I posted this earlier, but it was lost in the ether … somewhere.

Before lunch I gave my “N Things You Didn’t Know About Apache HTTPD” talk at Tek11. This is a talk that I’ve done before but which gets large parts of it rewritten every time I give it, based on what new features are most in my mind lately. N is currently 29, which is actually quite a bit more than I can reasonably cover in an hour.

About three items into the talk, the power went out. The Chicago area has had terrible weather this week, as has the rest of the country, and this was a pretty wide-spread outage. I just kept going. I’ve tried to design my presentations so that my slide deck is really just prompt cards for me, and a few useful examples or funny pictures. The audience was very kind, and some of them followed along with my slides that they had already downloaded.

I don’t know how long Twitpics keeps images, but here’s a picture of folks following along in the glow of their laptops.

My favorite tweets about this are: 1, 2, 3.

I was very impressed with how the hotel and conference planners handled the outage. By early in the next hour, they had run extension cords from generators to the projectors, and did this with very little disruption. Kudos to Cal, Marco, and Ardi, and whoever else was involved in this. I’m always impressed with the professionalism of this conference, but today more than ever before.