I found him prickly, humorous, generous and a magnificent spooler-out of well-rehearsed sentences.
But his explanation was simple and heartbreaking; the sound operator had inadvertently lain his anorak against one of the spools on the tape machine.
There, using a wireless network connection, it spends the day spooling through a parade of Internet widgets, like headlines, stock prices, weather, photos, Twitter or Facebook feeds, top 10 lists, e-mail, sports scores and jokes.
It hopes to do this by extending a manufacturing technique, called "roll-to-roll" processing, so that it can be used to make computer components currently made in the form of silicon chips.Roll-to-roll, as its name suggests, involves winding a continuous roll of flexible material (such as paper, plastic or metal foil) from one spool to another.
Bigger ones produce all the boost required, but are slow to spool up to speed.
Ribbons of steel a metre wide and half a hair's width thick spool through vacuum chambers in which they are sputtered with copper, indium, gallium and selenium collectively known as CIGS.
Dr Stone imagined an alternative solution in Mexico in 2008.Laser focusAfter slipping into "one of these little Zen states" while watching a fibre-optic data link spool out as DepthX sank into a sinkhole, Dr Stone wondered if the link could carry enough photons, generated by a laser on the ground above, to heat a penetrator to an ice-melting temperature.
Dr Rubenok and her team have tested their version of the scheme on a spool of optical fibre more than 80km (50 miles) long, and also on 18km of working cable installed in Calgary.
This approach involves unwinding a filament of thermoplastic material from a spool and feeding it through a moving extrusion nozzle, heating the material to melt it and deposit it in the desired pattern on the build tray.
Most nanofibres are only nanometres in length as well as width, but the longest one made by Dr Yu stretches for half a metre and he only stopped there because he got fed up with winding it up on a spool only a few millimetres in diameter.
A dismal home market and sliding exports cripple other Japanese electronics firms, but Canon still makes money as if it were spooling cash out of its high-speed copiers.
