Today started out as any typical Sunday. I had breakfast, picked people up, and went to church. I always arrive an hour early because I have to setup the sound and computer equipment for the service. So the time is 9:30am and service starts at 10:30am.
10:00am - I'm informed that a missionary will be speaking today, and she will be presenting a slideshow of pictures at around 11:00am. I meet the missionary, and she hands me three CDs which I assume is a Powerpoint presentation.
10:15am - A laptop arrives, so I patch that into the video projection system, and boot it up.
10:25am - I'm browsing through the CDs for a Powerpoint presentation and realize there isn't one. The CDs contain around 150 large photo files and that's it. I can't project each individual photo onto the screen, so I open up Powerpoint on the laptop. I'm thinking, oh yeah, I can put together a Powerpoint presentation in half an hour .... no problem. To my horror, I find that the laptop's Powerpoint is disabled because the license activation has not happened, and you need to enter a serial number to activate it. Gah!
10:30am - I get someone to let me into the church offices in hopes of building a Powerpoint presentation. After playing around with Powerpoint, I figure that this isn't going to work. Powerpoint is trying to import each photo onto the hard drive. I don't want that, I want Powerpoint to just read off the CD. In addition, I have to manually resize each photo to fit the slide as these pictures are super large photos.
10:45am - I ditch Powerpoint and improvise. I open up a plain text editor and I start hacking together a website that will read photos directly off the CD. The beauty of a website is that you can automatically set the height and width of every photo by going height=600, width=800. In addition, webpages are relatively small in size, so you can easily fit them onto a disk.
11:00am - I got all the photos from CD #1 onto a webpage. I quickly save the webpage to disk and run upstairs to the laptop. Thankfully Tom (benevolent founder of Islandnet) was sitting upstairs, so I got him to help run the show while I finish the other webpages. I run back downstairs.
11:15am - I finish getting all the photos from CD #2 and CD #3 onto a webpage, and I run back upstairs. I take over running the show of pictures. Then I realize one of the CDs is missing ... gah, run back downstairs, find CD, run back upstairs. Lucky for me I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt which is optimal for running up and down stairs.
11:45am - On the last webpage that I'm showing, the pictures stop showing up because an error happens. Turns out the computer ran out of memory as there were too many photos loaded at once. Gah! Oh well.... at least people actually got to see the photos.
So, that is why I entitled today's blog entry as "A Poor Man's Powerpoint", as this was very adhoc and it was a huge hack. Thank God it all worked out ... it was pretty rushed.
**Technical paragraphs ahead, feel free to stop reading now.
I'm reminded by some wise words that I learned from
Dr.Zastre. In a lecture, he said programmers should strive to be nomadic programmers. What that means is that good programmers should be able to program in any type of environment given a small set of tools such as a plain text editor and a compiler. This teaching definitely helped my specific case.
That is kind of why I am weary of using IDEs (integrated development environments) which is a tool that helps programmers generate code and what not. Some people grow too dependent on their IDEs, and are unable to write code from scratch. They also lose a sense of what's actually going on behind the scenes. An example is, some people know how to build webpages using Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, but have no idea how to actually build them by hand from scratch. If they were in my situation, they wouldn't be able to build a website on the fly since Frontpage or Dreamweaver is not usually installed on every computer. However, every computer does have at least a plain text editor.
Anyways, that was my eventful Sunday. Nothing like last minute rush jobs.
