Notes in 90?
Category Webinar
So last week, for Lotus Education Online, I gave a webinar on XPages called " XPages: Notes Development Meets Web 2.0"
Now I've done some public speaking before in my day. I've given literally hundreds of training classes for my company in both small and large groups but this is the first time I've ever done remote speaking. The technology being used is gotomeeting.com. Needless to say before the session I wanted to get some practice time in.
A couple of days before, Notes genius Rob Kirkland, and I hooked up for a run through of the presentation. And we found the first "snag". While connected to gotomeeting.com, everything seemed great but Rob sounded to me like Alvin from "Alvin and the chipmunks". What's up with that? Well it seems like there's some kind of problem with USB headsets, Apple Macs, and gotomeeting.com. I'm not sure who's problem it is yet, but if the audio input and output was set to be the USB headset, then I heard chipmunk. If I changed one of them then no chipmunk. I ended up having to use the phone for our practice session. Other then that, went fine.
So to solve the problem I bought an analog headset. I plugged one end into the headset port on my macbook and the other into the "microphone" port. Tested it and nothing. Apparently, it's NOT a microphone port, it's a "Line In" port. Which I think means that the headset needs to go through some like of pre-amp type device. Thanks Apple. That was easy... not! Ok, back to the phone.
3 minutes before the first presentation I put on the first slide in keynote and my laptop screen "dims" a little bit. That's odd. I go to move the slide just to check and nothing happens. I try to escape out and nothing happens - the screen is still dim but nothing is moving. About 10 seconds later the brightness comes back but Keynote CLOSED! Not only that my Virtual Machine closed!! All my applications ended. What the heck? That's never happened before!!! I've had some Mac problems over the years, but I've never seen all my programs just close on their own before!! Check my heart rate!
Well a quick reboot and I'm back in just fine and we start just a hair late. The second showing had no technical problems.
Other then that the presentations went really well and I had fun. The nice thing about the webinar format is there's no real time limit I have to hit. So I don't have to condense 90 minutes into 60 minutes. I can take the 90 minutes. What feed back I saw so far was very positive. I do need to talk a little slower and apparently I used some idioms that the European audience didn't quite understand. I'll need to work on both those things.
Thanks to everyone involved at Rockteam / Lotus Education Online for helping me with this. And thanks to the partners and customers who showed up to let me help them learn more about XPages!
So last week, for Lotus Education Online, I gave a webinar on XPages called " XPages: Notes Development Meets Web 2.0"
Now I've done some public speaking before in my day. I've given literally hundreds of training classes for my company in both small and large groups but this is the first time I've ever done remote speaking. The technology being used is gotomeeting.com. Needless to say before the session I wanted to get some practice time in.
A couple of days before, Notes genius Rob Kirkland, and I hooked up for a run through of the presentation. And we found the first "snag". While connected to gotomeeting.com, everything seemed great but Rob sounded to me like Alvin from "Alvin and the chipmunks". What's up with that? Well it seems like there's some kind of problem with USB headsets, Apple Macs, and gotomeeting.com. I'm not sure who's problem it is yet, but if the audio input and output was set to be the USB headset, then I heard chipmunk. If I changed one of them then no chipmunk. I ended up having to use the phone for our practice session. Other then that, went fine.
So to solve the problem I bought an analog headset. I plugged one end into the headset port on my macbook and the other into the "microphone" port. Tested it and nothing. Apparently, it's NOT a microphone port, it's a "Line In" port. Which I think means that the headset needs to go through some like of pre-amp type device. Thanks Apple. That was easy... not! Ok, back to the phone.
3 minutes before the first presentation I put on the first slide in keynote and my laptop screen "dims" a little bit. That's odd. I go to move the slide just to check and nothing happens. I try to escape out and nothing happens - the screen is still dim but nothing is moving. About 10 seconds later the brightness comes back but Keynote CLOSED! Not only that my Virtual Machine closed!! All my applications ended. What the heck? That's never happened before!!! I've had some Mac problems over the years, but I've never seen all my programs just close on their own before!! Check my heart rate!
Well a quick reboot and I'm back in just fine and we start just a hair late. The second showing had no technical problems.
Other then that the presentations went really well and I had fun. The nice thing about the webinar format is there's no real time limit I have to hit. So I don't have to condense 90 minutes into 60 minutes. I can take the 90 minutes. What feed back I saw so far was very positive. I do need to talk a little slower and apparently I used some idioms that the European audience didn't quite understand. I'll need to work on both those things.
Thanks to everyone involved at Rockteam / Lotus Education Online for helping me with this. And thanks to the partners and customers who showed up to let me help them learn more about XPages!
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