Well, that’s the first presentation over with and I think it went pretty well with one major exception. I bought myself a nice new clicker with a timing device and then forgot to switch the timer on! I was so flustered that I confused myself into thinking I was due to finish at 10:30, not 10:45! I kept wondering why I was so pushed for time 😉 In the end, I took almost the whole hour anyway and only went a bit quicker than normal so no harm done, I don’t think.
As you can see, it was a pretty big crowd. What I find mildly amusing about this picture is that you can tell my hands must have been shaking, even though I didn’t feel particularly nervous. That’s Shrek, bottom-right corner, btw, but I’m pretty sure Tom is blogging at the back and not sticking his hands in the air!
One thing I found a little unusual is that you’re standing very much on one side of the room. I tried to make sure I included the other half of the audience, but it was difficult.
Anyway, they laughed at the jokes (sometimes almost presciently!), I got good questions afterwards and I didn’t see many people leaving, so I think I did okay ….
Before that, I attended Bob Sneed’s I/O micro-benchmarking presentation which I thoroughly enjoyed and was disappointed I had to leave 10 minutes early to prepare myself for the presentation. It’s amazing just how many of the things he had to say about testing are similar to the things I’m going to be saying tomorrow. I have a page of notes but here are a couple of quotes that stood out (for me, based on recent experiences)
“You shouldn’t jump to conclusions. When you get a result, the ‘Why’ can take a little time to work out‘
‘There is always a bottleneck somewhere“
He talked a bit about the filebench utility, so I’m going to have to check that out.
This was everything I’m looking for from a presentation 😉
P.S. Thanks to the Sponge for getting coffee all over my freshly-cleaned suit! The dry cleaning bill is in the post …
Glad it went well, Doug. That must be a weight off your mind. Enjoy the rest of the conference and thanks for the regular updates which are much appreciated.
PS. Those guys sure had a lot of questions 🙂
Cheers Andy. It’s only really half a weight gone though because I still have another presentation to go tomorrow. That’s a new one so will probably be harder but then I shouldn’t be nervous 😉
First photo I have ever seen of Shrek. I’m not disappointed.
I’m also glad it went well. I’m really glad there was a “the why can take a while” quote as well, kind’ve sums up what I wanted to say about the too many mistakes post.
What is that Aldridge fellow up to??!
Sounds like sabotage to me.
Tsk, tsk.
That was god that blew the air that knocked over the cup that splashed the coffee on Doug, to punish him for his post-presentation hubris. And for not wearing a crisp white shirt. And for smoking. And for his offhand treatment of enthusiastic young questioners. He’s lucky he got away with just a couple of drops of coffee, actually.
Niall,
“I’m really glad there was a “the why can take a while” quote as well, kind’ve sums up what I wanted to say about the too many mistakes post.”
Thanks because it’s not been a great couple of weeks (months, year ….) I suppose there are different categories of mistakes though and the processes one was just stupid. On the paper as a whole, Jonathan said the word ‘ambitious’ the other night and I suppose I was aware of that and knew I was more likely to make mistakes, but at least raise some interesting questions.
Howard,
” What is that Aldridge fellow up to??!
Sounds like sabotage to me.”
Yeah, don’t listen to any of that ‘god’ stuff. It was *his* coffee, *he* placed it and it ended up on *my* trousers. All the other stuff is just a frantic attempt to shift any blame to me. (Very funny, though …)
Moving along …
I thought Doug’s presentation was very good, I must say, and I’m not just saying that because god made me, nor because he owes me beers (
Doug, not god). A very solid introduction into the architecture and configuration of parallel query, and some high quality observations on using the wait interface to probe the performance of PQ.
Good job DB.
verification “chgdawrf” — make of that what you will.
Well done Doug…sorry I missed it.
I’ve sent you some stuff in a ZIP file on my latest run…you can try and pick the “Why” out of it. 😉
Thanks chaps 😉
Jeff, it’s going to take me a while to look at what you sent through, but it certainly looks interesting at first glance!
Cheers