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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 ©iStockphoto.com/diego_cervo Great Public Speaking: Humorous Acknowledgments To Tough Situations — “There will come a time when you will either be in front of a hostile audience or a hostile question will pop up during a relatively calm presentation. This is a tough situation at best and you have to handle it with kid gloves. Humor can save the day and maybe even help you become President.”
Talk It Up!: Second-worst hotel experience — “I had to call for the following services, which apparently didn’t come with the seminar room: lights to be turned on, projector, ancient projector to be cleaned, water (twice, only brought after I’d begun speaking), water refill, hallway lights to be turned on, bathrooms to be unlocked…”
MSN: Top 10 Tech Embarrassments You’ll Want to Avoid — “The technology-embarrassment stories you are about to read are true. Some names have been changed to protect the humiliated.”
Nick Morgan, Public Words: The problem with modern business presentations is an ancient one — “What’s happening is that both sides of this modern attempt to communicate are being hampered by ancient instincts to fight or flee.”
EventManagerBlog: 75+ tools for your next event — “Here is my gift for the holidays, the largest collection of tools you will find on this blog to organize your next event.”
VGAOK Signal Generator “is a small handheld VGA video signal generator and tester that outputs a simple color bar test pattern for the purpose of checking projectors, cables, monitors, and other related devices … There is not a good small unit for the quick testing done by general AV techs in the many situations in which a display and cabling are supplied, but the source is the clients computer that is not available during set up. This unit allows for a quick verification that you have Red, Blue, and Green Signals, as well as Vertical and Horizontal Sync.”
 jaunted: Nothing Cheery About LaGuardia This Morning — “What were we thinking? Some crazy fantasy of Christmas at home drove us to attempt to fly standby this morning, in order to duck both the forthcoming East Coast storm and the just-passing Midwest storm. While there’s still the remotest chance we might be able to get out before our 2 pm flight, it doesn’t look likely–meaning we’ll be spending 8 hours in the airport today.”
Corporate Presenter: How To Be Professional On TV — “Just found this clip on You Tube. The American tv presenter inadvertently uses a profanity but gets away with it. No apologies, no red-faced embarrassment, she was just being professional.”
The Webinar Blog: Turn Off Your Blackberry! — “Everything seems fine during the call. Then I go to edit the audio recording and balance volumes and I find that there is a faint beeping noise being picked up on the phone line. This is a remnant of the wireless signal being received and transmitted by the device. It can get picked up by electrical cables, transmitters, headsets, and other hardware involved in the audio circuitry of your call. It comes across like Morse Code bloops and bleeps.”
TradeshowStartup: Even $137,500 Can’t Guarantee Conference Internet — “Le Web, the annual Internet trade show and conference in Paris spent $137,500 (100,000 Euros) trying to get a stable connection for their speakers, attendees and press room without luck.”
360Conferences: Conference wireless DOES suck — “At the Red Lion in Seattle, we made it clear, “Whatever you think, you’re wrong. We’ll abuse your wifi.” As such, for what we paid, they really did their best. They brought in a tech from the vendor and had him stay the week to be on call. Guess what? Yup, he was called. In fact, he came down in the morning in his PJs to put more access points around the place.”
Globsyn Business School: The Top 12 Presentation Mistakes — Lots of great things to watch out for in this article. “Mistake #1: Overlooking ‘Murphy’ / If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. This mistake basically means that you walk into the room where you’re going to present and something is wrong. LeRoux tells a story about a multimillion-dollar sales presentation to which “Murphy” paid a visit—in the form of missing curtains and a boardroom window overlooking a huge pool surrounded by bikini-clad swimmers (you can guess what the attendees looked at instead of the presenter). / Remedy: Visit important presentation rooms at least a day in advance. If that’s not possible, have someone take pictures from different angles and email them to you.”
BizBash Florida: Quick Poll: What do you have to have with you during your event and why?
Bunker Complex: “This is what happens when I’m slated to present my paper last. I sit and stew over my 3 page summary handout for 2.5 hours until it’s time to bumble and mumble my way through another botched public speaking task. I’m making changes and scratching out sections for a quick and dirty drastic edit as everyone else’s topic seems so much more interesting than mine.”
