Some Things I Learned While Traveling

I’ve learned a few funny things this last week:

1. All that Spanish that I took in high school and college was a complete waste of time. I should have taken wood shop, metal shop, home economics, anything other than Spanish! At least I would have gotten a cheese board out of it.

2. When a conference is over, I need to get the hell out of town! There are few things more depressing that lingering for a few days in the conference venue after a conference is over. All the cool kids are gone, and the playground is empty.

3. Apparently, you really can’t prepare enough for a talk. I kept track of the number of times that I practiced the presentation that I gave and I had done it more than 10 times. For a four-hour tutorial that seems like a lot of practice – nearly 40 hours of explicit practice over many weeks (and yes, I have a day job…and a family). The presentation was pretty good (In my own humble opinion, OK?), but I still feel like I had major flaws in the delivery.