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I'm doing a presentation at a conference tomorrow. It's no problem, something I do frequently and often enjoy. I had planned to complete the PowerPoint last night but didn't so I started plugging away again this morning - I'd already sketched out the structure and I knew where it was going but I has to sort the content and the images.

It was going swimmingly and I had most of the images and I was keeping a text file with details of the image author and the URL (I use Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr, including my own) and I'd found some real gems when.................. the power failed. The whole building and also a good part of town judging by the people coming out of shops and restaurants. Of course, because I used to be an IT professional and I've done IT training for large companies, I hadn't been saving regularly - well I had, but the regularity was once a day. There followed a very sweaty and tense 30-some minutes while we waited for the power to come back on and there was then a wee bit of jittery jitters while the PC wouldn't boot because tthe server and local gateway hadn't woken up properly until - finally - I could open Powerpoint and................. autorecovery is probably one of those bits of kit we forget about until it demonstrates how damn useful it is. Presentation finished and sent to conference organiser to load on the kit.

So tonight I'm not sweating over a hot PPT but enjoying one of life's little luxuries - a nice cup of PG Tips. Slainté :-)