The Weekly Might Have Missed List (11/02/08)

Life in the Corporate Theater: Presentation Fashion Tips from an audio guy — “The main doctor arrived and to my dismay, she was wearing a white blouse with Ruffles down the center. It looked pretty, but I knew it was going to cause me problems all day. You might ask, what does the audio guy care about the presenter’s blouse?”

Lee Hopkins: Melcrum Social Media 101 Workshop – reflections — (Note that Lee had a very trying day) “Today was fraught with technological meltdowns whose warning rumblings started yesterday evening.”

Tod Maffin: Audio Slides and the 50% Trick — (Great advice from someone who has obviously done a lot of presenting. Schmoozing pointers alone are worth the read.) “Okay. You’ve done the pre-event calls (see previous chapter), arrived at the venue, and connected with your on-site client. It’s time to set your audio up for the room. I’m extremely particular (read: anal) about my A/V setup because I know how easy it is for things to go horribly wrong — microphone, unexpected camera switching, laptop volume, and all that.”

RecognizedExpert.com: Small Audience In A Large Room — “To start, it’s always better to take care of this potential problem before it’s too late, and I consider “too late” to be once the audience is seated. It is virtually impossible to get audience members to move once they’ve made themselves comfortable in their seat. Worse yet, the moment you ask them to move, they will see you or the person you’ve asked to do your dirty work, as the bad guy. And, as you well know, many of them won’t move no matter how hard you beg them to do so.”

the concert: Singing with a cough — “And then it hit me. My chest started to spasm, and I needed nothing more than to just cough, loud and long. But I absolutely could. not. I held it in, eyes watering and body shaking, for what felt like five minutes but was probably only 45 seconds, until we all broke away and spread to all corners of the stage.”

Fail Blog: Chair Fail (video) — Hope this never happens to you.

Great Public Speaking: Beware when you prepare dry erase boards — “The next day you start your presentation, talk for 15 minutes, refer to your dry erase board comments for several minutes and then you go to erase them. — oops. They might not come off without some serious scrubbing of the board.”

Headrush: Intimations of Imminent Disaster — “People scare me sometimes. Often.”

The Associated Press: Podium gets carried away during Bush toast — “In his haste to honor Bush, Berlusconi accidentally bumped the podium from which he was speaking in the crowded dining room. It fell apart, leaving the grinning Italian to advance on the president with just its top and attached microphones.”

Blue Room technical forum: Cable Length Colours — “The advantage of colour coding over printing the exact length on the cable is that then you have to pick up each cable in a flightcase and read it when looking for a specific length, with colour coding you can easily spot the yellow 5m one you need among the blue 10m cables. ”

ProjectConnections: The Blackberry Maven by Carl Pritchard — “Once upon a project dreary, at a meeting getting weary Over many a rehashed mound of data by a crashing bore, Came a beeping, beeping, gently seeping, seeping through the conference door. ‘Tis only from the hall,’ I muttered. A passerby it must implore.’  ‘Only hall noise, nothing more.’

gigaom: God & Country Line Up to Stop White Spaces — “Wireless mic users and the National Association of Broadcasters have become increasingly vocal leading up the the FCC vote, claiming broadband service in that spectrum would cause undue interference to microphones and television channels.”

Presentation Zen: I love my Sony LCD projector — “Even if the venue says they will provide the projector, I carry this along now just as a backup.”

Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog: Where to get PowerPoint help — >But where do I go to figure out a question that I don’t know the answer to? Today’s tip will point you to the same sources I use for technical help.”