Google Ops Presentation and Meeting Formats

Fri Jan 27 09:53:01 PST 2006

Hi,

I attended the Google presentation yesterday.  I don't normally attend
BayLISA meetings because, per an earlier e-mail thread, I live in Contra
Costa, but Google ... I have a special fondness for Google.

Can anyone tell me if the presentation materials from the Google Ops
presentation are available online somewhere?  I usually work on Fridays,
so I had to leave during the third hour of the presentation.

I couldn't help but notice that the little "Open Source at 20" warmup
presentation, which in my mind should have been a breezy 20 minutes,
took and hour.  And when I finally surrendered all hope around 10PM, it
seemed that the technical presentation had maybe made it about 40%
through, if that.

It seemed ... well, it seemed that every slide had a 90% overhead of
SysAdmins asking, sometimes insightful, and often pointless questions.
My favorites were the ones where ... okay, I'm not flaming.  But ... I
mean, a lot of the questions were "I have an extremely short attention
span so I'm going to ask you now a question which you would ordinarily
have answered on the next slide were I not interrupting you."

My question, is, do BayLISA presentations normally go like this?  Or was
there something in the Google water?  It would seem very sane to "save
your questions for the end" ... because, while I found the presentation
engaging, I had this growing desire to jump up on the desk and yell at
everyone to just shut up for half an hour and let the guy present ...
but that would have been overly stereotypical SysAdmin behaviour, which
would have defeated the point.  And while I would have phrased my
suggestion that everyone shut up politely, I didn't want to be the
guy-who-never-shows-up-then-proposes-that-BayLISA-change-its-format-halfway-through-the-presentation.

Do you guys always drag presentations out for hours on end?  Would it
have been frowned on if I had raised my hand and asked if maybe the
presenter could present?  Can someone forward me the presenter's contact
info?  I'd love to actually see the presentation sometime. :)

Thanks,
-danny

-- 
http://dannyman.toldme.com/