Murphy's Law states: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This is especially true and especially painful when there is an audience involved.

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This blog was active from April, 2008 to July 2012.
It is no longer being updated. It will continue to be maintained for reference purposes.

Might Have Missed List (12/19/10)

Make A Living Writing — Things I Learned During Webinar Fail

Going with a new platform is risky. Anne and I really wanted to start with a free platform because we didn’t know how many tickets we’d sell. But Freebinar had a fatal flaw — it just happened to have a massive dial-in phone line failure at the time of our Webinar. None of us could get on the call. They fixed it right after we finished. So…that didn’t help, and caused about a 12-minute start delay while we tried to figure out a solution.

No matter how many things you nail down, there’ll be one thing you don’t. Years ago, an engineer told me happiness is redundant systems. I took many precations — I had Comcast out to doublecheck my connection the day before. I used a hard-wired mouse instead of my usual battery-powered wireless one. But we still neglected to do one thing that might have saved us — we could have gotten Anne another Freebinar account, with another phone number. That would have given us another shot at staying live.

Backstage at BackstageJobs —Don’t surprise your crew

Honestly, what reason could anyone have for not telling the the crew about these things in advance?  What good does it do to hold onto this information?  Assuming they “can just do it” falls along the lines of “theatre is magic.”  Theatre is magical: to experience.  But we’re not using magic to create it, we’re using plans, schedules, computers, gravity, acoustics, and timed choreography (yes, backstage).  Throwing a sudden change into this can be a problem, but throwing a planned change at us suddenly makes us mad.  Why?  Because if we had known about it, we could have done it better.

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