Last weekend, veteran AV pro Rick Pillars,  a frequent contributor to BML and owner of It’s a Rap Productions, started a Facebook post with these dreadful words: “So, a bad thing happened yesterday. I plugged my USB drive into the show computer.” I asked Rick if I could use the brief but instructive story he [...]

“Everybody has a plan, until they get hit.” ~Boxer Mike Tyson, via  Eric S. Smith Post to Delicious Post to Facebook

They call the meeting venue’s electrician “Sparky”. Unfortunately it’s not so much a affectionate, if clichéd, nickname. It’s more a description of his work. Inspired by a Nicholas Bate post from earlier in the week. (BTW, check out Nicholas’ terrific ongoing series, How To Be Brilliant: 1-50, currently on number 39.) How To Be Brilliant: [...]

Don’t you hate when you see something like this happen. You know someone, somewhere had a really bad night. You can imagine the band’s management yelling into their cell phone as techs scramble to get systems rebooted or rolled over to backup while simultaneously updating their resume in their heads. There are hundreds of  hands [...]

How about two quick questions, just for the fun of it… (okay the first one’s a little boring) Would you rather give a presentation with your slides but not your speaker notes or have your notes but not your slides? (the second has a little more “zing“) You’re at the crossroads, it’s midnight, the contract [...]

When presentations go wrong and how to recover afterwards (OfficeRocker!) – “If any of you were at the Nottingham Technet event last week, you were a witness to probably the worst crash and burn I have ever suffered during a live presentation. I had put quite a lot of work into the presentation, believe it [...]

Cringing and laughter. Good presentation disaster stories inspire one or the other. Really good presentation disaster stories inspire at least a little of both. This story, from Ian Whitworth’s blog, Can You Hear Me Up the Back?, ping-pongs back and forth from one to the other so often I lost track and ended up laughing [...]

A tad more embarrassing than your run-of-the-mill error and spell check never would have picked it up (you’ll need to click on the thumbnail to see the larger original on Twitpic — click on “View full size” once you get there). Post to Delicious Post to Facebook

You may have noticed that, thanks to the recent outbursts of nastiness inflicted by Kanye West, Joe Wilson, and Serena Williams, more than a little ink has been spilled lamenting the current state of public discourse. Here are some random examples grabbed from my feed reader: Create Your Communications Experience: Handling Hecklers – Obama does [...]

The Moore Speakers blog has been on a roll lately, posting three great stories that would cause anyone involved in the presentations biz  to wince in sympathy. I leaned to the side and caught the falling pants with my elbow. And that is the way I remained during the rest of the talk: one hand [...]