Eureka is right next to Halifax train station

Mary and I went up to Halifax this weekend to do a kid’s event at Eureka!, the national children’s museum. We were promoting our book Don’t Flush: Lifting the Lid on the Science of Poo and Wee which is shortlisted for the Royal Society Young People’s Book Award. The Royal Society had set up the gig – we are doing another one in Cardiff in the new year.

Eureka! is just brilliant: if you have not seen it, and you are under 11 years old, pester your parents to take you NOW! It’s just packed with fantastic, crazy exhibits that will keep you busy all day.

I got chewed up by giant teeth…

Our event worked fine: the audience laughed at all the right places, and thankfully didn’t groan at the terrible jokes. The staff at the museum took really good care of us – thank you Jenny, Sophie and Aisha.

However… setting up the event was an IT nightmare.

I was using a slide-show built on my Mac in Keynote, Apple’s looky-likey Powerpoint equivalent. Since PPT shows are usually a synonym for boredom, I had stuffed my show full of animations and sound. I planned to show it from an iPod, but since I have weary experience of technological hiccups, I also had a Plan B. I took a second copy on a Mac laptop. And a Plan C: I exported the presentation to Powerpoint format on a USB thumb-drive, and checked that everything worked on a neighbour’s Windows machine. Paranoid? Moi?

So, when we went in to the museum late on Friday afternoon to check that everything would work, I was quietly confident. Cocky, even. What could possibly go wrong?

… and Mary went searching for treasure in a huge nose

We plugged everything together, and the pictures showed up immediately. “That was easy!” said Jenny when the first slide popped onto the screen. But alas, there was no sound. We checked all the cables: nothing was obviously wrong.

Macs are no longer the strange incompatible beasts they once were, but – as anybody who uses one for presentations will know – when something doesn’t work, your hosts always assume that it’s your Mac that’s causing the problem, not their data projector or sound system. So I said “Don’t worry, I have a belt and braces.” I unpacked my MacBook and its rat’s nest of cables, switched on, and plugged in. Still no sound.

Now I was beginning to get a little uneasy. We pulled out all the cables, and discovered that there was a problem with the sound system. “It was all working on Monday” said Jenny plaintively, and trudged off to find a stand-alone PA.

Half an hour later, we tried again, but neither my iPad nor the laptop had any sound. So I played my trump card “Shezam!” I cried smugly “…I have the talk on a thumb drive that I have TESTED on a Windows machine!” Jenny got one of the museum’s laptops, and fired it up. I plugged in my thumb drive and got … an error message. I had used Powerpoint 2008, and the museum’s version was older. It wouldn’t play.

An infrared camera showed which parts of us were hottest

I broke out into a cold sweat. Our talk has an explosion in it. It simply wouldn’t be the same without an ear-shattering “BOOM!”

In the end, we got the problem sorted, by cannibalising one of the museum exhibits and borrowing its sound connector. But I had learned a valuable lesson. Taking a backup, and a backup of the backup isn’t paranoia: it’s a sensible precaution. And next time, I’ll take my own audio cables.