Ken VanDine and I flew up to the Detroit area yesterday to give a talk last night at the Michigan!/usr/group. As you can probably tell from the UUCP-inspired name of the group, it has been around for a while – at 21 years old, it’s old enough to drink!

They have a good venue for technical talks – in particular, working internet access is available (wired and wireless), so we were able to do live demos of the MediaWiki Appliance Experience and rBuilder Online.

This was my first experience using the S5 web-based slideware for a presentation. Upside: it’s easy to post the slides on a website; you can even let internet-connected attendees view the slides on their own system, so they can review as you go along. Downside: it’s slow. With the on-demand scheduler disabled and the CPU running at full speed for best performance, it still took about a second to display the next slide. Maybe the audience appreciated the fact that I occasionally stopped talking for a second, but it felt awkward to me.

I have added a link to the slides on the Conary:Presentations page.