A helpful reminder for demos

If you’re going to be doing any kind of demonstration from your laptop, in the name of all that’s holy, create a demo user account.  This will accomplish two things:

  1. It’ll ensure that you didn’t leave an IM client logged in, and
  2. It’ll hide your desktop icons and browser bookmarks (which hopefully aren’t as revealing as this desktop, but will still likely distract from your presentation).

I personally enjoy these kinds of diversions, but I was just reminded of the rules as I IM’d someone who, it turns out, was teaching at the time, and who will no doubt make it my fault when I get home.  Convincing everyone to follow the “make a demo account” rule is the only way I can think of to keep myself out of trouble - changing everyone on the planet is preferable to stopping myself from starting conversations with dirty words… :)