What a crazy user group meeting tonight. Through some schedule mix-ups (partly due to having things scheduled too far in advance and not following up) we ended up with no sponsor and no speaker.
I was originally not going to make it to tonight’s meeting due to some schedule conflicts, but they cleared up at the last minute so I joined Brent to help run the meeting. When we go there we discovered that due to schedule conflicts they had we were in a different room, so we got busy redirecting everyone to the new room. After a while we started wondering where the scheduled sponsor was... Then we also started wondering where the speaker was. We soon learned the sponsor didn't realize they were scheduled for tonight and would not be there, so Brent got on the phone and Alien Arc became the new sponsor. When it was just a few minutes from go-time and still no speaker (didn't have contact info) it became apparent that one of us was going to speak.
Fortunately I had brought my Surface with me and still had it mostly configured from my talk last week at Nebraska.Code(). Unfortunately I had not brought any of my dev devices and was going to have to go with the emulators. After a little rough start just getting everything running the meeting went good. Pizza got delivered towards the end of my talk and I only had one hiccup that I couldn't resolve right near the end.
My take-away from this experience is that as a user group organizer you have to be ready every time to make the meeting happen. At least I hadn't given this talk at the user group yet, so it was new for most of them.