or “Lesson Learned by Watching Shaun of the Dead.” 1) Until the moment they suddenly become mindless, snarling, death-dealing horrors, a zombie (like whatever it was that caused your current presentation mishap) often appears about as threatening as your Mom. A projector with a burned out lamp looks like any other projector. A virus laden [...]

Tech rule #1: Keep the boss away from the buttons… Post to Delicious Post to Facebook

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 [...]

Even fictional characters know the importance of the first principle — If you can’t do without it, make sure you won’t have to.  Acting on this knowledge is what marks them as professionals in the eyes of the other character in this passage from my favorite early work by one of my favorite writers: “Now,” [...]

Conference presentation is delayed. AV problems. Should have brought the Kodak projector. @SWsteven (Steven Widmann) Post to Delicious Post to Facebook

The Oops Factor (Two Well Read) – “It is a fact if you perform live, sooner or later you will meet with a genuine, bona fide onstage disaster. Generally, these seem to fall into two categories. The first is the self-made conflagration where lyrics evaporate into thin air, the high note that was there at [...]

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: [...]

If You Only Listen to One PowerPoint Tip…(Overnight Sensation) – “I did this once but had the good sense to save my file in an older file format just in case. When it loaded up, I was all excited – until I noticed that the system lacked the font I used and defaulted to different [...]

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 [...]

10 Things I taught my interns (The Hopkinson Report) – “If you’re doing a presentation, something will go wrong. … Even with modern advances, getting everything to work right is still very difficult. Every laptop has a different set of key commands to change from the laptop screen to the overhead monitor. There’s never the [...]