Well, I’m back from a junket to NYC and the AJAXWorld East 2007 convention. Honestly, I can say I was a bit underwhelmed. I had my eye on a couple of seminars and was looking forward to expanding my knowledge listening to the “experts”. I was disappointed when half of the sessions I attended were marred by critical presentation mistakes, technical difficulties, or both. I mean, don’t you guys practice these things at all? Sheesh. A young man who had authored a book about “rolling your own” AJAX library was one highlighted on my list. We waited for 20 minutes (out of a total of 45 slotted for the presentation) for a DVI to VGA adaptor for his Mac. No luck. Finally, they transferred him over to a PC, only to find that many parts of his presentation and demo app. were, I think, pathed incorrectly. Whatever the case was, he fumbled around for 35 minutes while the filled-to-capacity room sat in silence. I was truly embarrassed for him.
I don’t believe I was the only one who got fed up with the lack of quality of presentation in the conference. One of the numerous vendor presentations went awry soon after it began. People were standing up and exiting in droves as the presenters stumbled to get their app working on the laptop. I guess after two days of putting up with this BS, people had had enough.
I’ve come up with another professional career goal: give interesting, accurate presentations.