Russell Davies

Presentation Club

Here's a new thing.

I get asked for help with presentations a lot. But most of the time people don't really need advice, they need an opportunity to practice. And maybe some feedback.

So I've been wondering for ages if we could create a safe, supportive, welcoming space for that. Somewhere where people can try out a presentation. To practise, to test out a style or some ideas, or just to see how it feels.

And I've finally got the gumption together to actually organise something. It's going to be on Wednesday November 5th. Online. It's free, but you need a ticket. All the online event details will be inside Eventbrite/your ticket. We'll use Google Meet or whatever it's called today.

I think it'll work like this:

When/where

We'll do one a month. On the first Wednesday of the month. 7pm UK time. No time is perfect but I hope that suits many. If it's fiercely inconvenient for a particular group (maybe parents?) we'll also try some alternatives.

We'll do a mixture of online and live events. We'll start with online because that's easier and more accessible.

Audience

You can attend just to see what it's like, in case you might like to try presenting one day. Or just to be supportive. Or to learn from other people doing presentations. We definitely need an audience so please come along. You will be invited to offer feedback to the presenters but your feedback must start with the words "what I really liked about your presentation was...". In my experience people are hugely aware of their failings, they don't need them pointing out, we are there to point out their successings.

Presenters

You can have up to 10 minutes. Less is fine. We'll probably start with using Google Slides but we can probably adjust that if you need. Your presentation can be very finished or very not finished. You can be very experienced or not experienced at all. If you'd like to present just email me and let me know. [email protected]

Format

It'll be 1 hour. From 7pm to 8pm. We'll have three 10 minute presentations. There'll be plenty of room/time for feedback and stress-free setting up.

(I'm putting this here, for the benefit of the RSS massive but please be aware that this blog is going away. Typepad is going away. I'm now blogging over here.)

Here we go again

I've had a pleasant afternoon of digital pottering. Sorting and tidying, prompted by the death of typepad.

Phil has very kindly helped me get an archive of eggbaconchipsandbeans and agoodplaceforacupofteaandathink online. Those links should (hopefully) work post-typepadxit.

And I've set up a blog on Ghost. It's possible (if the good people of the Ghost Concierge service help me out) that this blog will be archived over there. If not I'll do another archive like those above.

Here's the new blog. There is, of course, RSS.

And then since I had an archive of the whole thing Dan told me to upload it to NotebookLM and make a fake podcast. I wasn't sure I could bear that so I tried the video version instead. It might be even worse, the AI sycophancy is in full effect. I could only listen to about a minute but, well, it's interesting, so here it is. Let me know if it says anything offensive.

(I'm pretty sure I've written something about how annoying I find it when people use 'evolve' to mean 'change' and the LLM does that in the opening sentence so that says something...)

*I guess I'll copy this to the Ghost version too.

 

End of an era

It seems a bit useless to write it here but this blog will soon be gone. Typepad have announced that they're closing down/going away/screwed. I need to decide what to do. As does Ben. We're probably the last two typepad users.

The export tools don't seem to work very well. But I'm hoping my Web 1.0 pals will be able to help with that and, if they can't, the Wayback Machine seems to have everything.

But I need to decide what to do. I think I'd like to keep blogging so I'll probably move to Ghost. But should I try and bring the archives with me? Is it worth it? Dunno.

In the hope that it's useful, if and when I work out how to do that I'll post it here for people in a similar predicament.