Execupundit.com: The Unpersuasive — “Your first job is to avoid being unpersuasive. A major mistake is to let a passionate commitment to a particular point of view create an image of stridency.”
Jay Raskolnikov: Lessons from a Two Year Old — “I don’t care what you call it. If you want to communicate with me you better figure out what I call it.”
My Toastmasters Blog: Public Speaking Trap – Losing the Audience after your Killer Opening — “Losing the audience after giving a killer opening is something I see many speakers doing on a regular basis. Whether the speech is given at a convention, a business meeting or a Toastmasters club, it is very common for speakers to deliver a fabulous opening, and then get very, very boring extremely fast.”
managesmarter.com: Debilitating Demo Diseases — “Here is a compendium of debilitating demo diseases that commonly afflict sales, presales and marketing teams when preparing for and presenting demos.”
A few scanning tips: Say No to 72 dpi — “We still frequently hear the very bad advice: ‘Computer video screens show images at 72 dpi, so scan all your images for the screen at 72 dpi’. This is incredibly wrong; it simply doesn’t work that way.”
FAILBlog:
Backstage at BackstageJobs.com: Props are important. Screw them up, and someone could die — “An actor at the Vienna National Theatre slit his own throat in front of a packed house when the fake prop knife he was supposed to have was accidentally switched for a real knife.”
Face2face: Teleprompter problems — “I know the new coolio teleprompters that are clear and posed on either side of the speaker are all the rage these days, but at IAEE’s opening session last night I felt kind of bad for the speakers, most of whom looked like they were trying to keep up with a tennis match, their heads sproinging wildly from side to side.”
Pivotal Public Speaking: Video – Guy Kawasaki – The Art of the Start — “How would you have handled the time problem?”
Overnight Sensation: 10 Reasons Why Someone Might Walk Out of Your Presentation — “It’s every speaker’s nightmare: you’re delivering a speech and someone (or more than one person) gets up and walks out.”
My Toastmasters Blog: Public Speaking Trap – Worrying About Bombing — “If you are speaking to groups of people, at some point you are going to bomb. No matter how good you are, sometimes there are situations out of your control that are going to cause you to mess up, not connect, and lose your audience’s attention.”
Payal: Overcome presentation gaffes with panache — “A gaffe is only as bad as you make it to be. The first step is to accept the fact that things can and will go awry – the computer may hang up, the microphone may disconnect or you may become paralysed with fear. Reconciling with this reality and thinking on your feet will stand you in good stead for setting things right again.”
Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog: The danger of gradient fills — “What this presenter did was to fill every shape with a gradient fill that moved from black at the top to white in the middle and back to black at the bottom. Then he put text in the shape. Of course it was impossible to select a text color that had enough contrast with both the black and the white background, so most of the text was almost impossible to see.”
Slide that stick: Preserving custom fonts when presenting away from your own computer — “One problem, custom fonts are a disaster when used on a machine that is not yours. And you discover it when you click through slide 2 of your presentation in front of a live audience…”
Linda Seid Frembes: Making the case for compelling content — “Yes, the projector could have been brighter, the screen larger, and the audio system more powerful, but his presentation would have been just as compelling if we had suffered a power outage and he needed to present with just a handful of postcards and a flashlight. Why?”
PowerPoint Ninja: Content Staging: Propel Your Slide Content Higher — “When you’re presenting your slide content, the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your audience with too much information on any one slide.”
Execupundit.com: Imagining Disaster — “Some executives and groups have serious difficulty imagining how things can go wrong. They rose, in many cases, by accentuating the positive and by having ‘can do’ attitudes. Caution can be too easily dismissed as fearfulness. What is later regarded as reckless was once disguised as bravery.”
The Technium: Movage — “Digital continuity is a real problem. Digital information is very easy to copy within short periods of time, but very difficult to copy over long periods of time. That is, it is very easy to make lots of copies now, but very difficult to get the data to copy over a century.”
