Dirty Tricks of Presentors

A reader writes "Perl expert Mark Jason Dominus gave a great talk last month in St. Louis on how to give a good conference presentation. There's nothing specific to Perl, and a lot of people said they thought it was the most useful talk at the conference even though they didn't think they'd be doing a conference presenation any time soon. Mark also wrote up some notes that explain the parts he forgot to put on the slides."

Comments

Now THAT is Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at OSCON last summer, when Dominus was giving a talk, one of the 1/2-day tutorials that are like $800.00 a pop...

Before it starts he says "How many people have taken $OTHER_TUTORIAL_NAME I gave last year?" .... to those who raise their hands he says "Well, you should go find something else to do, because $THIS_TUTORIAL is the same as $OTHER_TUTORIAL, only the name has changed"

Never mind that by the time these people get back to registration, find another tutorial they want to see, exchange their materials, and get to the new tutorial, they'll have missed a good chunk of the "replacement" tutorial which they paid good money for. Nevermind those folks who don't want to do some-other-tutorial, so now they're completely out the money and have to try and fight the conference organizer to get their money back.

Dominus is the last person who should be giving pointers on presenting. He's the only person on my list of presenters for whom "Hell will freeze over, Satan will ice-skate to work, before I go see him speak".

Re:OT: Slashdotting your content providers

[Restil]

This has been covered in the main FAQ and on several other occasions, but I'll recap and expand on your points.

First of all, if ANY single host starts slamming my site with HTTP requests, I'll instantly assume that its a DOS attack. This means I'll either block that address, or I'll shut down completely until the "attack" passes. What would the results of this "test" be from the point of view of the one doing the testing. Granted, if you're testing CNN, you'll probably never notice. But if you're testing some small site, they might pay more attention.

Mirroring the site in advance creates a potential legal grey area. If permission to mirror is required, and legally it is unless the author provies a GNU type license for the material, then the author would need to be contacted in advance, a process that can take hours easily. Who wants to wait 6 hours when you can link NOW?

Google caches are only available for those sites that have been around for more than a couple months, and even then the content is probably out of date. If slashdot is linking to something that's been around for a while, this isn't a problem, but if they're linking to something that's happened hours or minutes ago (which 90% of the slashdot headlines refer to), then google won't help much. And google won't cache the images, they still hit the original site, and typically 90% or more of the data from a site is graphics anyways. There are plenty of karma whores who will copy/paste the text part of articles/pages, and submitters will include google links on the occasions that they're available.

And the best solution to the slashdot effect is for the website administrators to configure the webserver properly. Bandwidth is only part of the problem. The other problem is caused by servers locking up due to excessive resource allocation. Once a server starts thrashing, all hope is lost, the server will be receiving requests faster than it can respond to them.

-Restil

More tricks...

[bentriloquist]

I was finally able to read this after many tries. Lots a good points which I will try when the times comes.

I could have wanted more "physical appearence" tricks, but it seems to deal mostly with putting slides together. If you are making presentations often, you (hopefully) are aware of how you react in such situations, but if you, like me, give perhaps one presentation every third year you might find these few tricks handy. I know they work for me.

• Prepare! Prepare! Prepare!
• Don't hide yourself behind a desk. Come out in the open where people can see you. This also solves the problem of presenters taking to the desk instead of the audience.
• If you're nervous you might tend to do a lot of weight shifting from one leg to the other... don't. There's really no need to show the audience that you are almost pooping your pants. It helps if you make yourself aware that you are nervous. You could start off with a joke, make the audience laugh and make the tension less.
• If you have to hold a piece of paper in your hands make sure you are not shaking. The shaking will really attract the audience's attention, drawing focus away from what you're saying. If the shaking is a problem for you, put the paper on a desk, look at it once in a while or memorize it.
• Walk around. Too much = too nervous. Too little = just another piece of dead meat.
• Don't say "eh..." or other pause words. There's no need to, because you followed my first advice!

Re:OT: Slashdotting your content providers

[twoshortplanks]

They can't configure their webservr properly from the get-go?

What is this "properly" you talk of? How you set up a webserver depends very much on the expected audience. You can only produce so much dynamic content per second, so how much dynamic content you create (assuming you're creating as much as possible to enrich the visiting user's experience) depends on how much traffic you're expecting.

That's like saying 'Sure, they could wear seatbelts, but only if they're warned that they're about to slam into a concrete wall.'

No. It's more like driving around in a convertable and someone chucking a bucket of water over the car. Sure, this wouldn't really be a problem if you'd had time to put the hood up, but since it was sunny you were trying to enjoy the sunshine.

As I said in my comment, the live demos were cool and more useful than static ones. What do you suggest I do? Always remove useful stuff like this just incase the entire of slashdot pops by uninvited?