Murphy's Law
Yesterday I did a talk at WordCamp Philippines, and just about everything that could go wrong, well, did:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
#WordCamp PH
