I can be on the shy side socially, but public speaking doesn't really bother me at all. I've done DEMO a couple of times now, last night's ignite event, and some others, and I actually enjoy it a bit. But, all of the presentations I've done have been really short, like less than 10 minutes.. For me, that's perfect because its just enough time to compress my thoughts, be full of energy, and be off the stage before I know it.
So, next month, I'm speaking at the 360 Flex conference in Seattle. My topic is a behind-the-scenes look at Eyejot; how we built it, what the internals look like, how we host it, etc.. Everything from the UI and software design, to systems, databases, and supporting infrastructure. You know, a good, solid, 30 minutes of entertainment :)
Well, I just took a peek at the schedule, and I've got a full hour and 20 minutes to fill!
I'm sure that's actually for the best, but it's a bit intimidating. In college, I had the hardest time staying awake through lectures, even the more interesting ones. I'll have a couple red bull with me for sure, but if anyone has any suggestions for "staying power", besides thinking about Xavier McDaniel ( anyone get the reference :) ?) , I'd love to hear them.
Yesterday, Adobe's On Air Bus Tour made its first stop, here in Seattle. Basically, it's a bunch of guys traveling the country in a big bus, spreading the gospel of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). AIR is an incredibly cool technology that lets you make a cross-platform desktop app, with all sorts of cool "real application" functionality, using web technologies like flash, pdf, html, and javascript.
Being the huge Adobe fanboy that I am (and the fact that the event was 2 blocks from our office), I was very excited to go check it out. Overall, it was quite a success. Lots of interesting people, and tasty food and drinks. I had to run back to the office for a few hours so didn't catch all of the talks, but the ones I saw were great, and I'm looking forward to watching the rest online.
In the evening, Ryan Stewart organized an Ignite event (each speaker has 5 minutes, with 20 slides, 15 seconds each, on autoplay) and allowed me to do a presentation about Eyejot. It was tough coming up with a presentation that fit that format, and was informative and entertaining, without being too product pitchy, but I think it went pretty well. It was definitely a lot of fun.
Brooke and I started dating almost 11 years ago... i'm proud to say she finally baked her cherry pie the other day, and it was well worth the wait!
Not sure what I was thinking driving my little car to lowes to buy a fridge, but I squeezed this thing into the back with about 1 inch on each side, and about a millimeter between it and the back shelf/hatchback thing...