 Empower Your Point: Context matters : Avoid turkey slaughter in the background — “While watching, it was very hard to focus on her : I totally missed the meaning of her interview. All I actually saw was this crazy man with his poor turkeys… I would much rather be an average presenter in an excellent context ( interested audience, computers working fine, etc.), than an excellent presenter in a horrible context ( say for instance with a turkey killer in my back)! Don’t get me wrong : Context is no excuse. It is your responsibility to make sure that everything is going to be fine.”
Corporate Presenter: Presenting on Television — “Even rehearsing your lines until you are blue in the face won’t always help you getting it right to camera.”
controlbooth.com: crappy cd player/bad cd??? — “So we’re up here in the booth, and randomly during an explosion cue, the cd player jumped tracks to curtain call music!! Nobody was touching the thing, and the sound consultant behind me said “that wasn’t you, it jumped a track”. Wtf????”
The Next Meeting: Virtual or Otherwise, You Need to Prepare for Meetings — “Let’s face it, the new technology available for virtual meetings, while exciting, isn’t quite perfect. You need to make some allowances for that. If you’ll be making a presentation, it’s really important to practise it ahead of time. Make sure it’s as clear as it can possibly be. You may not have the benefit of your colleagues’ blank stares to tell you they don’t understand you, so you won’t be able to adjust on the fly.” Other good ideas.
Humor Power: When Humor Mis-Fires (Part Three) — “It had never occurred to me that this joke could mis-fire. It got a good laugh, but as soon as I returned to my seat, I had second thoughts about using the line.”
Great Speaking Coach: Avoid Q&A Traps — “When you invite questions at the end of your presentation you run a substantial risk that one question derails the point of your whole presentation–and then you can’t recover your own momentum.”
Great Public Speaking: THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE — “I’m talking about the dreaded MICROPHONE BULGE. Unless you use a handheld microphone, or a wired clip on microphone (which causes you to trip over the wire all day) in one way or the other you have to deal with a wireless transmitter bulge in your clothing.
This needs to be addressed when you are purchasing the clothing you plan on wearing when you speak. … Sometimes I put the transmitter right in my pants pocket. That way there is no way it will fall off or come unclipped even if I get a little boisterous on stage.”
ChrisMoncus.com: How to Properly Wrap a Cable (the Over and Under Roadie Wrap) — Rolling up your cables (especially the one connecting your laptop to the projector) and storing them the right way helps to prevent them from failing when it might be more than a little inconvenient.
Hotel Chatter: You’d Better Find a Couch to Sleep on for Inauguration — Hope you’re not trying to do any regular business in DC around the 20th of January. Posted about this sort of thing a week or so ago.
PowerPoint Ninja: 13 Ways to Quickly Derail a PowerPoint Presentation — Part I — Starts with something dear to our hearts here at BML – “Technical difficulties: You and your audience are ready, but why aren’t the slides appearing or why isn’t the audio working? Delays caused by technical problems can cause you to quickly lose and never reclaim an audience. Leave nothing to chance.”
Just for fun:
Six Minutes: Gifts Public Speakers Really Want: Dozens of Christmas Ideas
Fortify Your Oasis: Weekend treat for Road Warriors — “As someone who has spent far too many nights in far too many hotel rooms around the world, these words of John Cleese’s have an all-too-familiar ring to them. Come to think of it, it sounds like I’ve stayed in some of these hotels.” (Video)
Virtual Meeting Success: Disaster Preparedness for Teleconference Nightmares — “At first people thought it was static. But, they soon realized that one of the participants was snoring. And everyone heard it! The snoozing participant had forgotten to turn on his mute button. There was nothing to do but ride it out. Sound familiar? Well, I would have thought it couldn’t get worse. But it does.”
