Technical difficulties during a talk

Matt Raible: I've had a total of one person attend before and I just said, "You should go to another session!"

I think the biggest problem that I've had was laptop difficulties in 2005. I was just comparing web frameworks, but I was using a Mac, and the Macs weren't on Intel yet and were so slow. Things just beach-balled so much that I was apologizing to the audience. That started 30 minutes in. What came next was two more hours of me fumbling around and even trying a different laptop because I did have a backup, knowing that this might be a problem.

That was the ultimate crash and burn. It wasn't all over Twitter because Twitter didn't exist, but there was plenty of talk about it. It sucked, but that was probably my worst experience.

I'm doing a bunch of JHipster stuff tomorrow at the Utah Java Users Group, and what I've learned to do is just bring swag, such as t-shirts and books. If I...