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From Slashdot – What is the Worst Tech Mistake You Ever Made?

Click here! (Score:5, Funny)
by NanoGator (522640) on Thursday January 08, @02:02PM (#7916693)
(http://www.ferion.net/ | Last Journal: Monday May 06, @03:16AM)

Well, this is more of a graphical error than a text error, but it’s still amusing. My company developed a technology where you can watch video from mulitple angles. (note: this is going back a few years.) So we were pumping out demos like mad. At one point, we got some stock footage of a horse show or something. It had a horse jumping over a fence, filmed from different angles. I had to insert the words “click here” at the bottom of the video because I was going to make that clickable. If you click there, then you get s’more info about our software.

Back then, we didn’t do letterboxing like Media Player does. If the window you play the video in isn’t the same as the aspect ratio of the video, then cropping occurs. I did not consider this little fact about our player, rather I got it up on the site as fast as I possibly could. Then, I went to lunch.

When I got back from lunch, I noticed the CEO was looking at the demo. So I poked my head in to say hi. He says “Why is this video telling me to lick it?” Wha? I go up to the screen, look at what he’s watching, and… eep. The c in click here was perfectly cropped out of the shot. I mean perfectly. I mean you didn’t know it was missing. So here’s a horse, reared up on its hind legs, with the words “LICK HERE” just below its.. uh.. tail.

I am so glad that we had the one CEO in our industry that understood what took place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2004 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Scrapbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.