“When you have plans, roles, and responsibilities in place, you will reap the rewards many times over if a disaster actually occurs. Rather than scrambling about to figure out who should do what, you can calmly and effectively monitor what is happening. If key personnel are away, you can adjust the roles and responsibilities as [...]

Rusty: You scared?
Linus: You suicidal?
Rusty: Only in the morning.
(Ocean’s Eleven)
Sometimes, the thing that is going to go wrong with your presentation actually starts going wrong long before you step up to the lectern. Sometimes, a disaster is sneaking up on you while your sleeping the night away in tranquil ignorance. If you’re lucky, you have [...]

As you may remember from an earlier post, my first real job was at a McDonald’s. Started the day after I turned sixteen. You might also remember that I got into some trouble because I didn’t deal with burning my fingers in way that had approval from corporate headquarters. They were funny about stuff like [...]

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a time when the simplest of technologies, something we rarely give a second thought, gaffer tape, unexpectedly failed to do its job and caused a great deal of trouble. Geetesh Bajaj (an Microsoft PowerPoint MVP who also runs the incredibly useful site Indezine — “a platform for PowerPoint [...]

Laura Bergells has been active in internet marketing since before most people realized that marketing on the internet was possible. She’s given many presentations and has witnessed many more. Her highly-regarded blog, More than PowerPoint… has been going strong for five years now. She also happens to be a really terrific storyteller and was kind [...]

Lisa Lindgren, a fellow member of the InfoComm Presentations Council and Publisher of PresentationXpert, was kind enough to share a story about how PowerPoint 2007 recently foiled Murphy’s Law. Lisa reminds us of some important best practices and I have an observation or two of my own (surprise, surprise).
We all know that we should test [...]

When you’re the slide guy, once all the presentations have been thoroughly PowerPointed and the meeting has started, they need to find something for you to do so you’re not just hanging around enjoying yourself. At least that was the case at an earlier point in my career. These days I’m also the AV guy [...]

[Warning: Although this post is about eating, it might be best if it wasn't read while eating.]
What do you and your team do the night before the big show? Do you hold a three-course sit down affair at the meeting venue and invite everybody who had anything at all to do with the project (”Will [...]

Heading out to my car the other day, I noticed pigeon spikes on some of the ledges in the parking garage. These spikes are just about the world’s nastiest looking preventive maintenance device. We’re talking strips of four inch long plastic or metal spikes designed to humanely discourage pigeons perching on, in or around [...]