Presentation Zen : Part 0

If you aim to be at an important position in some company, you will have to present/give a talk at some point of time or evaluate an idea or project.So to have good presentation skills in your armor is a must .

There are many experts in this field also and I happened to read a lot of stuff off the internet when I had to present my project. I'm no expert in this but have presented my project at various national level competitions and can tell a good presentation from a bad one. So here's some stuff that I have gathered on my way...

Well to start off I must say there are no rules for doing it well like what experts suggest, (in fact it would be great if you break the rules and stand out) but there are some definite do's and dont's.

When it comes to your presentation 3 things are important (and i'll discuss these things in seperate posts) :
a)The Content
b)Presentation slides
c)You!

Whenever there's a talk about presentation skills one name that often comes up is that of Steve Jobs. Even venture capalists in the Silicon Valley believe he's the best presenter around. (VCs from the Silicon Valley must be sitting through atleast 5 presentations everyday hence they know what they're talking about.)

So I would first suggest you watch this video of Steve Jobs at the first iPod introduction.





After watching this video I immediately realised a few key points :
Steve is vey well prepared with his talk.
He keeps it simple.
He leaves nothing open to interpretation (thank god he's not a songwriter) i.e. he presents the figures/stats very clearly.

Keep watching the video for more points, I'll continue this post tomorrow as I have a lot more to say and I'll also be providing some good links.

A quick note

I recently installed Google Analytics on this blog and it tells me that I have got 11 unique visitors - myself = 10 unique visitors!
A quick note on google analytics : I found it quite brilliant, it tells you everything about your site visitors right from their network service to their browsers, their OSes to their Screen Color Depths! And it's free! So if you have a page on the cloud somewhere I definitely recommend this tool.

The day we Entréed the kitchen!

Today me and a couple of friends tried our hand in the kitchen and after a lot of experimenting we actually pulled it off!
My greatest achievements in the kitchen prior to this have been : cooking maggi noodles and preparing tea and coffee.But the task at hand today was herculean...we wanted to make something with Chicken, almost a proper Entrée. We did have plenty of resources at hand : Oregano, Mayonnaise and Basil Pesto Sauce (now Google that!)
Ok, so the stage was set. We bought the chicken and lettuce and we already had Macaroni and other stuff just mentioned.
What follows is our recipe of what I call, (drumroll)

Herbed Chicken and Macaroni Casserole:
Boil the Macaroni as usual.
When boiling chicken add salt, oregano and black pepper to the water.
Strain both the Chicken and Macaroni.
Now prepare the usual white sauce(water+milk+flour+onions+garlic).
Mix the macaroni with the white sauce.
Take the boiled chicken pieces in a casserole. Add mayonnaise,Basil Pesto Sauce,Cheese,lettuce and some chopped mint leaves and mix well.
Pour the white sauce and macaroni over the chicken.
Keep in refrigerator for few minutes.
Take it out, sprinkle some other herbs if you want and dig in!
(To enjoy a little more, also keep smoked pork sausages on the side like we did ;). The hot sausages and cold casserole combination worked perfectly!)
This is a proud moment for all 3 of us because it was our first real attempt at cooking and nothing was measured, nothing was scripted, it was all on instinct! With a little more finesse I'm sure we can prepare restaurant standard Entrées.

Are you following the Phoenix?

The Nasa's Phoenix Spacecraft's Mars mission is blogged live via Twitter. Check it out because they keep sending links to newly captured images and give out a lot of information and answer follower's queries.
So go ahead and follow http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix

PS: It's interesting how the Web 2.0 has evolved. I had at first thought Friendfeed/Twitter wasn't really a brilliant idea...but guess I'm wrong!

The Don

Here's some funny facts(well they aren't facts really) I found about Donald E. Knuth. For those of you who don't know him check out his Wikipedia Article and Stanford Homepage. In short, he is Professor Emeritus and author of The Art of Computer Programming ,3 of it's volumes have been published (and can be found on the internet if you know how to dig deep, but then again don't bother because you won't understand it anyways) and he's working on the 4th one.So anyways, these are the facts that his followers/fans have written about him:

-Donald E. Knuth does not sleep. He codes.
-For Donald E. Knuth P=NP
-The dining philosophers starve until Donald E. Knuth has been served.
-Donald E. Knuth could tell you if the program is going to halt, without looking.
-When Donald E. Knuth was in his mother's womb, he wrote a program that
would count to infinity in constant time.
-Donald E. Knuth writes his books in constant time. The constant is very big.
-The travelling salesman visits Donald E. Knuth first.
-Donald E. Knuth has no need for compilers. He knows his code will run as intended.
-Donald Knuth took the blue pill.
-ParagraphsstretchtheirspacingwhenDonaldEKnuthapproaches.

[Paragraphs stretch their spacing when Donald E Knuth approaches.]

-Donald E. Knuth's turing machines have iPods, not tapes
-When power fails VCR's clocks flash 0000. When Donald E. Knuth enters a room VCR's clocks flash 1337.
-Donald E. Knuth's mother hasn't had to write any 2.56$ cheques

I'll have to explain the last one...Knuth sends out 2.56$ cheques to anyone who finds an error in his book.

Here's a quick one...

A joke about a conversation between two geeks
— "When you look at a girl, what do you notice first?"
— "Her hair, then her eyes, then her nose, then her lips — I have dial-up."

I was going to write a full post on presentation skills today but couldn't find the time coz I'm reading Surely You're Joking...right now, so expect it in 1-2 days.

My favorite feeds

For the first post on the blog I'll simply list the favorite feeds I have on my Flock (for those who don't know yet, Flock is a web browser that specializes in providing social networking and other Web 2.0 features built into its interface. The browser is built on Mozilla’s Firefox codebase.) Now I might have ctrl-c ctrl-v'ed this from Wikipedia but the reason I like Flock is because it gives me a personalized homepage when I open it showing my fav feeds/links, saved articles and a google bar, something I've wanted in a browser since long.
Anyways so here's the stuff I've subscribed to:

Scobleizer :
The techno-evangelist has embraced Web 2.0 like no one else. He's on facebook,friendfeed,twitter,google reader and the list goes on...
Lifehacker :
Great site for Windows/Linux/Mac and non-technology hacks...
Blog of Jonathan Schwartz :
The first CEO to have a blog...
Wired How-tos :
How-To page of Wired...another site with great hacks

The list is not over and will continue to grow...the problem is it's 2.35 am and I gotta go and do what I do best...sleep