Dope is cheap, show me the Bong!

Watching a video on youtube, about a demonstration which would thus change thepersonal computing industry . I have always heard of Doug Engelbart as an innovator. I never knew he actually did some mother of all presentations|demos. Reviewing my slides (talks given at various places past few years) over the weekend.  I now  will be very choosy  about the places I speak or conferences I go to, personally because  I realise I’m a lousy speaker, in a formal setup.   I seriously need to reinvent my stage persona, some of the worse mistakes I have done in past ::

    * I do show a lot of meaningless rows of text. (this SUCKS, BIG TIME)
    * Very few examples, I never have a bonus / surprise  section for the audiance.
    * Third order digressions.

People come a long way to attend conferences., expensive flights plus hotel prices,  hours of annoying security checks.If you are student its always a  PITA. If you are an employee its  mother of all PITA, given the present economic scenario. Getting a budget for air travel, stay and more importantly the  manager, who needs to explain to his upper management, why he needs to let you go with pay on a productive day, just sit for that 45 minutes or the 3 hour tutorial which I proposed. As a speaker I realise, I failed to realise this aspect, trying to be way to informal, or trying to be  uber cool with the choice of content on the slides. I think as a speaker I owe a lot to the audience. If I can’t interact and make the talk exciting, its better not to talk in the first place.

I have been enjoying as a delegate in a conferences in the past few months because  of the productive informal discussions on the floor ways rather than the talks. So for a few more months I might stick to the bof’s , unconferences , barcamp style discussions, a definite ++ for a threaded online discussion, need to try various methods like attending conferences via IRC, podcasts / webcasts. rather than going to a reputed conference, just to have been there and done that.  So,  untill I get my presentation skills to a minimal respectable standards, I would not be giving full length talks, tutorials.  

<third order digression alert !!!> a.k.a old habits die hard.
 
Coming back to Doug Engelbart’s talk, I always wish I was born in the 60′s/70′s, may be we owe it to the roots of the counter culture of USA, which our daily lives are built around today. Computers were much simpler then. The collobarative driven defence research movement, guess made computers to be more complex as it is today. We owe a lot to the misfits of the 60′s. Yeah the very same old dudes,  which the media termed the hippies, the social misfits, enrolled into  to computer courses to avoid being enlisting to the army  ,with ideas of the Civil rights, Anti War movements, Free Speech, Free love, Women rights Psychedelics Drugs and the acid tests. The era seemed like a dream. Yet they stuck to their cultures and what they believed in. "Sex, drugs and Unix" the idea of hacking code within dorms rooms, garages, high on LSD which many counter culture computer science students of the 60′s claimed to have achieved intellectual nirvana. Staying here in India, maybe a miniscule fragment of the butterfly effect of those misfits still does influence us.  From the Stanford Research Institute and XEROX PARC, where faster methods of computing were being developed for a country’s, world dominance. There were others who believed in a grand vision of using the computer as a tool to help people accelerate how quickly they could solve problems. Cultures of sharing ideas, experimenting collaborating between universities. Though most of the earlier life I have been meeting social misfits like myself and thinking its pretty cool to be amisfit.Droping out of the mainstream college and trying to make a living by stepping aside and watching the mainstream from a distance. You would see that students join colleges to achieve something, but a few realise collage teaches you to learn to achieve.

P.S :: Pradon for my grammatical errors, I have a bought a new edition of wren and martin, in the process of reinventing myself. 

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