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January 2007
January 26, 2007
How to make your JavaOne presentation memorable
If you follow a few simple rules, you are assured a memorable JavaOne presentation:
Start early and finish early. Ideally, before the audience arrives.
Never apologize, it shows weakness and they'll rip you to shreds in the Q&A. Make a few obvious mistakes to emphasize your unapologetic attitude.
Bullet lists rarely contain any useful content, and are often interchangeable. Borrow someone else's.
Never alienate your audience with sexist humor. Alienate them with the quality of your content.
Live presentations and air travel are the two most dehydrating activities. Neither should be undertaken without first having several drinks.
The preceding advice was taken, somewhat loosely, from this helpful list of suggestions from presentation guru Edward Tufte.
JavaOne takes place in San Francisco this May, and culminates with the the Duke's Choice awards, which celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology. Like your presentation, if you follow my advice.
Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:47 PM Permalink
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January 01, 2007
Lazy Resolutions
Lazy evaluation appealed to me when I first learned about it in grad school. I wondered if there were other ways to be productively lazy, and imagined researching the possibility. But somehow I never got around to it. I have, though, mastered Lazy Resolutions.
Years of experience have taught me that you should only make New Year's resolutions that would be hard to break. Otherwise the odds are either you'll disappoint yourself or you'll do things that seemed smart at the time but turn out to be dumb. Here are a few carefully selected resolutions that I expect to have little trouble keeping in 2007:
Use more open-source code in my work.
Not accept any back-dated stock options.
Find an excuse to go to San Francisco.
Remove that old MSJVM before it EOLs on December 31, 2007.
Change my clocks to deal with Daylight Savings Time.
Change my socks daily.
Decide whether or not to use Google's SOAP search API.
Stay up to date on developments in Java.
Not stay the course.
Posted by Mike Swaine at 02:03 PM Permalink
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