When I am If I were to be King of the Universe, every new mother would receive eighteen months of paid maternity leave at their full salary with no cap (right now, I think it's something like $1600/month as the maximum you can collect no matter what you make as a salary). There would be no maximum amount that could be paid out but for people earning less or no income, there would be a minimum payment (why not $1600/month for poetic justice's sake?) As well, every father would receive a month of paid paternity leave, also at their full regular salary.
But until that day comes, I'll head back to work tomorrow and think of Canada's $51 Billion dollar EI surplus while wondering, WTF is that for anyhow?
(Someday I'll detail my attempt to claim EI after a year of being a student, knowing this was totally against regulations and being totally shot down as expected – but at any rate, the story of my appeal hearing is a good one! )
This is a subject that's been on my mind as a possible topic for a post since probably before I started this blog and came back to the forefront of my thoughts after getting some very nice compliments about the eulogy I did for my grandfather last week.
I'm not a presentation expert by any stretch but, without a lot of formal training, I do think that I've developed the ability to give a decent talk when required (although I've also had a few clunkers in my life too!)
So, what are my personal tips for giving a good presentation?
1. Be original. I always like to attack my topics from a unique angle if possible. This was especially useful in a library school classroom where often many individuals or groups are presenting on the same or similar topics but also applies in other settings as well. It can be as small as asking to present on public library collection policies in my “Collection Development for Academic Libraries” course to taking on the persona of a young adult who is in a coma for my book talk in Children's Lit to trying to write eulogies that break out of the “The deceased was born here, lived here, got married when, had this many kids, this many grandkids, enjoyed pastimes such as and passed away then” template that so many people use mixed with glittering generalities (“He was a wonderful person.” “She had a great sense of humour.”) It can be risky – someday I'll post the obituary I wrote for my grandma where I talked about how she pretended to be an alien from another planet – but it can work. Not only did a lady come up to me after my grandfather's funeral to tell me they still had clipped and saved my grandma's obituary from nearly a decade ago but at the time, that unique obituary got my Grandma written up in the National Post.
2. Use humour. It's tough to do this effectively and again, I've told some clunker-jokes that aren't much better than the crap you find in “1001 Jokes for Toastmasters”. But in my opinion, effective use of humour is vital to keep your audience interested (or even just awake!)
3. Be prepared. Try to know your material inside and out. I'm not always the best at doing this (and it was hard to do in library school just because of how busy we were) but when I do know my stuff well, it really helps the confidence and reduces the public speaking stress we all feel. For example, I did ten drafts of the eulogy I was going to do for my grandfather all building on the previous one and so that was like an ongoing rehearsal. Then, when it was finalized, I read it over, both silently and aloud, probably another dozen times. At the funeral, I read the eulogy from a script but was comfortable ad-libbing a few comments and probably could've done it in a completely ad-libbed fashion if I had a cue card with a few main keyword reminders on it.
4. Don't Just Talk It can be gimmicky but I'm a big fan of props, games or other elements beyond that which are spoken to make the presentation more engaging. One example – I started a presentation on digitization by taking a digital photo of the audience in front of me. Another eulogy example – my grandma was famous for enjoying mints and candies so before I got up to speak, I handed out a bag of wrapped candies to be passed around each section of the church. This also gave me an opportunity to add some humour as my first comment once I got to the podium was a joke about the punishment awaiting anyone who chose to litter in church!
5. Be Concise I stole this idea from Elisabeth Davies who taught us Cataloguing and Research Methods but if you use Powerpoint, I'm a big fan of very plain, simple slides without a lot of text on them. In the MetaTalk thread below, someone suggests you shouldn't have more than six words on a slide and that's a guideline I try to follow myself.
Have you ever had the experience of going into an electronics store and having a salesperson try to hard sell you an extended warranty before you've even committed to actually buying a product?
There's a mixed view on these warranties which are licenses to print money for the electronics retailers – some people say you should never buy them, some say you should only buy them for certain types of goods that have high fault rates (digital cameras, DVD players) and some people like the security of buying them every time they buy a product, even if it's something that's highly unlikely to fail (hello brand new TV).
