Murphy’s Law

Yesterday I did a talk at WordCamp Philippines, and just about everything that could go wrong, well, did:

  1. I left my Keynote at home and had to whip something up using 280 Slides (great free service, by the way, although it’s been a while since the last update) two hours before heading into the location.
  2. A week into the day of the talk, I was informed there would be no BarCamp-style breakout sessions (i.e., there will be non-tech bloggers in the audience) and it just completely escaped me to update my rundown; I retro-fitted the presentation on-the-fly as I was speaking, to disastrous results.
  3. Another thing on the slides: I did have an older version of the presenter notes on a Gmail draft, but alas, I exported my 280 Slides to PPTX, and Keynote would not read Microsoft’s bastardized XML format.
  4. Even if Keynote did open the damned file, the WiFi onsite was wonky at best and we spent around 10 minutes trying to get Remote working. More insulting still, when I lent the next presenter my iPhone so she could use Remote too, it started working again. Bah.

I don’t want this to sound like too much of an apology for doing such a lousy job (I’ve already pounded my head on a pole with rusty nails sticking out in four directions). Overall, the day was much fun. I spoke with five, or ten, or twenty (?) participants after the program, and gained a few new Twitter friends on the side. That’s where the value of going to conferences lies: the networks that you start building in the after-event.

Kudos to MBS for a great job at WordCamp, and if they haven’t learned their lesson yet, I’d be happy to do a BarCamp talk next year (and promise to do a better job, heh).