On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:29:10 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>> With a general audience, no feedback is generally considered a good
>> thing, because *most* people will tend to say something only if they're
>> unhappy.
> 
> No news is good news? ;-)

Yeah, generally speaking.  :-)  Maybe nobody was wowed to the point of 
telling you, but nobody complained either, and that's a good thing.

> I still remember Zimin Wo. (Yes, that was is actual name.) Nobody ever
> listened to his lectures. People were openly using it as an excuse to
> catch up on sleep after that wild all-night student partying that normal
> students apparently get up to.

LOL, I had a chem professor like that.  He used to lecture the chalkboard 
for 2 hours at a time while doing chemical balancing equations.

I also remember going to a presentation by an IBM software engineer on 
NDS (Novell's first generation directory service) on IBM mainframes.  He 
lectured the podium in a very soft voice.  I was quite upset, actually, 
because I was interested in the topic, but even in the 3rd row, I 
couldn't hear him.

> Ways to wake up a sleeping audience:
> 
> Lecturer: "Uh, ok, uh, so den we have ah fisicol layer, da data link
> layer, an den presentashon layer..."
> 
> Guy at the back: "PRINCESS LAYER!"
> 
> Mmm, OK, I guess you had to be there... Trust me, it was damned funny!
> ;-)

I could see that....Back when I used to go to church, we had a pastor who 
was known to have thrown an American football into the congregation at a 
football player who used to fall asleep during the sermon.

While probably not something I'd do - physical interaction does tend to 
keep people awake.  When teaching, I occasionally liked to have spiffs to 
throw out to the class in order to wake them up.  I did that at my 
instructor summit last year as well as part of the "warm up" in the 
morning (and again after lunch and each break).  Of course, that only 
works with *soft* spiffs - I wouldn't want to give away, say, an external 
hard drive by throwing it into a crowd. :)

Jim

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