The conference is over, I am back home, not able to sleep. So I pulled out the old laptop so I could finish up the blog entry I started earlier in the week (Wed in fact) so I will cover Tue and Wed instead of just Tuesday. So here I sit in bed with the HP NC6000 watching history/science documentaries recorded by Media Center for me. Oh and Trouble (the black cat who owns me) is next to me, she really missed me I think. She blerts at me and purrs and gives me the look of “you better ask me before you leave again, I’m watching you!”
Tuesday
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Dean and I were asked to present for a second session today. Gil Kirkpatrick the CTO of NetPro and the Chairman of the conference gave up his session[1] for us so we could try and get through more of our slides. I am happy that folks liked the presentation enough to sit through the between session break let alone ask NetPro to find another slot. They were even saying they would do it during lunch if that is the only place that could be found. I have no misunderstandings of what happened, I am pretty confident that Dean was the primary reason for the curtain call. Again he is an amazing presenter. I am better in the one on one or one on small group answering specific questions or telling humourous stories. It was quite odd when I spent time up doing the presenting, I sort of spaced out and things got nebulous. I spent a lot of my internal time trying to filter what I was saying so that I didn’t say anything inappropriate such as NDA material or more likely, some “curse” words. When someone would ask a question I would zoom back to the scene and the words would find themselves and roll out but as soon as I went back to the presentation things would get quite ethereal again. I tried the old trick of focusing on one person and presenting but that doesn’t work so well if that one person decides to open up a laptop and start chatting with the person next to them, ouch! Anyway, I don’t think that was it as it wasn’t about a fear of presenting. I knew a lot of the people, I knew the material, my life nor job nor soul were on the line. I think it was more around the fact that I wasn’t directly solving a problem and didn’t get a feeling of criticality so my mind went on a trip. 🙂
If you asked me, I was stuttering and stumbling through it but I have been told that despite what I felt, it went well and I wasn’t stuttering. From my side though, it felt like I was running around the room on fire and no one was tossing water at me to put me out and I wasn’t bright enough to STOP DROP AND ROLL. It was hard to worry out whether I should go or stop as I would look at one face and see lights clicking on and in another see the thoughts of “get off the stage ya tosser” (those folks from the UK can be brutal!). Note for next time, don’t go with the developer content or at least not as much and not as deep. I have no idea how many people could be jammed in the room, maybe something between 140-200 and when I asked how many developers there were I think 3 hands went up hesitantly.
I have decided that I need to trust the people close to me who said it went well assuming they would tell me what I dorked up so I could get better for the next time whenever that may occur. So I must have done well but was simply overly sensitive to the situation. Too bad NetPro didn’t record the sessions, I would have loved to have seen that. I have a video camera around the house somewhere, I should dig it out and see how I look trying to present.
But enough introspection, I have done far too much of it. Back to the “real” world. 🙂
Lots of folks learned a lot of stuff. Unfortunately I missed a great many of the sessions due to being dragged off to talk to folks, answer questions, etc. That is fine though. I enjoyed it. I do wish I would have been able to have attended at least Brian P’s session, I like hearing about MS IT.
Anyone who is interested in seeing the slide deck and getting the scripts Dean has made openly available, please check out our new joint web site http://www.jadonex.com
Also heard from a lot of people using joeware that were quite pleased with it. That makes me happy that people find use in the tools.
Wednesday
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Unfortunately I missed most of the sessions since Monday afternoon and this day was no different. I did, however, happen to catch Joe Kaplan and Ryan Dunn presenting their material on programming AD with the NET framework. It was quite good, one of the best presentations in my opinion. Great material, good humour. At the end Ryan casually tossed out a joke that admins should buy their book, not necessarily because they can or they will write code, but because they could use it to whap developers up side the head. Outstanding!
That brings up a point from our presentation which was that admins should have some development knowledge if only to protect themselves from bad developers and integrators. If they don’t have a clue how things need to be done, they are fighting from a hole when there is a problem.
Before I flew out that evening I got together with several of my good friends most of whom are DS MVPs and we had a great dinner and a lot of fun. Life is all about the smiles and the laughing and there was quite a bit of both. The absolute highlight of the comedy show was a comment from Paul Williams. Paul is a riot to talk to. His Welsh accent is quite pronounced and he uses so much slang you are better off trying to follow the context of the sentences versus the actual words. Well Paul ordered a burger and the waiter asked what temperature Paul wanted it at… Paul had the queerest look on his face as he processed the question and then spit out questionly in perfect Paul accent… “Warm?” I bust out laughing harder than I have laughed in ages, tears actually came out of my eyes. The whole table was just busting up right along with it all. I think it took 2-3 minutes for everything to settle back down. It was great. Admittedly it was an odd question but the expression and the way Paul responded was just too much.
It is the people like that that make DEC and in fact every event I decide to take time out to attend absolutely great. Initially it was extremely unlikely I was going to go because I just wasn’t into the agenda I saw and I have just been so busy lately that I didn’t need the extra over and above busy make work. It isn’t that I think I am above it or don’t need to hear what people are figuring out, you just get tired running all of the time and sometimes just want to say no and just sit down on a ledge and watch life go by down below and reflect on your thoughts versus dive in.
However, and this is a big however, Dean seemed really interested in presenting and said he wanted me to be involved and I have a difficult time saying no to friends so against every wish in my body I said yes. Regardless of the reasons of going, in the end I am extremely happy I did do it.
joe
[1] This would have been even cooler had we not heard directly from Gil the night before that he only had a portion of his presentation done.
>>>This would have been even cooler had we not heard directly from Gil the night before that he only had a portion of his presentation done.
The motivation was a little different than you imply here:
1. I had 5 or 6 people ask for a chance for you guys to finish.
2. Lunch was the first choice, but that stepped on our sponsors’ presentations, never a good thing.
3. My preso was done, but the demos weren’t smooth (SPA 2 runs “funny” in a VM), and with all the other things I had to do the next day, it seemed a good tradeoff for the attendees.
So I’ll cop to a degree of lameness, but not “I didn’t have the presentation done.”
-g
LOL, just joshing you Gil. I knew the other items but it was funnier the way I explained it… In fact when I first heard someone say lunch I thought it was a good idea but I expect at least one vendor would have complained since they were supposed to be the floor shoes at that point… But anyway, you are cramping the humour so… hush!
;o)
I probably wouldn’t have attended if it had been a carnivorous lunch. Would have been there if it was a veggie day mind…
Don’t fret about your presentation -it was great! You did a good job. Some of the dev stuff can be tedious for non-devs, but it didn’t go too far. It just means we all now want to learn C and we’ve got enough to do dammit!