 ©iStockphoto.com/anthonyjhall So You Want To Be a Banquet Manager…: Wadda Mean It’s Raining in The Meeting Room? — “Just then someone bellows over the radio, “It’s raining in the meeting room”! “Hurry up, call Engineering”! Well there goes my perfect day. Now you’re racing to find every bucket, bus-tub, unused Lexan and garbage can, to catch the water racing out of the broken pipe from the room upstairs. Son of a b@>\#!. We try to dry the special notebook binders that the group contact spent 2 hours last night putting at each placesetting. We change the flipchart pads ’cause the’re a mess.” (I’ve had burst pipe problems at two meeting at two different venues. It’s a hard thing to prepare for but you need to have some sort of contingency plans for it.)
Humor Power: When Humor Mis-Fires (Part One) and (Part Two) — “Molly laughed. The rest of the audience didn’t. I instantly realized that the audience didn’t understand the closeness between us. They also didn’t know that Molly appreciated the humor. At that point, I completely lost them. But it wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I should have known better. Have you ever said something stupid in your presentation? Wow! As soon as the audience reacted, I knew I had messed up! I explained the background behind my comment, and then moved on.”
portfolio.com: Making Magic: “Steve Cohen, the ‘Millionaire’s Magician,’ shares some tips for winning over a well-heeled audience, including why you should never wing it and the importance of having backup plans.” For instance: “‘It’s essential to have backup plans—not just one, but several,’ says Cohen. ‘The key is to know all the things that could possibly go wrong.'” I like the way this guy thinks. Thanks for the heads to Olivia from Speaking about Presenting.
Musings: Crisis Management — “The first few hours/minutes/moments are the most crucial and most of us lose that in panic. Instead of thinking of the possibilities we start thinking of consequences, which really is no help at this juncture.”
projo.com: Workplace etiquette — “What do you do about a constant interrupter? I’ve run into this situation in meetings, conference calls, etc. I can’t really say if the interrupter is being rude or just antsy. I find it to be extremely irritating, and it throws off my concentration, especially if I’m giving a presentation.”
CIO: How To Get the Best Internet Connectivity While You Travel — “One business travel irritation is that it interferes with getting work done. If you have to give a presentation in New York tonight, and you need to create the PowerPoint presentation before you arrive, the problem isn’t as much the time spent enroute than how much you can accomplish on the trip.”
Acronym: Remote Troubleshooting — “We’ve all experienced technical difficulty with our computers at some point and some of us have had the opportunity to experience remote assistance. In my case, while offsite, I called my company’s IT department and requested assistance.”
Indezine: Cross Platform PowerPoint — “Cross-platform hiccups happen for more than one reason – it’s not unusual for the same company to have both Windows and Mac machines, or there might be a requirement to create an important presentation that needs to be compatible with whatever platform a client has. It might be that the designer hired to create a presentation or a template might use a Mac when the presenter is using a Windows machine – or even vice versa. Regardless, the differences between the Windows and Mac versions of PowerPoint have been giving presenters a fair share of problems.”
The Producer’s Perspective: We go to theatre to see if someone will #$&@ up — “Wigs falling off, technical screw-ups, and so on, are all things Producers spend millions trying to avoid, but ironically, audiences treasure them . . . and talk about them.”
We have a ton of really great links this week. Enjoy!
 a shel of my former self: Connecting to the Net in 1992 — Great story from the bad old days. “We found the AV tech and explained that we had requested a direct line. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘and that’s how you get a direct line.’ Patiently, Craig explained how a modem works. He unfolded the contract and pointed to the section that listed the requirement. Then he said (and I can still hear it today, 16 years later), ‘Over 100 people will arrive here in 45 minutes expecting to see an online demonstration that we can’t deliver without a direct line. And at Lexis-Nexis, we have two floors of lawyers with nothing much to do who would love to to make your life miserable over this.’
Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog: Plan what happens before and after your presentation — “The projector wasn’t needed the whole time, just for this one part. And when that part was over, it would not be needed again. Unfortunately, the people running the meeting didn’t plan what to do before or after the projector was used. They left the edit view of PowerPoint on before the slides were used and returned to the edit view after they were done. What could they have done better?”
Danny Thorpe, Architect of Disruption: Mashup Camp, Day 1 — “To make matters worse, the presenter had to talk his way around a number of technical difficulties, including (but not limited to): [ed. note: go to post to see list of technical difficulties]. All of that in 25 minutes. It’s a reassuring to know that even Google can have “those†kinds of demo days.”
