Solid advice.

Regarding the designing for failure, here's a tip: if you don't know the projector setup and the room, it's often best to avoid using the bottom 1/3 of your slides as a content area since, well, there's a really good chance part of your audience can only see the top 2/3 of the screen.

Sometimes you're just stuck with a crappy setup and then you have to deal with it – but if you dealt with that in advance, you win.