All posts by Julie

When presentations go bad

Just Rambling

Kate Gregory pointed to a blog post by Microsoftie, Darren Strange, who just plain old had a bad day. An experienced presenter, he was well aware that he was in a downward spiral, but just couldn’t seem to do anything about it. (Probably not as bad as what he describes.) The hardest part about when talks go south is picking up your ego and moving ahead.

I had a horrible conference experience (that I considered confessing to, but decided to keep a little bit of my pride in tact) and not only had to face myself (and my scores, and the people who had so kindly brought me to speak at the conference) but I had to present a week later at another conference, a sizable one, at that. Believe me, I did not want to. Not at all. But of course, I had a commitment to fulfill and I had to work hard to find the courage to go forward with it.

This was really really hard to do. It made me question if I should even be presenting. (Okay, I question that prior to every speaking commitment I have ever made (and after reading one negative eval, even if it’s surrounded by many positive ones).)

My choices were to just go totally dark or turn my bad bad experience into a series of lessons. I thought long and hard about everything that did not go well, the reason for each of these problems and what I was going to do from then on to avoid each and every one of them.

I was also fortunate to have the ears (and the shoulders) of other folks who do a lot of presenting (such as Kate) to pat my poor ego a little and remind me why I present in the first place – because I really love sharing what I have learned.

I stress out prior to every opportunity I have to humiliate myself publically. Wouldn’t you? 🙂 

Susan Wisowaty and Glen Gordon were angels earlier this week when the normally routine (2 minute) installation of Live Meeting that I had inevitably put off (this wasn’t my plan, of course) to only 1/2 hour prior to the GeekSpeak webcast just would not work. Finally I turned off UAC, rebooted my computer, ran the install yet again and was finally ready about 30 seconds before we went live. Those two, who are serious pros, were cool as cucumbers, professing basically that it was “all good” and even if I just talked about ADO.NET without showing any code (and believe me, I could do that for  hours and hours) it would still be fun. Of course, in the end, the event flew by and it was a blast and hopefully it was beneficial for listeners.

.NET 3.0 and Vista at VTdotNET last night

VTdotNetFeed

VTdotNET had our Vista launch event at last night’s meeting and we had a blast. There were about 35 people there (which is a crowd for us!). TEKSystems brought us piles and piles of fabulous pizza and two VTdotNET members, Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr gave great presentation.

Mike, who owns two of our favorite local stores in Burlington (Kiss the Cook and Apple Mountain where he has built their POS system) covered WorkFlow, WCF and WPF. Mike teaches software classes at Vermont Tech as well. WF is a hard thing for many developers to grasp at first, especially when it isn’t solving a big problem that they have been struggling with. There are many who see it and say “oh, what I’ve always needed!” and others who just don’t get it. I was in the latter camp at first and could tell there were plenty feeling that way last night. One thing I like to share with folks like me is that the fact that people who I have a lot of respect for, such as Kathleen Dollard, are VERY VERY excited about WF. She is doing a full day session on it at DevConnections. I figure if Kathleen things it’s huge, then it’s huge and that I need to pay attention to it.

Mike built a basic hello world server and a client  to call it with WCF so people could just see the working parts, get the most basic concepts and see that it works. After this he demo’s Expression Web and showed an awesome iPod-like interface that when he hovered the mouse over the center circle (moving it around the circle), the volume went up and down, just like on an iPod. Very cool stuff.

Next up was Rob, who makes the University of Vermont School of Business Administration tick. Before he got started, I made him show Flip3D on his computer. There are plenty that hadn’t seen it yet, so there was a fun reaction! Rob covered Vista security and then gave us a great presentation on CardSpaces, which I think nobody in the group has seen before. There’s an article on CardSpaces in MSDN Magazine this month (April and it’s not online yet, but I have it in my hands!) by Michele Leroux Bustamante.

After the meeting, we raffled off the swag that Microsoft sent as part of this launch event. The highlight was five Vista Business licenses,then there were things like pens, zipper pulls and mouse pads – silly stuff. I was really pleased that a woman who lives in Souther Vermont (over 2 1/2 hours away) and has never been to a meeting before was one of the Vista winners.

Thanks to Mike and Rob for all of the work they did preparing these sessions. And thanks to Elizabeth Rudolph at TEKSystems for not only sponsoring the pizza & soda, but picking it up, bringing it to the meeting and setting it all up.