Three things to check so your presentation doesn’t go up in smoke

On the 4th of July evening San Diego was supposed to have an impressive fireworks display called the Big Bay Boom. Instead the whole sequence went off in less than thirty seconds, as shown above in a video.

It was blamed on a computer glitch that is pretty easy to imagine. For debugging the program you would want to be able to step through the whole sequence quickly, like using the fast forward function on a video recorder. You wouldn’t want that fast forward mode to be left  on when running the finished program. Oops!

Before you head out the door with your laptop, check that:

1. Your desktop display has appropriate wallpaper and no naughty icons like My Porn Files.

2. Your screen saver isn’t Not Safe for Work (NSFW) like the one shown in this video.

3. Your PowerPoint handout doesn’t contain an embedded Excel workbook full of unrelated but proprietary data. (Save it as a .pdf file, or just include the spreadsheets you used for that presentation).