The crowd was a fair size, maybe 150 people, and the seat were arranged around tables in a very informal manner. Quite relaxed I was. Then I watched a couple of talks mostly presenting the uptake of mobile internet devices. Some do’s and don’ts — but all very much from a marketing perspective. And everything that was presented I was fully aware of, indeed, it was one of those situation where I could have expanded on those talks. That wouldn’t have been appropriate of course, they weren’t my talks, and besides, the presentations were at that level since that was the level the audience were prepared for.

What struck me as odd about this is that the people presenting were from companies that had a intent to sell their services to the audience members. An informative sales pitch. I guess that’s how it works in big business. I’m not judging it, I’m just observing it.

Then it was my turn to speak. I’d learnt to talk off by heart as per the tips I previously blogged about. But it didn’t go exactly as planned. It wasn’t bad by any means, but I ended up reading it out. They very thing I had intended to not do.

Why?

Because it was there. It was all there in front of me. I couldn’t not look at it, and by looking at it I read it out word for word. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t natural. It was a reading from an article I wrote.

By the way, the talk was about my experiences of technology through cancer. My experience of those times can still be seen here.

What went wrong?

The texts was too literal. Literally written on that page word for word. I should have had a list of points I wanted to cover. Then gone through each in turn repeating, from practice, the story I had to emphasise those points.

It would have been more natural. And likely it would have made more of an impact since I would have been speaking with the crowd rather than at them.

What went right?

How I felt, in myself, went right. I expected to be so much more nervous than I was. Public speaking is a fear. I overcame the fear by being prepared and confident in the message I had to deliver.

Although I have these criticisms, overall, I’m happy with how it went. It was a great experience and I’ve really learnt a lot from it. To the point that I hope I get another invite so I can make the necessary improvements.

In the mean time there are plenty of local tech groups and gatherings to practice at.

As a practice I decided I would host small presentations at our monthly jimmyteens.tv team meetings. The next to take place in December I’ll be talking about managing your email inbox. Influenced by Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero talk it will be more focused on the way things are done at jimmyteens.tv and specific to my audience.

As luck would have it a couple of weeks ago Teenage Cancer Trust asked me to speak as part of their presentation at the “eyeforpharma Mobile Strategies for Pharma” taking place on the 1st of December.

This is a great opportunity – before I’ve implemented my practice regime – and as such I’ve spent some considerable time preparing for it. The only way to conquer the nerves, as I see it, is to be immensely prepared for it.

I asked my Dad who has done a lot of public speaking in his time for some tips, seeing as we’re alike I thought his experience and process would suit me.

This is what he sent me back, which I think are some great tips:

1. Everyone gets nervous. I do too. But I know that if I am not nervous, I will not deliver a good presentation. At the end of the day, it is just a performance. I like to think of these nerves as healthy nerves. My nerves sometimes have gotten the better of me but never to the point where I completely lost it.

2. It is surprising how little people notice if I am nervous. Most of the time, and most definitely when you will be speaking at your forthcoming seminar, the audience is very interested in hearing what I have to say. Most of the time they do not know me well or not at all and therefore they have no preconceptions and tend to just look for the message that I am trying to get across.

3. For me there are three aspects to deal with when having to deliver a presentation:

   a) Nerves.

   b) Excitement.

   c) The message.

4. The nerves disappear to a great degree and are replaced by excitement if I have prepared my message well. With “excitement” I mean looking forward to the opportunity to actually delivering a message. Increasingly, over the years, I have enjoyed giving presentations and the once that have given me most enjoyment are the ones which have been prepared best. Without a doubt, it is ALWAYS down to preparation of the message.

   So how do I put together a good message?

5. I spend much time thinking about what I want to say and want to get across. It tends to rumble about in my brain for days, sometimes weeks, depending on how much notice I have been given. During that time I will also talk to people/colleagues and tell them that I will be giving a presentation to such and such an audience, what I have been asked to talk about and how I am planning to structure it.

   Using that process helps with crystallisation of ideas in my head. When speaking out loud with people about it, I realise what is good and not so good about what I am planning to say and how I want to get things across. (Sometimes people give immediate feedback, which can be helpful, although feedback that you get later in the process is more important. See point 9.) After this “gestation” period, I get everything down on paper.

6. a) Introduction:

   I. Pertinent facts about myself. An audience likes to know who is standing in front of them. I always take a conservative approach and give my complete name, as opposed to just my first name. If appropriate, I tell them how old I am. I give them two sentences about my career back-ground.

   II. With an audience that I have never met, I always provide relevant information about myself. With relevant I mean information that they can relate to. E.g. when giving a talk to a bunch of engineers, I will make them aware that I am a sales guy who has a great deal of experience in working with engineering departments and that I have been involved in the development and project management of technical products. If I am talking to sales people, I put emphasis on my sales background. If I am talking to finance/administrative people, I link my background to areas which they can relate to. Therefore, it is important that you understand who your audience is otherwise you might lose them during the intro.

