July, 16, 2003 archives

lafd responds to some power thing going haywire in my neighborhood. if i had been on the ball, i would have gotten out and taken a picture when it was sputtering and reportedly showering sparks.

here are the slides from my talk about mysql and php at the uuasc meeting last week.

the slides aren't terribly interesting (like most slides). but i actually did use a plain-text version of the slides to present. i set my laptop's background to an image based on the swimming dolphin from the mysql.com front page, and then just used a full-screen translucent terminal running vim to display the text file, with a couple of macros mapped to skip to the next or previous slide based on some simple text markers.

it was decidedly low-tech, but i think it worked quite well. i may take a similar approach in future talks. the process of writing the talk was easier for me in comparison to the php presentation tool, although the end result is obviously more crude. but i like the idea of having all of the slides in one file, and using a simple text format for writing the slides. (something like textile might be a good starting point for a slightly more advanced solution.)