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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The difference between being good and excellent is one tiny extra detail — Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That!
We travel around the country with extra suitcases full of 200 pounds of things that we might need. Things that might save the day. Zip ties, 5 types of thumb tacks, 6 kinds of tape, a hair dryer, chocolate, batteries, etc.
At our last event, the door to the auditorium was squeaking loudly. Enough to ruin the keynote.
Audio Disasters & How to Prevent Them — Viktorix
Without question, the biggest problem I face as a presenter is dealing with the unique audio issues of each venue.
Larger events will have a dedicated audio engineer, but for many events the planner is stuck with the “house†sound system or perhaps is bringing his or her own portable system to a company conference room. In either case, things can go horribly awry. It’s not that anyone is being unprofessional, it’s just that audio is intrinsically hard. I’ve learned to simply expect audio disaster, as that gives one the best chance of avoiding it. There are many varieties of audio disaster, so we shall break them down to: batteries, feedback, wires, clips, hot mics, and “potpourri.â€
This is not what I wanted to see this morning… — Betsy Weber
Twilight Zone — Rachelle Gardner
Thursday I flew to North Carolina for a conference. During my flight I was using my laptop to tweak my PowerPoint and my handouts for my workshop. When I got to the hotel and powered up my laptop, the OS refused to boot. I had a black screen with blinking cursor.
I called my tech guy. We ran the computer through a bunch of diagnostics. We tried everything to shock it back to life. No go. There was a tech guy at the conference who was running all the A/V. He worked on my laptop awhile, gave it his best shot. He couldn’t get it to boot either.
Finally I had to let that go, borrow a laptop, recreate my PowerPoint and handouts, and be ready for my workshop on Saturday morning. No problem, everything went great. (I’d neglected to bring a flash drive with my presentation on it as a backup. That’s the last time I make that little mistake.)
Worship Confessional 07.13.08 — WorshipSource
Don’t you love it when the sound system wigs out? It’s so awesome. I’ve been around church music world my whole life, and I’ve heard the statement “there’s demons in the sound board” about a million times, but today I think God did it.
Sometimes, in retrospect, it’s clear that a mere word to the wise would have been enough to prevent problems:
I recently provided a sound system for a high profile seminar hosted by the governor of a state that will remain nameless. When it came time for the governor to pose questions to panelists, rather than asking them to move a little closer to the table mics we had placed in front of them, here’s what he did: He unclipped his wireless lavalier and passed it back and forth among the panelists as they attempted a dialogue. Between mic handling noise, lavaliere element overload from holding the mic about an inch from their mouths and a couple of drops to the floor (not to mention tangling the lavalier cable around the arm of the chair) the audio was completely unusable.
The producer for the television production company that hired me was livid (his wrath was aimed at me, not the governor) and the audience was leaving the hall in droves.
The rest of Jeff Harrison’s story details what he took away from the experience,what he’ll do next time and includes some great tips for using lavaliere mics.
MadTV — Drunk Powerpoint Presentation (Somewhat NSFW)
Wired Presentations — Sometimes a Mistake Pays Off
All is well until a guy in the first row said, “my notes didn’t match what you were discussing.†Someone from the back chimed it, “Mine don’t match either.†Yep, Jeff had been bitten by Murphy’s Law.
It seems that I pulled a chapter from the course management system while the other developer had been working on a different chapter in our common work area
Pivotal Public Speaking — Funny Presentation Training – how many errors can you find?
This is a video produced by a presentation training company as an example of how NOT to make a PowerPoint presentation.
PPTools — Keep the session alive (prevent screensaver, logout problems, mouse jiggler)
Occasionally we get questions about how to keep the screensaver from kicking in, usually from people whose corporate IT people have locked down the computer to the point where they can’t change the screen saver settings themselves. In other cases, the computer may log them out after a period of inactivity.
Blue Room technical forum — Fire alarms vs. haze…
Hit a minor issue at the place I’m currently working at today, as I managed to evacuate the entire school when demonstrating the haze machine… I’m fully aware of the cap over the sensor or isolating the particular part of the building that the haze machine is being used in to solve this problem, but the school (despite a huge amount of persuasion from me) don’t want to do either of those, as they are concerned for the risk implications.
Nothing To Do With Arbroath —Missing cat appears on BBC1’s Question Time
A cat owner only realised her ginger Tom was missing when a friend rang to say she had just seen him – live on television. Tango appeared on screen on BBC1’s Question Time as David Dimbleby, politicians and pundits discussed topics as diverse as the wearing of burkhas, the situation in Iran and MP’s expenses.
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