Quick, before the memory of last week fades… I spent most of week 377 preparing my talk for OpenTech about Today’s Guardian. It shouldn’t have taken so long but I’d never really done a proper presentation before so it was a slow process.
The best part of four days was spent dithering and putting off making slides and writing a talk and wondering if I was doing it right. Should I try and memorise all the words, like acting? Or just remember what points to cover and hope I wouldn’t forget anything? Did I have too many slides? Having spent years being overly critical of poor presentation techniques I didn’t want mine to be too terrible.
Late in the week I checked my Delicious links and found Merlin’s presentation tips and replaced my word-for-word text with a few notes. Having run through the full text quite a bit already, this worked fine. On Saturday afternoon I seemed able to run through it all without much hesitation, and felt alright about it. Phew.
I think the talk itself went well. It was mainly a presentation version of this post about friction, readability and finishability. I listened to a bit of the audio yesterday (which will be online soon) and it sounded as bearable as listening to oneself can be.
Also last week, I spent an afternoon returning to the lengthy job of updating the Pepys’ Diary maps. Still some more plotting and reorganisation and work on a new interface to go, but progress was made. The novelty has definitely worn off though. I also prepared nine days’ of the diary and fixed another 100+ broken comments, to round out week 377.
On the upcoming paying work front… there now seem to be four or five possible projects circling, all about to land any time soon really honest. Hopefully they won’t all land simultaneously in a nasty crash, but that’s looking increasingly likely.
Onward!
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