Well, yeah, so I'm a little behind. Slowly but surely I'm getting caught up on everything :-)

On Friday evening after the SELinux Symposium, Russell and Manoj hitched a ride back to Harrisburg to check out the CPLUG Conference. That was fun -- they both spent the night, and we got up nice and early the next day to head into the conference.

I feel like I got out of most of the work. By the time I got there, Shana and the rest of the folks who got there early had most of the things handled.

The conference itself went great. I enjoyed each of the speakers. From the input I've received, the attendees found them all enjoyable as well. It sounds as if each of the six speakers presented someones favorite talk. I heard really good things about all of them.

That being said, I believe Trooper Jon Nelson of the Philly LUG had the most popular talk. His topic of computer crime and law caught everyones attention to such a degree that the questions were non-stop. Towards the end of his time slot (when he was only a handful of slides into his talk), someone ultimatly suggested he try and get through the slides instead of answering questions. He managed to zip through most of them, thanks to the pizza being a bit late.

I somehow found myself as organizer, MC, and speaker. I felt vastly underqualified for most of that (no, I'm not fishing for compliments! :-):

• I have never MC'd an event before in my life (the CPLUG meetings don't count, they're small and short :-) Heck, I'm not even sure I quality to introduce the speakers we had, but it all worked out :-)
• I felt odd speaking in between such high caliber presenters. I'm thankful for the opportunity to have done so, it was fun. I'm glad Russell coaxed me into it or I would otherwise never have considered it.

I discovered some interesting things in all this. After a few minutes, I was the least nervous I've ever been in front of an audience. An unusual time to feel that way, for sure. But it gave me a wonderful opportunity to be able to focus on what I was doing rather than being nervous, and I discovered a whole host of things I could do to improve in public speaking.

Rather than getting into all of them right now, I'll say that I'm really considering getting back into the ToastMasters program. I had gone to one meeting before -- but through a series of unfortunate events which left me in crutches for several weeks/months, I never ended up going back :-) (okay, okay, on the walk home, I tripped on the side of the road and twisted my ankle pretty good)

Two quick things regarding this -- I think it's finally time to start putting less info on the slides, and to learn to think while I'm up front. It's easy to load the slides with so much info you don't have to think. Seeing myself next to these other speakers finally allowed me to see that. The part that concerns me is how forgetful I am even when not standing in front of an audience. Without having time to do research and think things through, I often can't think of what it is I want to say on the spot. So the trick is to come up with a way to be able to discuss everything I want to, without actually reading so much off the slides.

Second, I think I want a wireless presentation clicker. I really like the feel of the one I have now, but the cord just keeps getting in the way. Having so much info on the slides was bad enough, not being able to walk around and engage the audience really helped to me recognize where I needed to improve.

This pointer from ThinkGeek looks like it might be a nice one. I've been put off to a lot of these pointers due to their size. This one from ThinkGeek is the size of a PCMCIA card, which is convenient. And it has a laser pointer -- even better :-)

We've been asked by many to do this conference again in the future. We're going to get together again soon to discuss it. My exact thoughts on that warrant another post (as I recognized when I began to type an email on this subject to Dr. Chase. Notably, I still haven't finished that email, but I am highly intersted in doing this again, I had a great time :-) There's a few things I'd like to overcome if we're to do it again next year.

That's all for now. I'll finish up with a link to my CPLUG Security Conference pictures.