Lucas is writing a talk
Hit and Miss #428
Somehow, it’s Sunday again. Always caught off by short weeks, particularly when travel’s involved. Time, travelling! (That, I should note, was a declaratory statement distinct from the concept of “time travelling”. Which, speaking of, some good links for local history nerds below.)
Lucas writing a talk is, as with many folks confronted with doing so, a particularly anguished Lucas. The subject matter’s dear to my heart (the parliamentary process!!), but, as ever, the question is how to best deliver it for the particular audience.
Doing this reminds me of perhaps the fundamental state of creative work: sometimes doing the work looks like not doing the work. It can be: working the words for an hour, but turning up little; then stepping away for a drink of water (without a screen at hand), and an idea suddenly striking, fully-formed, just waiting to be captured when back to the keyboard.
If you’re procrastinating working on a talk, some links:
- Giles Turnbull, Ella Fitzsimmons, Matthew Sheret, and Russell Davies have written and collected tips on presentations over the years.
- It’s easy to get distracted by your tooling, fiddling with pixel alignment in Keynote or finding the cheesiest transition in PowerPoint. As a long-time fan of iA Writer, I’ve enjoyed iA Presenter—it forces you to focus on the content of your presentation (both what’s on-screen and what you’ll say), while limiting your ability to tweak the formatting. (Which can be frustrating if you’re used to tweaking the design of your slides, but it’s a helpful constraint!)
- Part of my process is turning to the work of folks whose writing and talks I admire, like Frank Chimero. Today, doing so, I chanced on a brief essay of his that reflects on both woodworking and software—what a treat.
On to this week’s links:
- Nick Offerman is out with a new book, Little Woodchucks. While it seems a delightful book, the more immediate delight for me is that Offerman is making the rounds on radio and podcasts to promo it. See, for example, his conversation with Rachel Martin for Wild Card. Offerman’s conversations are always worth a listen—a gem of a human. (I often return to his conversation with Krista Tippett when needing a bit of practical spiritual guidance.)
- Some geographic misconceptions about east and west. My favourite is that the sun only rises in the east and sets in the west on average (except at the equator and the poles, where it’s more complicated).
- Simon Collison on sharing work in progress, versus sharing about process.
- If you’re looking for an old-style webpage heaped with photos of old furniture, check out the “sold page” of John Cornell Antiques. Over 1700 entries! (Crashed my browser trying to load it once, but it usually works out.)
- I promised local history nerdery! Every few years, I have reason to use city directories to answer some historical query—they were like phone books before the phone, giving people’s address and occupation, and that of businesses. Library and Archives Canada describes them well, and offers a number of digitized editions. The University of Waterloo Libraries Geospatial Centre has done some impressive work, transcribing and geocoding decades of city directories for the region, while the Kitchener Public Library make PDFs of the directories available online. The Ottawa Public Library has a great collection of directories in the Ottawa Room, and some PDFs are available online. If you live in an older part of town, take a look at who lived in the streets around you—or in your own home! Great fun.
- Thanks to Jack Cheng, I’ll be thinking about how the same activity can be either “Rest or Rot”.
All the best for the week ahead!
Lucas
P.S. I just figured another way to distract myself—scraping and visualizing some data that could be good for the talk!!