one down, one to go!

One talk for OSDC down, the evening's keynote to go. More importantly, the conference is underway, and as yet, nothing's caught fire and burned down.

stealing from the professionals

Well, I did the "Stealing from the Professionals" talk tonight at the OSDC conference dinner. As far as I can tell, the response was very very good. It was possibly the least technical talk I have ever done, with absolutely no technical content whatsoever. And that's me for the conference - aside from running the lightning talk sessions (for which I must now go and finish building some props) and maybe doing a lightning talk on Wednesday. I'll see about that, depends whether I have time to write one before then.

I have no idea if my talk tonight was recorded, sorry.

the quote I used in the talk tonight

The talk tonight was about using techniques from standup comedy in public speaking (in this case, technical conferences).

I had a section in there about using humour, and touched on the whole "no, no, humour is 'unprofessional' and 'not serious', you can't use it". This quote sums up my attitude perfectly. I've highlighted the bit I used, but the whole piece (On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity, by G. K. Chesterton) is worth reading. Here's the paragraph in question.

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. The question of whether a man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of moral state, it is a question of instinctive language and self-expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. The question of whether Swift was funny in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe would not maintain that the more funny "Gulliver" is in its method the less it can be sincere in its object. The truth is, as I have said, that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr. George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.