Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: So there was a stressful moment there

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

So there was a stressful moment there

I'm the kind of guy that likes to scope things out in advance. One example was the MRI last October. I'd been past the South Health Campus enough to know where it was, but not enough to know about parking. I wanted to scope it out during daylight. I found a good spot and decided to check out the inside of the building so I'd know where to go. Hospitals can be quite the maze. Found where I needed to go, sort of accidentally got checked in, and they took me early. Score!

Most recently our senior's group asked me to give them a presentation with photos of our trips to New Brunswick and Newfoundland. They'd liked the presentations about Yukon and New Zealand. I was happy to, but a bit twitchy about our projector, and how the new laptop would work out.

I went over to the hall a couple times to figure out the best way of presenting the photos, and to be sure the laptop could talk to the projector. The laptop has an HDMI port, and the projector has an HDMI in, but in between there's a dodgy switch.

After some playing I discovered that of the 3 cables, only one would work, and in only one of the switch ports. I could cope. So there I was on Tuesday, setting up that way. Then the fun started. The screen image flickered, showing the laptop desktop then the blue screen of death. Back and forth a bunch of times. After a bit of fussing I got the image to stay up. I was doing my introduction, and went to show the first image, and, blue screen of death. Sigh.

I ended up unplugging the switch and plugging the projector HDMI directly into the laptop. That's a short cable, so I had the laptop on top of the equipment rack in the AV closet. I had to duck in and out to change slides.

One lady's husband had worked for Parks Canada in Fundy National Park for a long time, and had seen much of New Brunswick. Another lady had traveled there and seen some of it. I'd brought along the travel books, and people loved those.

So other than a sweaty few minutes trying to overcome the projector issues, it went really well. And people wonder why I pushed to have the AV equipment upgraded during the upcoming hall renovations...

In other news I was out for a walk near bridge 9. It's been warm, snow and ice is melting, the water is gushing, but it's still a sloppy enchilada out there.