First Desktop Conference 2006 Presentation

Well I've just finished my first presentation for the Desktop Virtual Conference 2006, on XML Publisher. It was a bit strange presenting it actually, there's no feedback during the session from the audience and no visual clues as to whether you're doing OK or not. At the start of the talk I told the organiser to open up the voice channels so that people could comment during the talk, but I didn't hear anything and it was all a bit strange. It takes you a while to get used to the idea of presenting to your laptop with no-one else in the room, after about 10 minutes I kind of relaxed and got into my normal "presenting stride". There were a few names I recognised in the delegate list - Nick Goodman, Lewis Cunningham, Toon Koppelaars, but after you start presenting you can't really see who's joined or who's still there as Powerpoint is maximised out. Next time I'll keep the "Web Conferencing" console on the screen rather than have it auto-hide when doing the talk.

It was a bit of a shaky start to the talk, I had to wait until about 15 minutes after the start time before I could talk as there were a few technical difficulties. I was pleased though that the technology worked from my end - I dialled in to the voice line number using Skype and a headset on my laptop, which was connected to the internet using a 802.11g wireless connection. I've got a 2Mb DSL line from the house and it seemed to hold up fairly well. I was on the phone for about 90 minutes and my biggest fear was the call cutting out and then having to negotiate the reconnection process, which seemed a bit longwinded.

Anyway, if you listened in, give me some feedback as I'm on again tomorrow with Oracle Database 10g OLAP Best Practices. If you're on later (Nick, Lewis) good luck and I'll listen in.