spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective (apophenia) – A week before the conference, I received word from the organizers that I was not going to have my laptop on stage with me. The dirty secret is that I actually read a lot of my talks but the audience doesn't actually realize this because scanning between my computer and the audience is usually pretty easy. So it doesn't look like I'm reading. … I pushed back, asked to get my notes on the screen in front of me, but was told that this wasn't going to be possible. I was told that I was going to have a podium. So I resigned to having a podium. … When I showed up at the conference, I realized that the setup was different than I imagined. The podium was not angled, meaning that the paper would lie flat, making it harder to read and get away with it. Not good. .. I only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk. … When I walked out on stage, I was also in for a new shock: the lights were painfully bright. … Taken aback by this, my talk started out rough."

Cut off after 2 minutes (Speaking Energy: Adventures in Public Speaking) – "In the smaller room there are a lot more distractions as well. If my audience of one decides to do something else besides listen…well, my presentation just got a lot more difficult — and energy depleting. … The person I was speaking to (or trying to) had just come out of a high stress meeting an hour before I met him. He had a lot on his mind. Very distracted. One of the first points I raised was something similar to an issue he recently had. This set him off."

Final act (leewochner.com) – "…but we had major ongoing tech problems, too. At the end of an 8-hour cue-to-cue rehearsal in which all the light and sound cues were programmed, they mysteriously disappeared. All of them had to be reprogrammed, which added nine hours onto the day. (I said, “I won’t be here at 2 a.m.” And wound up leaving at 1:56 a.m.)…"