I respectfully disagree. I work to make my talks entertaining — intellectually and on-topic entertaining — and people give me very encouraging unsolicited feedb

I respectfully disagree. I work to make my talks entertaining — intellectually and on-topic entertaining — and people give me very encouraging unsolicited feedback. I hate most talks. They're dry affairs that are far better experienced as transcripts to skim for nuggets of info. I very rarely go to conventions for this reason. Speaking is a skill: you're inspiring and transferring rough mental representations. People should watch Lisp/AI prof Patrick Henry Winston's lecture on how to speak: (http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9F536001A3C605FC http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9F536001A3C605FC) I agree with 100% of the article, or close to it. If my spidey-sense tells me people are glazing over a bit, and my words/actions legitimately could be perceived as boring, I rush or skip through that part. I don't plug my company, and in fact it's nice to try shocking people a bit by offhandedly criticizing the company. In addition, I won't step through a file of code. If I must show them code in its context, I'll tell them that they don't have to understand it, and I'll just point out some interesting attribute. I dislike when people step through code; most of it's generally obvious and in a form for explaining to a tediously literal-minded computer.