The experts in action:
Is There Life After Death by PowerPoint? (4min)
Very funny look at major PowerPoint mistakes. A quick one to warm you up.
TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity? (20 min)
There are a lot of fantastic talks at this website but this one is my favorite. His pace and use of humour is brilliant. This is as good as it gets.
Steve Jobs: Keynote Address 2006 (1h12 min)
No list of great presenters is complete without including Steve Jobs of Apple. This is a guy who is known to spend a LOT of time ensuring that everything is just right. He is the gold standard for minimalist use of slides. Just about any presentation he gives is amazing. I like this one for demonstrating excellent use of visuals... plus he demos great slide producing software.
Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Innovation (54 min)
Kawasaki, IT venture capitalist and presentation guru is famous for his role as Apple evangelist as well as the great 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.
Randy Pausche's Last Lecture (1h25min)
This is probably the most moving lecture you will ever have the privilege to see.
Harvard Business School Public Speaking Contest 2006
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Excellent use of humour. Will be particularly amusing to bankers...
And while we're on the subject...
An excellent resource for aspiring presenters: Presentation Zen
Labels: humour, powerpoint, presentations, speaking
I'm a bit fanatical about not wasting things. "This is perfectly good" is a phrase I have applied to 10 year old shoes with holes in them as well as an ancient MP3 player I can no longer sync to my PC. I cannot bear to throw anything away.
But I am happy to sell-away, give-away and recycle.
Of late I've been into
Freecycling. This a way to give away your used stuff by offering it to people on the local Freecycle mailing list. Likewise people on the list can make requests for items that they need.
Sometimes this works OK but sometimes people just take the piss. Loads of people asking for free Xboxes and iPods doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the thing.
Likewise, when I've offered items, it's obvious that there is an army of people sitting by their computers 24-7 waiting to call dibs on your item just so they can turn it around for resale. Half the time they don't even know what they're grabbing.
There have been a few alternative services that manage this a bit better than Freecycle (
GigoIt and
ChanceXchange) but they just don't have the presence or size to work in Singapore.
So I've invented my own work around. Now people interested in
My Items have to
Register their interest. The registration form collects entries in a
Zoho database and it's much easier to ID who I want to deal with. E-mails are just messy for this kind of thing and I simply delete those who reply by e-mail showing that they haven't even bothered to read the first line of my offer ("Do not reply to this e-mail!").
Next:
Buy Nothing New for One Year ... and ultimately
Freeganism!
Labels: freecycle, freegan, recycle
On Saturday evening we (the
SSC) performed Handel's Messiah. This is pretty standard fare for choirs but in this case we did it without scores ie no music... by heart. Oh and by the way if you are late tuning into my life, this isn't some rinky-dink little church choir we're talking about... This is the Symphonic Choir and people were paying to hear us either succeed or fail gloriously.
To make a long story short, we didn't have any spectacular errors. Oh there were problems for sure. But nothing that the average concert goer would have been unnerved by. Still, maybe it's my imagination but the audience response seemed muted... well certainly compared to most of our other concerts.
The fact is that even though the group had to work harder for this work than anything we have done (Messiah is a LOT of music to memorize), without the benefit of the score, the result was below par. You lack a certain confidence on entrances without the music and this weakens the impact. For fear of coming in at the wrong time, you often fail to come in at the right time.
Quite frankly I never want to do this again. I don't regret giving it a go but it seems to be a lot of effort for the result.
What this did show me was how hard my fellow choristers were willing to work to pull this off. Those guys surprised me. I didn't think they had it in them and they really showed heart. Kudos all.
Labels: choir, music, ssc