   III. I provide two sentences on why I am standing in front of them, and THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE INTRO, I tell them what I am going to tell them in the next 10 minutes, 15 minutes or however long I have been given to deliver the message. I invite the audience to ask questions, either during the delivery or afterwards. I much prefer during but sometimes it is not suitable so then afterwards is more appropriate.

   Then:

   b) Bullet point / message part 1

   c) Bullet point / message part 2

   d) Bullet point / message part 3

   etc. etc.

   e. I close with a conclusion or summary and ….

   f. I open it up for questions even if officially I am out of time. I always take liberties with this; if the coordinator wants me off, they always come and tell me. If I know I have a chance to mingle afterwards (during lunch or a break) I tell people that they can approach me then. (I do not know what opportunities you have with your audience but if this is a networking opportunity for possible work then grab it with both hands!)

7. In the early days I used to write the whole thing out in full sentences. It helps with remembering.

8. Then I practice, in front of a mirror. I timed myself with a stopwatch every time. Once I get to the point where my times are consistent, I have it properly in my head.

9. The final test is to deliver it to a practice audience. In my case it is always your Mum. I do this twice, three times and accept criticism. If your Mum does not understand, then I know that the audience does not either. I make the necessary adjustments. By the way, my practice-run is truly a practice run, i.e. I am standing up, adopting the style, body posture, gesticulation of the real performance. I find that if you can do that convincingly, the real performance is easy. The final stage is…

10. Some more practice. Then I leave it for a day or two. I don’t touch it and relax.

11. Two days before delivery I read it again and I am likely to make a few minor changes and do the last bit of fine-tuning.

12. I do some more practice.

13. I practice some more.

14. Finally… I remind myself that I must speak slowly (exaggerate) and clearly and LOUD. I keep this in mind when I am delivering.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

First up things are going well. I’m settling into some sort of routine. That is, when I feel like it I do some work. Be that in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. Indeed, it seems I’m most productive when I get up about 4 or 5 am, make myself a pot of tea and get stuck in.

jimmyteens.tv is what I’m working on at the moment. There are plenty of projects lines up for this website but week one has been tidying up some loose ends and writing a podcast plugin. There are a few out there but I decided to write a dedicated one for us which I totally understand – and which will work with the video conversion tool I’ll be working on soon.

In myself I’m feeling quite relaxed. The reduced pressure of not having to worry about singletrackworld.com has allowed my mind to rest a little. Although physically tired (an 8 week old son does that to you), mentally I’m exploring ideas and coming up with some fun learning projects for the future. These will be sites that allow me to experiment with the latest in HTML5 and its many facets whilst building an end product. This will not only allow me to learn new things, but give me practice at project management, and have something to show at the end of it all.

So I’m in a transitionary period whilst I get into the rhythm. This is also because I’m currently working from a cluttered office room – cluttered because it contains all the stuff that used to be in the outhouse whilst we get our extension built; which will house a dedicated office. My own room, completely designed by me. Completely my working space. It will be neat, clean, tidy, everything lined up at right angles, an OCD haven. Along with a giant whiteboard for plotting ideas.

Speaking of plotting ideas, I’ve just got an iPad and have been looking at ideas apps. Picked up Penultimate this morning, it looks great at getting things down on paper. And has different paper backgrounds like lines, dots, and grids. It would be great if there was a 960.gs grid for it.

Anyway, that’s my first week and a bit. Bit of a ramble while I find my feet with writing et al but I’m feeling good about it all.

Adios (temporarily).

The problem I was having, at home at least, was all the distraction. Apart from the entire Internet accessible to me, I had all my music, films, Spotify, etc. on there. Doing any work was in itself a task to try and ignore all the distractions easily accessed from the launch bar.

At work the distraction is general office noise, at times vital, but noise nonetheless.

A while back I got an old white plastic MacBook from work. A bit of a castoff it required me to replace the keyboard and DVD drive but I got it up and running (at my own expense) and used it for work occasionally, but mostly it was used for web browsing in bed and for streaming media to the TV. So recently I bought it a new battery and a new hard drive.

While I didn’t stretch to the cost of an SSD, as it’s an experiment, I did get a hybrid drive. Mostly traditional platter but with a splash of SSD where your most launched files and applications reside. It seems quite speedy, but then a fresh OS install always does.

The MacBook was set up with my core web development applications. All my files reside in Dropbox. It’s squeaky clean and all data is synced to Dropbox, which syncs with my iMac, which syncs with TimeMachine and BackBlaze. For me to lose any data at this point I’d have to do something very stupid. Whilst at home I plug it into a 24″ Acer monitor (with slightly less than satisfying colour), and at work just use the fairly low resolution 13″ display. Certainly far lower than I’m used to anyway. That’s a bit of a struggle. But hey, this is temporal experiment number one.

