This is the first time I've seen a recording of me talking. Aside from saying "umm" too much, I think this was one of my better talks.
Feedback is welcome here, and if you're a public speaker and have any tricks to avoid the overuse of "umm...", I'd be interested in hearing about it. It'd also be great to get the discussion going again about community driven development.
Errata / Notes:
- You might notice the slides are not synced with when I actually advance them. My laptop didn't give a good video feed, so Confreaks had to manually sync them. They did as best as they could, but sadly that'll cause you to miss a little of the Takahashi splendor. It's a shame, because this talk was one where I got the timings pretty good.
- The first part where I mention Boston RUG and 25 minutes was not about talk length, it was about 'getting my computer to work with the projector' time, which was probably 5+ minute at MWRC.
- When I asked who was involved with free software projects, better than half the room raised their hands
- The phantom question which got me talking about meta-docs was because James Britt said that he found you need to make it extremely easy for people to contribute to projects, and cited some examples from ruby-doc.org
- Ruport Mailing List was originally established in December 2005, not 2006
- The GPL/MIT comparison I quoted was from Eleanor McHugh
2 comments:
I haven't watched my own talk (save for about a minute to see just how it turned out), so I'm also curious about the "um" count.
I *think* I do pretty good on it; I've tried to get it locked into my head that not making sounds is perfectly OK, and that 10 seconds on stage only feels like 20 minutes, so there's no reason to make babbling noises. (Well, unless they're related to the slides.)
My only tip on the matter is to watch speakers who use abundant filler words; it's annoying and distracting, especially once you've become aware of it. Before long you'll cringe at the thought of being like that.
(I once listened to a guy tell some story that went on for some time, and he had a habit of injecting "but, ah, ..." whenever there was the threat of a 2- second gap in talking. Pretty soon it started sounding like he was saying "butter", and it got increasingly surreal. "Butter? WTF has *butter* got to do with this? Does he have some toast someplace? Is this a subliminal cry for diary assistance?")
I've watched mine a couple times to try to learn a bit from them.
You're right, a lot of the ums were mainly filling in things that could have been silence (breath catching and whatnot).
It's strange, they come in little groups and the disappear for a while. I can't remember being particularly nervous during this talk, so there has to be some other reason.
<shrugs>, I think seeing this recording will teach me a lot about my speaking style and allow it to correct itself in a lot of ways.
Thanks for sharing the butter story, hehehe.
Post a Comment