My improvised solution was a that I slid a sheet of paper under the glass plate.

Conference room
The presenters were supposed to put their laptop on a reading desk present in the conference room. Against my principle I did not check this out before my talk. When it was my turn I discovered that the nicely styled reading desk had two bad properties: (i) the laptop had to be put in there in an almost vertical position and (ii) it was fully made out of transparent perspex.

My Vista laptop has as “protection” that it does not automatically sends a signal to an additional monitor. I have to tell Windows explicitly that there is a second monitor. And I had to do that on a vertical laptop with a non-working mouse because of the transparent surface. It was quite difficult. The chairman saved me by holding a piece of paper behind the reading desk.

Pointing stick
My conclusion was that I really needed to get to be able to use the touch pad. But then one of my PhD students demonstrated quite convincingly that the pointing stick is much better. I am trying this now.

Follow