Spyced

I just got back from PyCon, and as with all conferences where the talks are delivered by engineers instead of professional speakers, we had a mixed bag. Some talks were great; others made me get my laptop out . The most important important axiom is: a talk is not just an essay without random access. It's a different medium. Respect its strengths instead of wishing it were something it's not. Here are some concrete principles that can help: Don't read your slides Advice often repeated, too-seldom followed. This is sometimes phrased as "make eye contact with your audience," but I've seen that second version interpreted to mean, "make eye contact while reading your slides, so your head pops up and down like a gopher poking out of its hole." So just don't read your slides, no matter what else you're doing. Some good presenters go to extremes with this, with just one or two words per slide. This is fine as a stylistic embellishment, b...

In the last three years my primary machines have run OS X, Linux, Windows, OS X, and now Windows again, in that order. The observant reader may note, "That's a lot of machines in three years." It is, but I also changed jobs twice in that time frame, so that's part of it. Another part is that I'm a bit rough with laptops; the two mac machines broke badly enough that AppleCare told me they weren't going to help. The Dell and Lenovo machines, though, outlasted my use of them. For this most recent machine, I had several requirements and several nice-to-haves, some of which were in tension. Requirements: Able to drive a 30" external monitor At least 8GB of RAM At least 1440x900 native resolution Nice to have: Smaller than my 15" macbook pro, which is too large to use comfortably in coach on an airplane Larger screen than my wife's 13.3" mbp A "real" cpu, not the underclocked ones in the Macbook Airs A graphics card that c...