Conferencalicious

Most of the details of my life are in another blog, so I'm not visiting this one much. I'd originally thought this one might be a sort of quick blurt of the day type blog, but that's all elsewhere, so this one is for random thought and stuff that requires more detailed blather.

My conference poster went well. It's the first one I've ever done - I never went far enough as a student to get to make a poster for a conference, so it was all a bit weird, and since I'm not a student I didn't have a supervisor to tell me how to do it properly, but it turned out OK. And I've got new software for diagrams, and discovered I already had good page layout software, so all was good. Actually, seriously, Pages is really good page layout software for the uninitiated. I was surprised. I was very happy with how well the poster turned out.

The bad bit was that I had to give a presentation to go with it. I didn't expect that when I signed up for the deal, and am generally terrified of public speaking. Nearly had a meltdown when I discovered I was presenting in the big auditorium that would happily seat a few hundred. I was enormously relieved when only thirty or so people actually turned up. And the presentation went OK, though I think I confused the audience a little (my presentation was a little too techy for the conference). My colleague presented the other poster I worked on (I did most of the poster-making on both of them), and his went down well, and because the subject matter was appropriate for the conference (educational conference, and his was on the exam item bank we're working on) we were asked lots of questions afterwards and there was a lot of interest in what we're making.

On another note, this was posted on metafilter, and is nice and creepy: