My presentation at Oklahoma City Community College went off without a hitch. It’s funny, before I give a presentation like this I constantly worry that something technical will go wrong — the machine will blue screen, for example — but once I get up in front of a crowd I forget all about that because then I’m too busy being nervous about standing in front of a group of strangers. I hope I didn’t look it. The panic only lasted five or ten minutes this time. After that I loosened up a bit and got into the groove. Next time I speak in public I’m downing a margarita before I hit the stage (or hell, maybe I’ll just hit the stage with one in hand).
I would say the audience of 25-30 college kids was split 25/50/25: 25% of the kids were actively interested in what I had to say, 50% were polite but didn’t seem super engaged, and the remaining 25% appeared to be actively DISinterested. In fact while I was introducing myself I caught one kid popping in his iPod earphones, and halfway through my speech the kid directly in front of me went to sleep. I thought about dropping the spare C64 I brought with me on his desk (or head) to wake him up, but his face read, “I’m an eighteen-year-old kid still trying to balance attending community college and managing hangovers,” so I let it slide — I can empathize, I was there once too.
For forty-five minutes I sputtered my way through Commodore’s history. I touched on things like the VIC and SID chips, the advantages and disadvantages of different types of game media (carts/tapes/disks), various types of copy protection, and other minutiae. My PowerPoint presentation also contained three videos (each two minutes in length) demonstrating several Commodore video games and demos in action. I talked over the top of the videos, so there wasn’t a break in the action.
Many thanks to Drew Stone and Akram Taghavi-Burris for inviting me out. I had a good time and always appreciate the opportunity to practice plublic speaking. If anyone from Oklahoma City Community College who attended my presentation happens to run across this post, I’d love to hear from you and see how you thought things went. You won’t hurt my feelings; I can take it.
PS: I’m trying to come up with a viable way of posting the entire presentation online.
PPS: Akram and Drew have since invited me to possibly present something at OEGE 2009. Stay tuned!