I am scheduled to speak at the IEEE Sustainable Technologies Conference at the Lloyd Center Doubletree on Thursday morning August 1, next week. This morning, the conference chair sent out an email saying that all presentations must be Powerpoint, the first time this imperative demand has been made of me. I use my own open source tool, wydiwys, because I can navigate faster and do Q&A faster with the hierachical presentation menus built into my tool.
I have presented Server Sky at thirty conferences over three years; although I've often done so among a sea of Microsoft- only presenters, I've always got my machine swapped in and running in a few seconds, sometimes with an assistant so I could talk through those few seconds. I could use an assistant on Thursday morning. I've even presented this way at the Microsoft Conference Center back in the day when Linux did not autofind the projector and required rebooting. It was fun showing the Ubuntu splash page, then a presentation with features Powerpoint can't duplicate. The microsofties present looked a little green. The conference chair may prove intransigent, perhaps physically restraining me from moving a VGA connector, or cancelling my talk. I hope not. But, if this happens, I imagine we could have great fun if I instead did the presentation across the street in Holladay Park, with the open source and other radical communities swelling my audience. Perhaps inviting the papers and the TV media, getting some attention for open source and the M$ monopoly. That is way too much work for me to set up, but if there are people looking for a CAUSE, and willing to organize permits and handle press relations and print flyers and stuff, I'm willing to make the presentation that way. I have a kilowatt portable generator and a too-small-to-be-useful-outside projector. To make this go we will need to borrow a Really Powerful Projector to work in tree-filtered daylight. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug