Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 17th, I’m giving a talk on business blogging to the Montana Society of Association Executives. I’ll post my impressions (and the PowerPoint) afterwards.

Report (aka, Gmail to the rescue)

Well, it wasn’t a total disaster, but if a technical detail could go wrong it did. My laptop wouldn’t display through their projector. I don’t yet know if it was my laptop, Linux or their projector; it’s entirely possible I have a bad video port on my laptop. The hotel didn’t have wired internet access like they said they did (if they did it was through an ancient 6pin [RJ25?] jack), and I didn’t have my wireless card configured yet in Ubuntu Linux because I didn’t want to risk bricking my laptop right before the presentation. The gentleman who brought the projector also brought a spare laptop, but I couldn’t open my presentation on it, and his copy of Acrobat Reader wigged out when I tried to load my backup PDF version of the presentation. Finally, my saving grace was the fact that the other laptop had wireless access, and I was able to display the raw text version of the presentation, sans titles and graphics, via the Gmail “view attachment as HTML” feature.

As if I wasn’t nervous enough.

You might think I’m being negative, but all things considered I think it went well. Hopefully they don’t think I’m a complete dolt. I’m going to send I’ve sent a copy of my presentation in PDF format (117kb) to my contact and she’ll distribute it to the members. Perhaps that will help me save face.