Yesterday’s WEBDC presentation went …

Yesterday’s WEBDC presentation went very well. I was nervous at first, but loosened right up as soon as the audience
started responding to what I was saying. Lots of excellent questions. I was quite surprised at the amount of interaction my
particular audience had with me (as the speaker) since most of the presentations at conferences like WEBDC are really dry
and technical.

For those who care, my slides and supporting documents are up on the web. [Please note,
that a couple of links are
broken. I’ll be updating these slides later this weekend. Also please note that I realize these slides need more bullet
points and less paragraphs of text. When you only have a couple of days to put together a presentation like this, you
simply don’t have time for revisions. Sigh…]

When I asked some audience members I knew to compare my presentation to others they had seen earlier in the week, they
said that mine was good because it “had personality.” Cool, whatever that means.

I ran into Bryan Boyer at the train station and we talked about Deepleap and various other things. I am continually impressed by the team Lane has put together. These guys are really going somewhere…

I also finally met Michael Sippey (of Stating the
Obvious
) in person. We’ve exchanged a number of emails over the years, but I’m glad to say that he’s as nice a guy in real
life as he is online.

GoodExperience.com: Invest in the Customer Experience, Not
a New Name
. Mark, it’s no use — you’re trying to deal with marketing people in this instance. It’s kind of
like trying to win an argument with a tree. As much as I admire marketing and advertising people and some of the work
they do, I’m continually dismayed at the level of ignorance and stupidity evident in many companies today, especially in
the marketing departments. It was probably the marketing department who suggested the name change. It was probably the
Powerpoint slideshow that sold it to the CEO and upper management, and it’s the customers who end up suffering. If
customers had a choice, they’d go elsewhere. Unfortunately, we’re all locked into the bad position of being on the shit
end of the stick because the telecommunications industry effectively has a legal monopoly on the market. I mean, how
freaking long do I have to wait for my DSL? I ordered it in April. It’s now August. The DSL line was finally installed last
week (after four different technician visits) but is not
active because of some kind of mis-configuration error on the DSL ISP’s end, and the DSL ISP is swamped with work because Bell
Atlantic (ahem, Verizon) workers have been on strike for a week because they refuse to do any work that actually requires them
to be polite to the customer, climb a freaking pole, or even just do their freaking jobs. I can’t even tell you how many Bell
Atlantic (excuse me, Verzion) vans I walk past EVERY day that always have at least one or two technicians just sitting in
them, listening to the radio, or just generally slacking off. These people should be installing my DSL, not taking a 6-hour
lunch break! Sigh…Don’t mind me, I’m just rambling (ranting)…

This totally kicks ass. Go Pink, go Pink, go Pink, go.

MisterHouse is a Perl-based Home Automation program.

Do you still use your Newton? If you do, you’ll be interested in these aliminum cases for them.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at August 12, 2000 05:27 PM

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *