Copyright

But the good news was, at least for me, that the presentation was well received, in fact requests followed to rerun it four or five times during the mid 1990’s, in Birmingham (the one where they have strange accents, oh I see, well OK the one in the UK), Nice, Helsinki, Gothenburg and Copenhagen. This became the 'Zen World Tour' and led to one of the reasons behind these writings, more and more people wanted to hear the original presentation and I had a day job to do!

Now for the bad news, the organizers of one of the conferences I was scheduled to present at was concerned that, 'if it went well' ('if indeed!) the audience would expect a similar style session in the future, and so was born;

ZEN II
-The Son of Zen -3D
- This time it’s personal
- In software no one can hear you scream
- Just when you thought it was safe to develop software

(all done to the theme tune to Jaws – do-do do-do do-dododododo)

ZEN II was really the bits leftover from the original presentation, but also included some of the more outlandish stories from earlier times. As the amount of material grew a number of friends and colleagues persuaded me to collect my thoughts in a more structured way and' WRITE IT DOWN!'

'WRITE IT DOWN!' was not going to be as simple as it seems, you see the original Zen (ZEN I) was multimedia and involved images, text, sound, morphing, video and animation together with a huge number of 'props' such as a bucket with 100 table tennis balls in it (see Downsizing for an explanation of this particular image). So, would it be possible to recreate a true multimedia presentation in writing? I don't know, we'll have to wait and see «««GOTO # 247 FOR DISCUSSION ON INTERRUPTS

First; In amongst these random ramblings I have littered some fundamental rules, some axioms for a better life, here is the first;

W.C.FIELD'S FIRST RULE OF ACTING - "Never work with children or animals".
THORPE'S FIRST AMENDMENT TO W.C.FIELD'S FIRST RULE;
THE FIRST RULE OF PRESENTING - "Never work with children or animals OR multimedia!"

Why? Well, multimedia in presentations deliberately develop problems immediately prior to the scheduled start time, they run out of memory; they develop obscure graphics problems, and generally misbehave. In fact the use of technology in presentations should be used as a bench marking procedure for robustness.

A_Word_About_Copyright

I have to be honest, the Zen presentations were not the first I had ever done, in fact over the years I have given quite a few. Over those years a good friend of mine Colin McGavin from Christchurch, New Zealand, had used some of the ideas I had put forward. Can you imagine my surprise when I first saw a diagram I had created being used in another context on another continent? It is to keep Colin under control that I now use the copyright symbol wherever possible;

Terence Thorpe

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