Life in the Corporate Theater: Customer Service — “Since the first day onsite my meeting planner friend has been telling me horror stories of the service the AV company is providing. The first one starts off with something simple…”
End Point Corporation: OpenSQL Camp 2008 — “My talk on MVCC was the first talk of the day, which of course means lots of technical difficulties.” What does that say about the current state of the industry?
Make Your Point with Pow’R: The basics are the basics for a reason — “I have given presentations in the past with this laptop and projector, so what could have changed? Puzzled at first I soon realized that I replaced my laptop a few weeks ago. The new one looks the same as my old one and I forgot that I had not tested this combination yet. Thank goodness for rehearsals.”
James.Random(): Behind the scenes at PDC: The Keynote Timelapse — Has nothing to do with the actual presentations, just very cool to watch. Notice how early in the process they begin to test/calibrate the projection system. And how often they recalibrate. “I’ve just uploaded this cool video which I got hold of internally that shows how the PDC08 keynote room was assembled, used and broken down in under 6 minutes. It’s quite impressive how it all comes together, just for a few hours of presentations!”
 BizBash Los Angeles: Emergency Preparedness Panelists Stress Early, Detailed Security Measures — “Last week—just ahead of the destructive fires that burned a swath through the region—BizBash gathered Los Angeles planners for a panel on emergency preparedness at events. … Here are some of their top tips for being ready for anything.”
Executive Speech Coach: Fire Alarm During Your Presentation — “I’ve witnessed this happen to two other speakers and this week it was my turn. It’s a lot easier to think logically after it is over. It might never happen to you – but perhaps you should be prepared for the fire alarm to ring during your presentation. About eight minutes into my breakfast presentation to the local chamber of commerce at a fancy restaurant the fire alarm rang.”
HotelChatter: Fires Cause Evacuation of Four Seasons Manele Bay: Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking things like this can’t disrupt your presentation, meeting or event. “Brushfires on Lanai — which burned about 300 acres today — caused the evacuation of all guests and staff at Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay. The fire was about a mile from the hotel when the Maui County Fire Department order the hotel to evacuate everyone to Manele Bay Harbor and onto boats.”
Rules of Thumb: Giving a Speech — “When giving a public science lecture to a general audience, there will always be one weirdo who asks questions that have nothing to do with your lecture. There will also be one smart-aleck who asks questions to show how smart he is. The faster you silence both of them, the happier your audience will be.”
Execupundit.com: Ambushed By Minor Items — “What surprises me is how often otherwise savvy individuals get to a certain point in planning and then suspend all scrutiny, relying instead upon a combination of hope, fate, and pixie dust. Things do not magically come together, but they don’t just trust on that convergence, they rely upon it.”
iGroupNews: Top 10 Services and Facilities A Meeting Planner Should Identify — “When I travel to a destination for a site inspection or to assist with a client conference, I always make it a point to arrive a day early. An early arrival allows me time to “walk†the city and gather information that a client or attendee may require outside of the confines of the hotel.”
Next Generation Event: Resources for Running Effective Meetings — “If you’re an event planner, you know how to plan events. When you’re planning an event, you leave no detail undefined. When you execute the event, you follow clearly-defined schedules and guidelines. But do you sometimes neglect those standards when running small meetings within the office? “
 ©iStockphoto.com/Gerville PowerPoint Ninja: 8 Tips for Effective Team PowerPoint Presentations — Great suggestions from someone who has obviously lived this situation. “When you’re working independently on your own PowerPoint slides, you have full control over the outcome of your presentation. Coordinating a PowerPoint presentation with other individuals introduces new challenges, which can frustrate even PowerPoint ninjas who are caught unprepared.”
Bridget M: Power Point for dummies, publishing for nit-wits — Things did not go well for this academic presenter. “The version of my presentation that was uploaded onto BB was not the final one…. It broke, I heard a bead bounce and hit the floor, then another.”
