Last week I found time to attend an internal 2-day course on presentations called the Executive Engagement Briefing Skills workshop. It was an excellent course and Brad H. was an excellent coach. Highly recommended. Besides the obvious presentation issues (gesture, posture, projecting energy, how to structure a presentation), we also focussed on understanding the customer issues and some of the parts I normally have problems with such as pausing.
On the Powerpoint side, I learned a new feature: the B key. This is a simple way to blank the powerpoint presentation and refocus the attention of the audience to yourself.
And remember: The Powerpoint content is the “play-by-play” guardrail; the actual presentation should be the “colour-commentary” that makes it worthwhile listening...
Michael Brundage's excellent XQuery reference book is finally available. Check it and the first review by Ken Henderson out at Amazon!
This book, together with the XQuery from the Experts book that I co-authored gives you the ultimate XQuery reading and reference material (besides the specifications themselve of course).
Also, on February 15th, the last call phase of the recent batch of the XQuery specs has finished. However there are still many comments comming in, so if you want to send one of your comments, feel free to still do so. I am also still working on reviewing the serialization spec and to go over my old F&O comments to see which ones are still relevant and need to be sent again.