Bamboo Blog

Things I learnt while presenting at a conference for the first time:

• Pacing back and forth rapidly will upset the camera guy.
• Turning your head violently will dislodge the radio mic. Still, this is better than a hand-held mic, which forced Dr Nic to give some of his talk while typing one-handed. Awkward.
• Position the glass of water a large distance from the laptop.
• Contrast on a projector is much lower than on a screen. I think keynote should have a 'conference rehearsal' mode that applies a #CCC 50% opacity block over your slides. Luckily, my slides were largely pictures of explosions, stealth bombers, and cats.
• If you close the lid immediately after removing the VGA dongle, your macbook will crash.

I hope everyone in the audience had as much fun as I did. I want to do some work on exciting presentations; even the most technically interesting material can be challenging to stay focussed on after five or six hours. I absolutely loved Jim Weirich and Joe O'Brien's paired presentation at Scotland On Rails 2008, and I'm keen to take the format further. Any suggestions?

Video of Refactoring With Fire will be up soon. In the meantime, I've uploaded the slides, and created a Speakerrate page.