The Trap Room: Worst outcome from a missed cue — We need to remember that theater was, of course, the first form of presentation. This forum thread shows once again how many way there are for things to go wrong. Even for the professionals. For example: “My WORST fouled cue occured during a somber opening scene. The dramatic opening music automatically faded in the mini-disc cue, the actress began her quiet opening monologue and I pushed “pause” with the fader still up on the mixer. Yup, the deck had already auto-paused and the next recorded cue was a “toilet flush” now routed at full volume over the main speakers.”
Tod Maffin: The “3-3-3″ Pre-Event Client Calls — “I always make three phone calls to my speaking clients prior to the event.”
Speak Schmeak: I can’t hear you… — “At my networking event the other night, I noticed two problems that just about every speaker had with the microphone, and I want to pass this along as a quick reminder”
Execupundit.com: Crisis Prevention by Introspection — “Some not-so-obvious questions to avoid disaster”
washingtonpost.com: When Colleagues Talk Out of Turn — “What do you do about a constant interrupter? I’ve run into this situation in meetings, conference calls, etc. I can’t really say if the interrupter is being rude or just antsy. I find it to be extremely irritating, and it throws off my concentration, especially if I’m giving a presentation.”
The Intelligencer: District denies committee projector — “The Central Bucks East Stadium Committee had a PowerPoint presentation to show Central Bucks school board members this week, but wasn’t allowed to use the school district’s projector to show it.”
Web Worker Daily: Getting Charged Up to Work in an Airport — “It’s 5 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon and you managed to get through airport security on your way home, with half an hour to spare to check your e-mail and make phone calls. But your electronic device of choice is low on power. Do you know where to find an outlet to recharge and work before your flight leaves?”
The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method: Advanced Presentations by Design now available as an ebook.
Backstage at BackstageJobs.com: Preparing for festivals — “If your theatre company has been asked to participate in a festival with a particular production, it can be quite a thrill and learning experience. But there are things to keep in mind when bringing your production to a festival. Being prepared can be the difference between a good experience, or a painful one.” Same goes for taking your presentation on the road.
Strategic Guy: Presentation Prep and Packaging — Did personal style in dress and presentation method diminish this presenter’s effectiveness? Interesting situation. Interesting discussion in the comments.
Great Public Speaking: Tough Venues — “Did you ever present in a barn? How about a bowling alley? How about a community center where drum lessons are being given in the next room? Well I’ve been in all those situations and more and so far I’ve survived the recurring nightmares and waking up in a cold sweat just thinking about them. I’ve been diagnosed with PTVD — Post-Traumatic Venue Disorder.”
 ©iStockphoto.com/arekmalang Web Worker Daily: Laptops and Water Do Not Mix: A Cautionary Tale — “This past weekend, I was on the web and doing some writing on my beloved Lenovo ThinkPad X40 sub-notebook, when disaster struck.”
The AV Report: Plan B, from Earth (back-up planning in action) — “I believe in a solid AV set-up, with all details considered, so that audiovisual presentations (slide shows, audio, video, multimedia, special film screenings, etc) play back in as flawless a manner as possible. However, being an earthling from Earth, I know the gods can be crazy from time to time.”
Jackie Cameron: Memories of a really bad speaking experience — “A couple of weeks later I received a tape of the session – and the audience feedback. I listened to the tape and cringed.”
Presentation Skills: Presentation Stories — “When I agreed to give a presentation to 26 soldiers from the former Yugoslavia about the Tribunal, I had no idea so many things could go wrong in a 25 minute presentation.”
The Experience is the Product: 5 sentences that send your audience lunging for their Blackberries/iPhones — “’OK, hang on a second, having some technical difficulties…’ Projectors are not known for their usability. That said, there aren’t too many variables: a couple types of cables, a couple settings, a few places to look for projection/monitor settings on your laptop. I learned them. If you’d rather waste my time than learn them yourself, I’m a lot less inclined to listen to you.”
