# Thursday, 09 June 2005

The Groktalks are finished! Now comes the editing... so Scott Stanfield needs to rest up a little... and at Tech Ed, you take your rest where you can get it. :-)

Anyone who doubted that 40 ten-minute talks could knock an attendee over need only have visited our booth this afternoon as we wrapped up. What a treat to see and hear so many of them, and what a lot of work to film them all! The Groktalk crew all deserve a big round of applause: Patrick Hynds ran the schedule, Scott Golightly tracked the times and kept the speakers on task, Scott Stanfield was camera and direction (and heart and soul,) and J. Michael Palermo did everything else technical that needed to be done. Today I made sure speakers were ready when their time rolled around. Tons of other RDs came to the booth for moral support, occasional technical support, and to hear some really good presentations, ten minutes at a time.

Let me tell you, speaking for ten minutes is HARD. Speaking all day, for eight or nine hours, is tiring, but not that hard: if one demo blows up and you need to either do it over or abandon the rest of it, there's plenty of ways to speed up or slow down other parts of the day. An hour is reallly pretty nice: if you speak too long on one thing you can make up for it later, if you forget something when you're on slide 11 you can always find a way to weave it in to slide 12 or even 22. But in ten minutes, there's just nowhere to hide. I am so impressed that we were able to do this, and really glad we filmed them. Watch for links as we get things edited and uploaded.

Kate

Thursday, 09 June 2005 22:38:10 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #