Siliconchef by Brian Richardson
Tuesday, April 16, 2002. 6:06PM.
Intel Developer Forum, Hilton Tokyo Bay.
Imagine talking in front of a room filled with engineers and foreign businessmen eagerly watching your presentation and hanging on your every translated word …
That’s what I’m doing right now … imagining it. It sure as hell didn’t happen.
Why do they even schedule presentations at 5:00PM? The last thing anybody wants to do is speak in front of a group of worn out engineers who have a train to catch. These guys have been listening to keynote presentations and dodging salespeople on the show floor all day long. They’re not really in the right frame of mind to properly deal with an overdubbed PowerPoint presentation.
Yes, I’ve officially been overdubbed. As I gave my presentation, two women sat in an isolation booth and translated my every word for the audience. It kinda looks like the United Nations, but on a much smaller scale … and without equal representation from countries besides Japan. I prefer to be subtitled, but we didn’t have the special effects budget for that.
I have this image in my head of some poor Japanese translator scribbling words onto cue cards and holding them just around my knees in an attempt to subtitle my speech. Leave it to my brain to conjure that vision.
I have to give this presentation two times next week … once in Taipei and once in Beijing. This version went a little smoother than the one I gave in San Francisco. I preferred the audience I has back in February, but I could have done without the cascading failure of all three demonstrations in front of the home crowd. Today’s demo only had one issue, thanks to the fine folks at Keyspan … we have got to debug that damn USB-to-serial driver.
This IDF is smaller and slower than the one in the US. The trade show is a bit thin, disappointing many of the vendors. IDF hasn’t quite caught on in Japan. I expect the event in Taipei to be bigger. I have no idea what to expect from Beijing, both in conference and culture. I hope those audiences are more animated … the only response I got was giggles from one of the translators. “Since there are no questions, I guess I explained it perfectly” was apparently a funny line, since she had to cover her mouth to keep the laughter from passing into the microphone.
It’s all part of Brian’s Globetrotting Dog and Pony Show, bring technology and snake oil salesmanship to multiple points of the globe. I really need to get world tour t-shirts made up (“Brian: Live from Disneyland! One night only!”). I could make “AMI Unplugged” t-shirts, showing me and my laptop in some random airport.
But the show is over for now. Time to repack the briefcase and head for my room.
