It's done for me, but I can offer up some details for those who couldn't attend...
First, an incredible amount of work goes on behind the scenes at any large show like like this. My thanks go out to Paul Kent and everyone at IDG for doing this year after year, and knowing how to make things run smoothly. Also to all of the vendors that fly in, take time to set everything up, and then, pretty thanklessly, stand there all day.
IDG sets up a nice "Speaker's Lounge" for anyone who's presenting during the week. I had my picture snapped just outside of the lounge:
You can go there, kick back and relax and work on your presentation before you go on! More importantly, you get to meet all of the other speakers during the week.
My presentation, "From the Chime to the Desktop", went off without a hitch. I had a really great time, presented to a standing room only crowd (sorry to the people that got turned away), and ran for close to two hours. Nicely, my demos worked. I tweaked my slides right up until the night before, so, they're a little different than the one on the MacWorld CD that attendees received. When I mentioned that during the presentation, someone asked, "So what do we do? Do we have to take notes?" I said, "I would! And, don't you feel fortunate to be here? There's a lot of people that just couldn't make it out to San Francisco for one reason or another....let's try to share with everyone!" And then I took a quick crowd pic:
I'm no photographer! I think I left the zoom in a little - you can't see a good chunk of the room, or people standing along the sides.
Speaking of the slides, I am going to post them here...I just need a little time to touch them up: no one needs all of the transitions that I build in, etc. Also, be forewarned, that I already feel slides are useless without the talk, my slides are typically especially useless. You know what I mean if you watched my "Sniffing the Wire" presentation. I like the slides and talk to work in conjunction, and not have one distract from the other. I also think most people just fall asleep at the sight of slide after slide of bullet-point-lists. So, I try to keep it interesting one way or another. The 'downside' of that is that without that talk, the slides just don't make any sense. If the audio was being recorded, I'll try to get a copy and do what I did with Sniffing the WIre - match it all up and make a QuickTime movie of it.
So, great time, great crowd....I hope to do it again! But now that the presentation isn't swirling around my brain, I have plenty of other things to get back to, including walking the show floor a bit more.....and writing a book!
If any attendees have any questions, please feel free to contact me, and if I can help, I will.
Happy New Year!....see some of you soon, and some in 2007!
