So I got asked by a biz dev guy to help out and give a presentation at my company's sesquiannual product trade show/ conference. I'm giving a presentation on performance tuning and monitoring of the architecture my company uses to build and run application stacks.

So, I'm you're typical geek guy who is pretty bad at PowerPoint. I follow all the normal rules (you know, 3-4 points per slide, don't put sentences, don't read off the slide, etc etc), but my ppts just aren't as flashy as some of the really cool ones I've seen. From a knowledge standpoint they're ok and I've got the whole public speaking thing down, but I hope the audience isn't expecting cool graphics and lots of clip art.

But this leads me to some really terrible presentations I've seen by brilliant developers and architects. Sort of the ones where you can tell how bad it is because even the people without blackberries start having thumb wars to pass the time. I'm hoping it won't be that bad.

Someone at my company recently resigned. He's a pretty funny guy who will be missed, but he was telling stories of previous programmers from time long passed. This guy was pretty outspoken and once exclaimed to his manager "Who makes these decisions? Are you a manager or a damager?" (the manager had just told the Board of Directors that we were using an arbitrary technology). So I love the word "damager" and hope I never encounter one (so far I've been blessed with skillful and caring managers).

For all the crazy managers I've worked for many years ago, I'm at a bit of a loss for stories right now. All I can think of is the CEO I worked with who didn't want me to hire someone "Because he's from Ohio." and another guy because his palm had perspiration.