The PowerPoint® Blog: Before Ungrouping Chart – Make a Hidden Backup — “For many projects I find myself ungrouping charts for custom animations or any number of other reasons. But what often happens is a need to adjust the chart… oops that chart is now 50+ individual text boxes and autoshapes.”
Make Your Point with Pow’R: Innovative time tips when you don’t have a designated timer — “Do you lose track of time when you are presenting? Every presenter is subject to going overtime and getting off schedule. Going over time is an occupational hazard of public speaking, but you have no excuse for going over time.”
Indezine: Version Hell: PowerPoint 2007 Shadow Problems — “If your presentation uses the Formatting toolbar to add shadows to text, you’ll find that it shows fine when played in PowerPoint 2007. However, any shadows that you add through the Drawing toolbar in PowerPoint 2003 or earlier end up looking horrible in PowerPoint 2007 — this works out more worse when the text is animated — in that case the text animates, but the shadow doesn’t!”
RULESofTHUMB.org: ASSURING SUCCESS — “To succeed against all possible odds, count on at least 1 in 4 things going wrong. In other words, you need a 33 percent margin of safety. If you have to have 30 of something, plan to make 40.”
 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.’Â ‘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.”
 - ©iStockphoto.com/Renphoto
My Toastmasters Blog: How Rude: Don’t Be a Content Thief — “The simulated click of the camera captured my attention. Sitting in a conference room, a middle aged man in front of me was snapping pictures of the lecture slides. My attention on the presentation was snapped and I was slack jawed. My thoughts were racing, ‘What is this person doing? Last time I checked, that is not allowed without permission.’â€
Write From Home: Sucking the Suck Out of Corporate Presentations (or, Conversations With Monkeys) — “I knew this guy was in a monkeybutt of a mood from the beginning. He was the one guy who didn’t look me in the eye when I walked in the room. He was the one guy who didn’t want to shake my hand. He sat there, hands folded across his Armani chest, and pouted through the first part of my presentation. Then it was like a bug crawled up his ass or something, because right in the middle of everyone’s good time he stood up and took a big monkey dump on the conference table.”
RBerteig on Flickr: The Missing VGA Cable
— “The solution to this dilema was a carefully bent collection of
paper clips, connecting the pigtail off Andy’s Mac (female HD15)
directly to the back of the projector (also femail HD15).” Gotta keep
this one in mind.
Great Public Speaking: A Breath of fresh air — “You would think all that wind you are blowing on stage would disperse bad breath, but for some reason after speaking for an hour or so, every foul smelling odor from your stomach wants to leap forth to your audience.”
Patricia Sellers: Power Point: Pay the price — “When Billie Jean King, who runs World TeamTennis with Kloss, is prepping for a speech or appearance, ‘She drives us crazy, absolutely crazy, planning for everything and anything to go wrong,’ Kloss said. ‘She’ll say, ‘What about this? What about that? What if this happens?’ By the time Billie gets on stage or on the court, she’s laid out every possible scenario in her mind. And at that point, she’s totally calm.’
Fleeting Glimpse Images: My First and Last Presentation — “I wax nostalgic today. Partly spurred by the article in Slide:ology this week and partly because I recently stumbled upon a cache of ancient binders containing bits of my larval creative efforts. Humbled, I am walking down memory lane to my first presentation and contrasting it with my most recent.”
SLIDE:OLOGY: Rockstars — “A similar thing happens in conference rooms across America when teams gather to prepare for The Big Presentation. All too often, the presenter will run through the slide show and describe the kinds of things he will say to accompany each slide, rather than rehearse the presentation itself. It’s a strange thing to watch.”
spoiledvids.com: Stage Hand Takes Fall During Live TV — No explanation at all on the site. No assurance that the stagehand was okay or that it was just a gag. You have to wonder, how do you prepare yourself to react/recover should something like this happen while your presenting.
Better Communications Results (Lee Hopkins): The ‘To help Lee get to America everything and the kitchen sink is for sale at half price’ post — “I’m selling everything I have at 50% off.” (Hurry, offer ends October 30th.)
Blue Room Technical Forums: Best way to connect to AV rig, Looking for campact flexible kit to play back video
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