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So, I avoided the #freakout! The conference talk went well. The one thing that didn’t go well was trying to use Periscope. It turns out that attempting to type, show things via a phone, and deal with the inherent delay of viewing “live” in Periscope was more than I could take on at a time. The moderator came up and showed me that there was a light with some sort of button I could push which would then project whatever was under it. Should I end up getting to talk at OSCON again, I’ll investigate that a bit further. As it was, I ended up just providing color commentary to the audience (“if you could see this up close, it’s blinking!”), rather than attempting to deal with one more thing on the fly.

So, the results… beyond me feeling like it went well, I have a few more data points to suggest, hey, this came off very nicely! First, the qualitative: right after my session, I had to jet to the airport to catch my flight. Not one but two different folks in the same security line mentioned that they had just seen my talk and really enjoyed it. Score! Basking in feelings of minor celebrity there in the security checkpoint line. Second, the quantitative: of likely 60 (!!) folks in the room who came to my talk, 6 have taken the time to evaluate my session and give it a rating. Of a potential 5 point rating, I have 6 folks who’ve given me an average of 4.67 as a rating… Just for the record, I’m not one of the 6… I haven’t, unfortunately, taken the time out to rate anyone else’s schedule, so I’m particularly grateful for those who’ve taken the time to give me a good rating.

I’ll be given a reprise of the talk at a local Golang group on June 23rd… Trying to figure out what to add between now and then – doesn’t feel right to give a duplicate talk, exactly. But do want to take advantage of the work already done and expose it to a local audience….

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Sitting in the last talk of the day for me before I give my own talk. Mentally running down the ‘yes, this is going to work out well’ game talk. Cataloguing for me to help me debrief later, as well as give me a checklist to consider for further talks…

Preparation:
– Came with equipment that works (advantage over last time, which went OK, though for a rougher week than desired), as well as repair kit and tools.
– Came with the beginnings of a presentation
– When I realized my plans to work on my presentation slides over the weekend got trumped by family schtuff, reprioritized the sessions I wanted to attend, and carved out a slot early in the week
– Checked out the room the day before the presentation and tried out my laptop – no issues. Also had the opportunity to sit in on a session in the same room: good talk, great inspiration for my own.
– Stream of consciousness wrote my talk itself and worked on it throughout several days
– Carved out time for run throughs two nights before: wasn’t happy with the result, so carved out more time the following evening. Prepped notes, rehearsed, refined, rehearsed some more to make sure I fit the time with the stuff that matters.
– Got some sleep. Not much, but some, the night before the presentation.
– Highlighted some key facts in my speaker notes, so I can look quickly and refer.
– Notes include setup requirements, and already have most of those tabs and windows up.
– Scheduled notifications to go off during the event time: won’t have to think about it.

Advantages:
– My talk is right after lunch, which both means folks will be able to get there, and I can get in early to do a last equipment check and rundown. Short lunch!
– Brought juggling balls to let me focus on something other than the talk itself once I get it set up.

Risks:
– my power supply seemed to stop working overnight: will need to plug in my Raspberry off of a cellphone charger either USB-linked to the site computer (??: suspect that’ll cause concerns…) or to an outlet that I’m not sure will be there.
– the Furby itself is acting flaky. While I’ll be able to talk to it, would really like to see the full demo come together.

Goals:
– Engage with the audience! That’ll help keep me focused and in the flow.
– Stay relaxed.

I’m prepped, I’m ready, and there’ll be something there that hits someone’s interests. I’ve defined my scope, and worked to focus my flow through. The work done to prep this was fun in itself, helped me learn some things, and gave me a chance to come out again to OSCON. Lots of wins from the build-up to this week. Time to bring it home.

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I’m at OSCON 2016 in Austin. As opposed (ahem) to the last time I did this, I have a slide deck ahead of the day of, as well as working hardware. Realized earlier today, though, that working hardware is only practically useful if the audience can see it… Since the video is trained on the stage, rather than on me, unless I do something, it doesn’t practically matter whether my schtuff works. Problem, particularly given the amount of time I’ve spent making sure schtuff works…

To resolve it, I’m experimenting with live streaming. From my phone, I can send out a Periscope stream, which I can then pull up from my browser to make it visible on the screen to those in the audience. Depending upon lighting, maybe this’ll be valuable and maybe it won’t, but at least it’ll be cool!

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Woke up today with a pounding sinus headache. That’ll teach me to think I can walk around outside in the springtime without any allergy meds. After a few hours of sleep, the pain was at least muted enough to function in a quiet environment. So, down to the basement I went to work with Furby.

Luckily for me (???!), Furby was quiet today. Too quiet. As in, couldn’t get it to come on at all quiet. Took a step back and futzed with LEDs again, now tied through the ribbon cable. Uh, finally got the LEDs to come through. But then they stayed on – wouldn’t power on/off at my signal. And then they went out.

That hardware thing: no real configuration management. I guess I could take a picture of my breadboard at a quasi working state, but even then, I’d need to zoom in fairly far to see where the pins practically connected. Several errors today just based on not being able to see where the pins aligned on the breakout board, or whether the pins were in the same row…

So, I retreated and wired in my Furby to a straight 5V + GND alignment. The power wire kept coming undone, so the Furby stayed off. When I finally got her on, none of my sound signals were getting picked up. I’d tried replacing components, completely redoing wiring, … nothing was coming together. At around midnight, I was adding up the problems (non-working power on/off, non-working Furby!), comparing it to the time spent today, and started down the path of ‘oh my gosh, what on earth am I going to say at the front of the room next week??!?! Should I find a way to bail out now?!’

I went to bed. Or tried to for a moment, anyway. And then decided to be stubborn and try to see whether a new set of speakers would send out sound differently – if I could get the Furby to react at all, I’d find another power on/off solution, and maybe I just needed a better set of speakers. Disconnected the ones from the family computer, tried to plug them in down here in my lair. No luck. The set upstairs expected to be powered from a bass which sits underneath the computer. The speakers themselves were big enough they’d be a pain to lug on the plane. No way was I lugging the bass, too…

Defeated. And then an idea.. what if I just needed to make the sound louder from my own speakers? There was no volume control on them, but maybe there was a way to control it programatically. Long story short: there is. And with a louder volume, Furby starts behaving. And the conference session was saved.

I still want to figure out a better power solution. But that’ll mean driving blinking things from GPIOs again, and that wasn’t working so well today. And then adding some sort of NPN (?) solution in the middle to let the GPIO interact with a 5V source, instead of the 3.3 it’s happy with. BUT, as of 3:30, I have a Furby responding, with an LCD display showing info. I _could_ give the talk just based on that… We’ll see!