The iMac is now a dedicated entertainment computer, and I bought an Apple TV to get it to the TV.

It’s about 3 weeks into the experiment and it’s going well. I’ve definitely noticed an increase in productivity and I’ve saved time by not having to synchronise application settings and updates on my home and work computers. My problem still lies in the fact that the entertainment iMac is still sat on my home office desk so I can listen to podcasts and music while I work. This is proving to be a bit of a distraction.

I have a plan though. I could place my Airport Express in my office. The iMac elsewhere, get some speakers, and using the iPhone control the iMac to stream music. I just need a place to hide the iMac now.

If this all works out I’m hoping to purchase a more powerful laptop. Perhaps a MacBook Air. But ideally Apple will launch something along the lines of an Air Pro. Basically an MBP without a disk drive, supreme battery, SSD, and low weight.

Didn’t they say technology would make things easier?

So self taught is a fairly accurate description. And a lot of these teachings have come out of necessity.

Before my job at Singletrack my websites had at most around 200 visitors a day. A stat I was quite proud of but still a relaxed number.

Singletrack brought about 15,000 a day from the outset. A leap if ever I saw one. A bit daunting, but I was naive, and so was the website. This was three years ago and I’d be making changed live on the website while I was deciphering the extremely outdated CMS. I’d basically been following the same principles of ‘live testing’ as I had done on my lesser viewed sites.

After the great hack – a 15 year old boy ripped the site apart Christmas 2008 and I spent the next couple of weeks working tirelessly implementing a new site and forum before all our users jumped ship to competing websites – a new testing strategy was introduced, and our users stayed.

Two sandbox sites. One runs an identical setup to the main site and is where the majority of changes happen which are then tested before being presented to the audience at large. Then another server where more radical things can happen, this one is used far less frequently. I don’t know how we ever got by without it. Especially with that number of visitors, which has now risen to over 40,000 a day. That’s not page-views, it’s visitors. And further more the average site visit is around 8 minutes. Crazy when you think about it. But the forum is so damn popular. We’ve racked up over 2 million posts in the last 2 years. My mind boggles at times.

I digress. Despite this massive success I still lack any real engagement with other programmers and “web people”. I may have painted the impression that I work entirely alone but that’s not true. There is another tech guy at work who deals with server maintenance and internal systems. On top of that he is a good programmer and writes some of the more complex scripts that I can’t quite get my head around. He is great to work with, but let’s just say he is more geeky than me. This is certainly no judgement on him at all but I find it difficult to have back and forth banter conversation speculating what fun things we could implement on the site. He has a far more traditional approach to computing. Whereas I’m reading about new startups and different exciting new web technologies every day. Thinking about it, it’s probably quite a good team.

I just feel a little isolated in that I can’t chat about things. And at times I feel almost frightened to ask questions in case I’m being silently judged – “how can you hold this position and not know that?”. I have more of an “ah, fuck it” attitude these days. If I ask the question I’ll save a lot of stress and potentially hours of forum trawling looking for an answer. I’m no longer bothered what people think. That’s partly why I’m writing this blog. It’s kind of putting yourself out there and I’ll probably write some stupid things but, hey, this is my learning and I’m documenting it mostly for my benefit. It’s cathartic getting your thoughts down on (digital) paper.

Damn, I’m just craving some learning. Someone who can learn from me as I learn from them. This is almost turning into a lonely hearts column! Anyway, my 2011 new years resolution is to start attending GeekUp. I once went a couple of years ago but it turned out to be their Christmas do, I was shy, and I just stood there for ten minutes wondering what to do with myself before deciding to go home. Lame, I know.

So, GeekUp for 2011, let’s see where it leads. I’m in a pretty good position. It just needs a little refinement so I can get what I need out of it.

One day a week SE isn’t enough to get any meaningful and dedicated work done.

About 2 months ago I agreed with work to allow blocks of one week unpaid leave every now and then that could be used to concentrate on bigger projects within my SE lifestyle. To date I haven’t had the opportunity to achieve this as there always seems to be a pressing task that needs doing at work. I’ll have to put foot down at some point, with both them and me, to plan these week blocks far better otherwise they just won’t happen.

I think it will also be beneficial to entirely remove my thoughts (if that’s possible) away from my day job and concentrate on something else.  A lot of brain processing happens behind the scenes and inspiration strikes when you’re not focusing on the problem at hand. One of the reasons I find cycling so enjoyable, apart from it being totally awesome, is concentrating on the trail ahead somehow allows me to find solutions to all sorts of complex (to me) problems when sitting in front of the computer for hours, messing with code over and over, had yielded nothing but frustration.