In other fields, speeches are pretty much planned out. First off, this isn’t meant to be a blanket statement, as there are cases in which speeches in front of a group or crowd of people do become complex and can have unexpected issues. With technology, demos always seem to be complex and happen to include the guaranteed glitch. Network latency, a software crash, or website being unavailable. That one bug that was either noticed and ignored as unlikely to reoccur, or one that never appeared until your demo will show up in front of all the current and potential customers.

I was at a website demo recently when Firefox was on a blitz resizing a page that was not available page due to network issues. It could have been the projector as well, but I’ve never see the Try Again button get so big.

You can prepare for every possibility, but the only way to prevent a glitch is to run a prepared video, which itself can have issues. Audio, video, or both could fail. When you have to present a demo, just be prepared for that glitch, and if need to, dismiss it with “Oh, so that’s how that bug occurs.” Dismiss it and get back on track as quickly as possible. Customers, especially technology people who have presented with a similar situation, will not hold it against you if you show your product is solid amid the minor demo issue that won’t appear when they try it themselves.*

Oh, and if it’s your product’s bug, you need more testing.

• I assume no responsibility for the use of this response.  It could backfire in certain situations.

This past weekend, many of us followed a tradition that has happened twice a year for some years now. The shift of one hour either forward or backward, to “save daylight.” We either lose an hour of sunlight in the evening, or gain it back. It’s the time of year when you become blinded earlier as you’re driving home. It’s also the hour of sunlight you regain that you can enjoy outside again.

I recently bought a new alarm clock that offers two alarm times, a radio, and an automatic adjustment of the daylight savings time. On the top of the box, it even mentioned the new dates the time shifts occur that were enacted in 2007, and that it automatically adjusts for those shifts. It doesn’t seem very hard to know the time since it knew the right time when I plugged it in the first time (through air waves). I was awake to watch this great new technology adjust the time for me. I mean, my computer, my VCR, Tivo, and cell phone all adjust the time for me. I was looking forward to adjusting only one clock, my wall clock which has no connection to any date (I guess I should upgrade so I don’t have to worry anymore).

I was bummed that my automatic alarm clock did not change the time correctly. It sat there at 1:59, 2:00, 2:01, 2:02, etc. Perhaps technology isn’t as smart as we’re led to believe it will be. If it’s true that computers will take over in the near future, I guess we’ll have to stop this daylight savings time. Or else every human and machine will need to understand when and how to change the time. I’ll update when I find out the cause of this “bug” I experienced.

Credit card companies now provide year in summary reports of your expenses. They summarize the twelve statements from last year into categories like gas, grocery, and entertainment so that you can deduct expenses when tax time comes. It’s convenient to go down a sorted list and determine how often you bought things at certain places.

No tallying the receipts of the 52 fillups you had last year. They give you a grand total. You think, wow, that’s a lot of money being burned up driving! Perhaps transit is cheaper. It also helps you plan for the next year’s budget. As gas prices continue to rise, you have an estimate of what it’s going to cost you this year.

If they provide you an electronic version of the summary, you can open it in Excel and play with the data. Graph the amounts of each grocery visit by week or month. How often did you buy something from a certain place? You can’t tell what you bought exactly, but they provide the grand total of each visit to the store.

Buy coffee every weekday? You can see the increase in prices, or how often you order the differently priced cups of the varying types of coffee your mood decides when you step up to the register.

One of the interesting side notes on one of the summaries I received: the year end summary cannot be used to dispute a charge. You must dispute a charge within 60 days of the closing date of the statement which the charge originally appeared. It’s in the fine print.

In the last couple of months, there’s been a rush for APIs. The whole social networking phenomenon has made sharing user details and activities between networks a critical feature every network needs to support, at least incoming if not outgoing. You want to attract users to your network, with all their friends. More friends, more users, more eyes equal bigger advertising profits. Incoming API support is a necessity, but can also pose data bombs or a rapid growth of the user database.

Now, why would you support outgoing APIs, since you would lose members to other networks? Well, not exactly. If you provide widgets, you can market your site from outside back to your site. How do you get these external widgets? By inviting developers to write them. They don’t cost you anything to have developers build them. More developers equal more widgets, more attraction and better ROI. Err, not really investment per say. A better return on the technology at hand.

But then each network has it’s own API, own protocol, and own data structure. Developers hate having to read each API to figure out how to interact and get data to and from each network. Open Social is a great start, but it is taking time to build a standard. Networks are not waiting for the standards, as there’s a rush to get something out in the crowd. Hopefully we don’t end up in a similar situation as the browsers are in.

As the election of 2008 continues, there’s a lot of activity on the web with campaigning. Only a few years ago, websites were not as common for candidates to have and push information to the voters. Today there are websites, blogs, YouTube videos, and mobile efforts to get the younger (and older) crowd to vote for the candidates.

Websites allow a number of different groups to access the same data with minor changes. Translation of text is simple, quick, and can reach many more people than a commerical in English on one television channel. If video is important to get the message across, different groups can select the message they want to hear. Sifting through commericals not required. Read the blogs of news outlets and click the link to the video recommended. Don’t know who to vote for? Check out your friend’s MySpace of Facebook pages (or Twitter) to see who they’re voting for.

Still not sure? Try the best candidate for me websites that ask you questions to determine your position on issues. The websites compare your answers and priorities to the candidates positions and priorities to suggest a good match. This doesn’t mean the next four years will fulfill your desired actions by the politicians (which never seem to keep their word).

If you can’t make up your mind, you might as well go back to reading the paper election booklet. Misplaced it? Search Google and you’ll find it.