[TLUG-ANNOUNCE]: GTALUG Meeting on Tuesday 10th April, 2012 at 7:30 pm

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Wed Mar 28 19:43:55 UTC 2012


On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 1:46 PM,  <john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> At least I don't think I offended anyone - hope I didn't. If so, an apology
> would be probably ineffectual at this point.

There were bad old days when the things you describe were quite,
quite, quite true.  There was the "infamous" Java talk which went from
bad to worse.  Of course, that was close to ten years ago, and it
would be unfair to assume that things haven't changed since then.

There is truth to the notion that there are people that frequently
attend that do like to hear themselves talk.  (It's even conceivable
that I myself have occasionally been guilty of this.)  There is merit
to the idea that those that attend should, before speaking up about
something, take a moment to ask themselves if they:
a) Have something to say that others want to hear;
b) Are trying, perhaps without being quite aware of it, to upstage the
speaker who was, after all, invited to come and speak, and whom is the
person that *OTHERS* came to listen to.

As a not-so-loose rule for Gentle Listeners to consider...  It's well
and fine to have a question/comment.  If you follow up to your own
question or comment, multiple times in a row, that's steering firmly
away from well and fine.  (I actually have a particular individual in
mind who might be steering towards needing for someone to have a
little chat with him about this.)  If we had wanted for you to
monopolize the discussion, we would have assigned *you* as the
speaker.

Some of the very cleverest speakers figure out how to use the audience
to do part of their talk :-).  I recall a conference near Baltimore a
few years ago where, in one of the sessions, the speaker pretty
consciously drew out myself and another of the erstwhile listeners to
explain some deep details.  (He was doing a talk on database schema
management; I was the Slony replication system developer in the crowd,
and the other guy was responsible for implementing recursive SQL in
Postgres...)  In that case, it would have been rude for me *not* to
step in and do part of his talk!  :-)

There seems to be a certain tendency in the hacker community for a
touch of Asperger's Syndrome, so I think it may be unrealistic to have
*none* of this...
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
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