I think that maybe it would be a good thing for me to give presentations more often. If my brain ran some flavor of unix, giving presentations would be my equivalent of sync;sync;sync. The process of planning forces me into a different mode, and it always seems to be one where all my tangential subconscious wonderings finally reveal themselves to me. Freeform slide topics come together, and over a matter of days I've suddenly synchronized myself again with a pretty broad topic.

I sometimes think that the first half of my career was mostly about observing the behavior of others. I knew I was green and inexperienced, so I usually gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. Nothing about me has changed over the last three years except that I finally decided that the dumb things people do are not, in fact, clever ploys masking their true intentions and intellect. They are, in fact, just actual dumb things.

As soon as I made that shift, I started enjoying giving presentations. It bothered me that management seemed so entirely unconcerned and unaware that their presentations were boring and demoralizing. So I just did it the way I usually learn to do things best: find something awesome and imitate it.

Damian Conway was one of the bigger inspirations there. I had the good fortune of stumbling into just a couple of his presentations at OSCON in 2006, and they were completely awesome. Simple slides, rapid-fire, clever and smart. I'd seen that stuff before, and have seen it since, but the best part was that he was effectively the straight man in an odd sort of comic duet with the projector screen itself.

One thing's for sure... slides are a heck of a lot more fun as visual subtext than as a vehicle for graphs and bullet points.