Merlin's tips for presentations

A few weeks ago I featured a Google Tech Talk by Merlin Mann on this site. Now he has a post on his site that details the methods and tips he uses in putting together a presentation. I tried to follow the same guidelines in my opening talk at GTAC, and I think I'm going to refer future GTAC speakers to his post. I also have to echo Merlin's point that iStockphoto is a great site, and a fairly inexpensive way to get good quality stock photography and illustrations for your site.

Nice compliment at GTAC

We received several great compliments on GTAC last week, but there was one in particular that really stood out for me. During one of the breaks, Edward Miller approached me to tell me that he thought GTAC was great and that the team had done a good job in putting it together. He should know, Edward Miller is the guy who organized Quality Week, one of the best testing conferences out there, and one of the conferences that really inspired me to start GTAC. Last year, several people compared the London conference to Quality Week. I was really pleased at that comparison, and this year the man behind Quality Week paid us a compliment.

Seam detection based image resizing

One of the cooler things I've seen recently is this demonstration of seam based image resizing.

International connections

For the last few years I've been making a lot of international flights. Most of the long flights have been between London and San Francisco or London and New York. I've also made a trip between London and Hyderabad, India. I've found that there are some universal truths to getting a good airline experience. The most important of those is that you should fly direct. If you can't fly direct then you should do the short leg first. I fly direct to save time and hassle. Since I'm flying from London, that means that I can usually fly anywhere in the world on a direct flight (except for Hyderabad). Flying direct means that I can check my bag once, and know that once I'm on the plane all of the hard stuff is over. When you do have to connect there are usually two options with regard to when you take the short leg of your itinerary. Upgrade, has an article on strategies for making international connections, and I totally agree with what the author says. Basically it comes down to always making your short trip first. So if you are flying from the USA to Europe and you have to make a connection, do it through an airport in the USA. That way you can sleep on the second flight and when you wake up you are done. Also, as the article points out, when you are flying into the USA you have to go through customs and immigration at the point of entry to the USA, not your final destination. So, if you can swing it, you should set up your return flight so that you do a short flight in Europe and then a direct flight back to the USA. There are some exceptions. For example when I fly to India, I prefer to always do my short flight in Europe. So I fly from London to Frankfurt, and then fly direct from Frankfurt to Hyderabad. The reason for this is that I find navigating and killing time in the Mumbai airport to be a little painful (there aren't many restaurants, and there isn't much to do).

GTAC 2007 play list

We've had the videos from GTAC posted for about a week now, and have them wrapped up in an easy to use play List on YouTube.

GTAC 2008

I mentioned this in my closing remarks at the conference. GTAC 2008 will be in Hyderabad, India. I've included a map with all the GTAC locations below:
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My GTAC Talk

One of the benefits of running a conference like GTAC, is that I get to talk about anything I like :-) This year, I took the opportunity to explain some of the thinking that goes into the philosophy of GTAC. Now that the conference is set to run annually, I wanted to take some time to explain what we're thinking, and why we have set it up the way we have set it up. You can view my talk below: Also, you can view all of the other GTAC talks on our play list on YouTube.

Changing location in a digital world

I'm in New York this week getting ready for GTAC, and one of the first things I did after getting checked into my hotel was to change the location for all of my location aware services. Here is the list of things I've had to change so far:

• Timezone on my laptop
• Timezone in Google Calendar
• Timezone in Grand Central
• Timezone and phone number in Twitter
• Timezone on my USA mobile phone (actually had to enable auto timezone sensing now that it's actually on a network it recognizes)

It seems that as we make a move towards a global presence service with sites like twitter we should also have some kind of global location service. So that when I travel I can set my location in one place and have it propogate to all of my devices and services.