The reason this is in my mind is that my laptop gave up the goat last night. I did buy an extended warranty with it and am obviously glad that I did. Initially I thought it was the hard drive that died but when I took it into PC Place (one of my favourite electronic retailers ever – I've been buying computers from them for 15 years – and hey, they're in Ontario now!) they thought it was likely the motherboard which is good/bad news. I do have a backup system in place but restoring all that data would've really been a pain in the butt so it's good that my hard drive's fine. But instead of being fixed right here, they have to ship it to Acer HQ for repairs which means I'll be without my main computer for 2-3 weeks. I do have access to an old desktop here (obviously) as well as one in Weyburn so I won't be too out of touch. But it still feels like somebody cut off both my arms anyhow.
The back-up system has come in handy once or twice when I've accidently deleted a file or a directory but this is the first time that I nearly had to use the entire restore function. True, the $50 or whatever it is for an annual subscription is expensive compared to the cost of buying an external hard drive and doing your own backups. But I like the “always on” feature so that I don't have to remember to do backups and even for software that allows you to automatically schedule backups for daily or even more frequently, Carbonite is instantaneous – as soon as I change a file or upload new photos or whatever, they're automatically sent to Carbonite.
So anyhow, updates may be even more sparse (although I'm doing pretty good for a guy with a new baby – although next Tuesday is back to work so that'll cut into my time for doing non-essential stuff even more) for the next few weeks.
Home from BC and lots of catching up to do in terms of e-mail as well as other domestic chores. Back to work next Tuesday and the two weeks I had off for Pace's birth have passed way too fast, especially with a three-day detour in the middle of it.
It was fitting that I ended up sitting beside two mothers on the flight home – one with an 11-month old and a 2 year old from Kelowna to Edmonton then a first-time-flying-with-kids mother with a 5-month old from Edmonton to Regina. You should've seen me swapping parenting tips and tricks like an old pro!
If you compare it to the original version, you'll see how far it came through the revision process of the Partnership Journal.
I've said it before but it's worth submitting an article to this journal, especially if you have ambitions to become an academic librarian someday. Some people probably don't see an online publication as being as legitimate as a print one but if anything, I'd say that the editors are aware of this perception and are more stringent!
Quinn did a brief post with a link to a longer article recently exploring the subject of why publishing with open access journals is better than publishing via traditional methods.
(Oh, and the quote that gives this post its title is from an unsolicited e-mail a librarian I just met a couple weeks ago sent me after seeing my article. I'm expecting the hate mail from Alberta librarians to come flooding in any day soon so it was nice that my first feedback on the article was so positive. )
I'm sitting at the Kelowna Public Library using a temporary barcode and password (do all public libraries have this option for visitors? They should!) to check e-mail after a very long day. (I start to shake if I don't check e-mail at least every second day.)
The funeral was good – the Royal Canadian Legion did a very moving tribute (my grandfather was a WWII veteran who drove a tank in Holland) and to finish, three couples who used to dance with my grandfather and his wife regularly danced everyone out of the auditorium to the sounds of Anne Murray's “Can I Have This Dance.”
The eulogy went over amazingly well – I got a big round of applause (which I don't think I've ever heard at a funeral before!) and the Funeral Director came up to me after and said “I would say that was the best eulogy I've ever heard here.” (I thought about quipping “Well, you mustn't have been open very long then” but didn't.)
I'll likely post the eulogy when I get home (though after a build-up like that, it might also disappoint!) But yeah, this is the third eulogy I've done for a grandparent (my other grandfather died when I was 7 or I might've been able to do that one too!) so I've got some practice. Plus, as much as I hate to admit it, all of those presentations at library school probably helped me improve my public speaking quite a bit.
Anyhow, I fly out early tomorrow and will write more when I get home…
Mike T. sent this along and I'm reprinting it with his permission (though technically, I only asked if I could reprint the list – I hope he doesn't mind me reprinting the whole e-mail.)
Enjoy.
