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talk is done!
Mar. 24th, 2004 05:27 pmWell, the talk is done. Huzzah!
I wrote out slides for it on Monday. These were traditional title and 3-4 bullet points per slide, all very standard. Then I sat down to check timing of the presentation and made an unpleasant discovery. This form of talk is very, very, very boring. I was bored just _reading_ the damn thing. It also didn't fit with how I work when I want to present something, and present it well.
So, as with all good computer scientists, I did the obvious thing. I stole ;)
In this case, I stole an idea I'd first seen in a Larry Lessig talk that was on the web. Lots of slides, but only a few words on each slide. Don't try and stuff the paper into powerpoint format -- it's boring to read, and kinda pointless. If they want to read the paper, let them read the paper.
So, I rewrote them from scratch - where I previously had about 15 very detailed slides, I now had 120 very brief slides. This format flowed _so_ much better. It also worked better for slotting the jokes and cheapshots in the talk - you can use the slides for the punchlines. The only thing with this format is that you _really_ need to practice it to get the timing right. You've gotta get it right, and that's tricky.
The talk seemed to go down really really well. Lotsa interest, lotsa laughs at the jokes (and at the cheap drive-by kickings I delivered on the way), the audience got into the style of it (and kept in the style for the questions - see this report for the questions. The "too much attitude" question came from Guido (Python's original author), and, coming from him, I regard that as a badge of honour. I'd also just put up a really awful picture of him from a few years ago, so that was fair ;)
I got a _lot_ of comments during the day from people about the talk. A substantial number of them were praising the talk's format. I know I certainly enjoyed giving it, and I think this will be the format that I use from now on, where-ever possible.
A couple of folks have recorded the talk - I plan to get the audio off them, and then make the slides into a flash presentation with the audio synced to the slides.
If you're interested, the slides are online.
I wrote out slides for it on Monday. These were traditional title and 3-4 bullet points per slide, all very standard. Then I sat down to check timing of the presentation and made an unpleasant discovery. This form of talk is very, very, very boring. I was bored just _reading_ the damn thing. It also didn't fit with how I work when I want to present something, and present it well.
So, as with all good computer scientists, I did the obvious thing. I stole ;)
In this case, I stole an idea I'd first seen in a Larry Lessig talk that was on the web. Lots of slides, but only a few words on each slide. Don't try and stuff the paper into powerpoint format -- it's boring to read, and kinda pointless. If they want to read the paper, let them read the paper.
So, I rewrote them from scratch - where I previously had about 15 very detailed slides, I now had 120 very brief slides. This format flowed _so_ much better. It also worked better for slotting the jokes and cheapshots in the talk - you can use the slides for the punchlines. The only thing with this format is that you _really_ need to practice it to get the timing right. You've gotta get it right, and that's tricky.
The talk seemed to go down really really well. Lotsa interest, lotsa laughs at the jokes (and at the cheap drive-by kickings I delivered on the way), the audience got into the style of it (and kept in the style for the questions - see this report for the questions. The "too much attitude" question came from Guido (Python's original author), and, coming from him, I regard that as a badge of honour. I'd also just put up a really awful picture of him from a few years ago, so that was fair ;)
I got a _lot_ of comments during the day from people about the talk. A substantial number of them were praising the talk's format. I know I certainly enjoyed giving it, and I think this will be the format that I use from now on, where-ever possible.
A couple of folks have recorded the talk - I plan to get the audio off them, and then make the slides into a flash presentation with the audio synced to the slides.
If you're interested, the slides are online.
