This morning, a project I’ve been working on with a small team scattered around Research had a presentation scheduled to a VP. We wanted to give a demo, and some of my colleagues back East worked through the weekend to integrate their technology into the system. All was well.

So this morning, when it came time to demonstrate, Things Went Awry. The person giving the demo couldn’t actually get connectivity in the meeting room — she solved that problem by switching from wireless to wired, but then the system didn’t work well, giving “500 Internal Error” messages. Of course, we had backup slides to show, and made light of the problems, but it was still infuriating. Even restarting the server, and then the machine, didn’t help.

Once I got to the office, I was determined to find out what was wrong and fix it, because I hadn’t changed a thing since Friday, when all was well (the integration all happened on another system on the other coast). Nothing made sense, so eventually I searched the corporate directory for an expert, and found the right guy in one shot. He listened to my description, and then asked me if I’d pinged his servers to see if I had connectivity.

I hadn’t, so I tried. Name resolution took an awfully long time. And it failed at times, too. This was a strong hint that the problem really wasn’t in my code — it was somewhere in the bowels of the nameservers. So I got a nameserver expert involved, and, eventually, all was well.

But why did this have to happen this morning?

We had to go to Valley Fair this afternoon so Diane could return some purchases to Coldwater Creek. Since I had no particular interest in that store, I wandered over to the Apple Store, secure in the knowledge that I wasn’t going to buy anything.

There were two reasons I knew I wasn’t going to buy anything.

The first reason was that just last weekend, I’d upgraded my Mac Mini to 1GB and bought an external hard drive/port replicator for it, all to make it easier to transfer my old tapes to DVD. When I captured the first tape I tried, there were dropouts; I thought it was because the Mini was short on memory, but after further investigation, it just seems that that tape is defective in spots. But having more memory is a good idea, and I was desperately short of hard disk space anyway.

The second reason: tomorrow is the first day of WWDC, and there might well be some interesting announcements. I’d hate to buy a new machine today, only to find out that it was obsolete tomorrow.

But clearly, many people either didn’t know or didn’t care about WWDC; the store was very busy, and it wasn’t just lookers — there were lines at the registers, and not just for accessories and software, but for new systems galore. Almost makes me wish I owned Apple stock!