I know that you probably won't believe me, but the first month is
actually really easy compared to months 2-18. They sleep an awful lot
in that month and are darn cute while doing so. I know that you are
enraptured by his eyes and smile right now, but take the opportunity to
take lots of pictures of his hands and feet. You won't believe they
were that small in even a few months.
I
don't know if I gave you my fool-proof checklist for dealing with an
upset new-born/infant, but I'll give it to you again just in case.
If the baby is fussy or crying check:
1. Is he hungry?
2. Is his diaper dry?
3.
Is there something physically bugging him? (a tag on his sleeper, a
bunched up blanket under him, a toy looking at him funny, etc.)
4. Does he have a fever?
If
taking care of those four things doesn't work, then you are probably
dealing with colic, teething, or some other unusual circumstance.
Those four things will take care of it 99% of the time, though.
And always remember that worse people than you have raised wonderful kids, so don't worry too much.
Cheers
Mike
There's that old saying that when it rains, it pours and that's the situation for us right now. In addition to the birth of our son, Shea's had a few (minor) complications from her c-section so that needs to be dealt with on a daily basis.
Then, a week to the day after Pace was born, I got a call that my last living grandparent, Grandpa Peet, had passed away. So I'm flying out to Kelowna tomorrow, the funeral's on Wednesday and I'm back Thursday morning.
I've been asked to do the eulogy (the third of my four grandparents I've had the honour of doing this for) so I might post that eventually.
No need to post condolences or anything – Grandpa was 88, he'd been in ill-health for the last month so, as much as these things can be, it wasn't a huge surprise. He went the way I want to go someday – he was still living at home, still driving, still playing cards nearly every day (but had to cut back on the dancing a bit!), both mentally and physically sharp.
It's my own selfishness but I'm telling myself that part of the reason he held on as long as he did was to hear if we had a boy or a girl and to see pictures of the baby (which he did.) Whatever gets you through the night, eh?
Anyhow, posts might not happen for the next couple days but we'll see. I definitely want to get down to Kelowna Public Library (actually Okanagan Regional I think) and ironically, that's where I sat to write my Grandma Peet's eulogy way back in 1999.
I don't do a lot of link dump posts but I've had a few things sitting open in tabs for the past couple weeks that had the potential to be full-fledged posts…except now, the baby has all but wrecked my ability to write anything for an extended length of time so this is what you get…
Facebook Facelift – in addition to Facebook's recent re-design which is getting mixed reviews (I tend to like how it streamlined things for the most part but it didn't address some of the core problems with the site that I've blogged about elsewhere – search my blog for “Facebook” and you'll find a couple entries on the topic), Facebook is beginning to enter into partnerships with third-party sites to allow widgets of various types to be integrated into the site. The article I link to mentions that MySpace is way bigger than Facebook but that Facebook is growing more rapidly so I suspect this will only accelerate that.
reCaptcha – here's a cool idea. You know how you have to type a few random letters when you leave a comment on this (and many other) sites as a spam guard? Somebody's come up with a way to have those characters represent parts of public domain books so that everytime one of these “captcha”'s is entered, it helps digitize these books.
“[We]
estimated that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming
that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, this is over 160,000 human
hours per day (that's about 19 years). Harnessing even a fraction of this time for reading books will greatly help efforts in digitalizing books.”
Google Introduces Universal Search Between the Google toolbar, Firefox's Google Search Extension and various other options and plug-ins to give me direct access to it, I rarely go to the Google home page anymore (even if I try to, I get redirected to the Google Canada home page.) So I had to hear about their biggest redesign in their history via the media before I saw it with my own eyes. Universal search is an attempt to combine all their various search options (Internet, news, photos, blogs, books. etc.) into one interface. I still don't like how it won't “pass” a search string if it's not in the main menu at the top (you can switch to a search for “Jason Hammond” in Images but not in Books if that makes sense.) But it's a good start and puts Google that much farther ahead of everybody else in the search wars.
The Beatles Useless Pop Culture Trivia 21st Century American Politics Nonfiction Potent Potables Opera (because there's always that one category where you go, “ah, crap”…even when picking for yourself, I guess!)
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