I had another business breakfast this morning, on an issue that promises to be processed to death. I had the privilege of listening to more people asking for more input and more alternate perspectives relative to a project that should have been on tracks and steaming a year ago.
Then I scrambled back to my hotel room* to polish off my presentation for this afternoon. I Photoshopped and typed and edited and edited and typed and Photoshopped, and in the end I had put together what I hoped would be a not-too-embarrassing presentation. I got to the conference room early — or, to be exact, Margaret dragged me to the conference room early — and I noticed that my TiBook had crashed when I put it to sleep at the hotel. It took much of the first speaker’s time for the TiBook to get through the file system check, and then it became clear that the crash had knocked a few nuts and bolts loose. I spent the second speaker’s time restoring the slides to the proper order, and adding a couple of goodies that I’d forgotten to incorporate in the presentation the first time.
The first speaker was a well-known biblical scholar/media critic, who devoted the first paper of this “Digital Hermeneutics” section to an exposé of the Veggie Tales videos. Now, I don’t know much about Veggie Tales, and I’m willing enough to believe they’re badly done and pernicious to biblical literacy. The paper didn’t have much to do with “Digital Hermeneutics,” though, and amounted mostly to a review rather than, say, an academic paper.
The second speaker was also pretty well-established, but his presentation trod the thin line between “report on activities” and “commercial for his biblical-video business.” He helped spark my imagination on these issues a long time ago, and his presentation made at least some gestures toward “digital hermeneutics,” but it was still a let-down.
The upside of all this is that mine was the only presentation that actually addressed the topic of the session, and neither of the other papers was anywhere nearly as sophisticated as mine (not that they were trying — both presenters are highly-sophisticated scholars, they just weren’t doing that today). So the paper itself went spectacularly, much better than I’d been expecting. The respondent, who had been very patient with my improper last-minute-ness, described the presentation with several superlatives. The other presenters were very impressed (the fellow whom I’d known longer observed that although he had been working on media criticism for years, he’d just never thought of the issues I was pressing. There were a couple of Jeff Ward/Arete/Culture Cat-level rhetoric and media types (for whom this is old hat) in the audience, but mostly they were standard-issue biblical scholars, and they were not prepared for my position. (I sketched the beginnings of what I was planning to say back here and here and here.)
So I rocked hard. Not as hard as Margaret did yesterday morning, but hard.
Then the whole question-and-answer period was swallowed up by people who wanted to issue five-minute monologues about Veggie Tales or about the other presenter’s video-clip Bible stories. I just sat there while person after person gave little speeches. No one asked about my stunning presentation at all. Gnash, gnash. Ah, well, at least I have the satisfaction of knowing it was good; maybe it’ll sink in over time.
Posted by AKMA at November 24, 2003 06:29 PM | TrackBackGah. The same thing happened to me at Feminisms & Rhetorics (no one had any questions or comments for me after my presentation, which was NOT bad, so why is that?).
Posted by: Clancy at November 24, 2003 10:28 PMVeggieTales are astonishingly funny. Check 'em out some night when you are thinking of renting a comedy. I highly recommend Lyle the Kindly Viking, but they're all goo, with the exception of the recent cartoon adventures of larry-boy series, which stinks.
Posted by: Paul Baxter at November 24, 2003 10:51 PMGo AKMA go!
I'm betting they were so stunned and amazed that they couldn't think of any questions at the time. You'll probably get inquiring emails six months from now.
Posted by: Krista at November 25, 2003 07:28 AMAlmost all of the questions were critical (with a couple of people simply repeating what the veggie tales woman said). Other than the respondent, it didn't seem to be a group given to constructive thought ...
[and there was so much about the advertisement that needed destruction ...
Posted by: Trevor Bechtel at November 25, 2003 05:10 PMAny chance that you presentation could make it online in one form or another. Would love to read it.
Posted by: Jordon Cooper at November 25, 2003 06:15 PMI can endorse Veggie Tales too. My boys love them, and remember the stories. Christopher did some mental arithmetic and decided he had forgiven his brother 70 times 7 times already and could stop now...
I've been thinking about making a tool to let you record yourself speaking a presentation while syncing up slides from Keynote. Would that be interesting/useful?
Posted by: Kevin Marks at November 26, 2003 02:42 PMFriends, thanks for the feedback. I haven’t ever seen Veggie Tales, but my co-panelist did make a pretty strong case for their being ideologically problematic. If I ever have the chance to look ’em over, I’ll try to give them a fair shake on the strength of your words.
Kevin, such a thingummyjigger would be very helpful. I think I just read about one on a Mac news site, but if so, it slipped past me.
Jordon, I’d like to go over them one more time, and then I’ll slip them online for a short while. The Keynote file includes lots of images of art to which I don’t have rights stronger than fair-use, so I’d rather not leave it up indefinitely.
My cross-the-street neighbor Juliet came to the talk; she’s working on visual dimensions of gospel manuscripts, and we wondred about holding an impromptu symposium in which we’d each present our work. That would be fun, and the two would surely reinforce one another. And she doesn’t say anything about Veggie Tales.
Posted by: AKMA at November 27, 2003 07:32 PMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Leonard at January 13, 2004 02:51 AMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Mark at January 13, 2004 02:51 AMThe most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
Posted by: Judith at January 13, 2004 02:52 AM