So it was World Usability Day yesterday, and as promised, Hans and I gave a 90 minute lecture at DLSU Manila on "Web 2.0 and Usability." I went over our work at mobiuslive.net, talked about the stuff we were doing and the inordinate amount of crud we could still improve, and answered a surprising amount of technology questions. (It was fun to be able to talk about Ruby and Rails without having to intro with "what is a scripting language?")
I’m gonna try to avoid the whole "UP students do this, and DLSU students do that" comparison (the last lecture I gave was to a UP student org), but I will definitely say that UP students laugh a whole lot more. Either that, or I was just being thrown by the fact that I was sharing the stage with Hans about a third of the time, and was thus not making as many jokes as I normally do.
Yesterday was the first time I lectured without starting out rough during the first 30-60 seconds. Like the proverbial Windows desktop, my startup process is normally a bit rocky (I forget basic things, or I enunciate badly), but yesterday I was more like a Linux server, which felt really, really great. That isn’t to say that I didn’t have a few rough spots of course, but I think I’m definitely getting better at it (after a grand total of 3 attempts this year).