The experience

As for the presentation itself, I think it went reasonably well. There were some technical difficulties, which have are on tape for all of eternity. I had about 30 minutes allotted, so it was basically just me talking at the audience and hoping it stuck. Speaking of which, it was a smaller group than normal, because PyCon Canada was at the same time. I think there was a decent mix of experience levels - some very experienced, and at least two early year undergrads.

I would have liked to interact with them a bit more, take more questions about what was or wasn’t making sense - but that’s what tutorials are for. I didn’t spend a lot of time going over the code, but much like the professors who page through slides faster than you can take notes, I knew they could look up the slides later. And I have links to all the stuff that I read to learn about the topic, so there’s that too. I included a couple of plugs for Matt’s book, for obvious reasons. If anything, the best thing I could do is convince them to read that.

Hmm, what else. One person asked me about how I did the presentation in Emacs - I’ll talk more about that in another post. A professor in the computer science department at UofA congratulated me on doing it in the first place, and we chatted about his experience doing live coding. I saw him at a PhD thesis presentation later in the week - hilariously enough, he has either the same laptop as I do (the tablet version, too) or the model from the year prior. I’ll probably write up some notes about that presentation, but, that’s a tale for another time.

I thought the meeting started at 6pm, but it was actually 6:30. On the one hand, that gave me enough time to eat at the pub next door. On the other hand, that gave me just enough time to eat at the pub next door. I walked in, asked if they could prepare anything in 15 minutes, the waitress said yes, and it turned out she was right. During a brief moment of sanity, I started by eating the fries first, but it didn’t last - I tried to eat the burger as fast as possible, and in the process, thoroughly burned most of my mouth. I didn’t feel it until afterwards, but, when I did - ow :(

I got really stuffed up for the next few days, which was really annoying. I figure it was some sort of ineffective response to my burned mouth, but who knows. It kept me from talking to the CS professor when I saw him again, because I didn’t want to make anyone sick. I’m not even sure I was sick, except for one day where I felt terrible. Anyway, I’m sure you don’t care about my suffering. I just wanted to write it down while I still remember.