Before I get into SXSW, which I do intend to record some notes about, here's a quick update on some of what I've been up to professionally and personally:

• Last week I spoke as part of a panel about Second Life experiences at SLA SARC IV in St Petersburg. Due to technical difficulties, I didn't have immediate access to the screencaps I'd brought along, and ended up speaking extemporaneously about Second Life for about 20 minutes. And I discovered I loved doing it that way, and feel like I did a much better job than I would have with the visual aids and/or a rigid outline. I've moved a little closer to the kill PowerPoint camp, though with a topic like SL, visuals are essential, and luckily I had a few minutes with them later, and the audience got to see a brief demo before my section.

• At SARC I finally got to hear Stephen Abram speak, and got inspired by him and a number of other presentations. As I told someone there, I love the law library bubble and we have a great time there, but it's nice to peek out into SLA world from time to time. SARC is a great conference--just the right size and duration not to be exhausting, and a variety of good presentations.

• And one more item from SARC: do not underestimate the power of knitting as a networking tool.
  

• Writing about social networking with Debbie Ginsberg for LLRX.com.
  

• Sabrina Pacifici will be visiting the South Florida Association of Law Libraries on March 17, and I'm excited about meeting her and seeing her present.

• My sister's wedding is coming up in a little over a month, and I'm getting excited about that. I'm even having dreams about the day going horribly wrong, though none of them have yet involved her new obsession with Guitar Hero.
  

• The wedding present is to be an afghan made from our grandmother's pattern--essentially 8 scarves sewn together. I am now halfway done with #8. This means I can start knitting other things again. First up: a pair of socks, of course.

• Did I mention I'm at SXSW? :)
  

Lifehacker via the CALI pre-law blog links to a fantastic slideshared presentation about how to use PowerPoint without killing your audience (and shooting yourself in the foot in the process). I liked it so much I'm going to embed it here too, but do check out the comments at Lifehacker for even more helpful tips--like using being stuck in a bad presentation to assess the way others react to it.

My favorite part? The example slides in Russian to make the point that you don't have to know the language to recognize a bad slide when you see it.

No, it's not transcribed baby talk, but a sort-of competitive PowerPoint match. Wired explains:

[Pecha Kucha] applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

There's an example at the Wired link. (Digression: the example is about emotionally intelligent signs, a great topic for librarians, since we often need to enforce rules that are negatives--don't talk, don't use your cellphone, don't eat. How could we use emotionally intelligent signs to explain the empathetic reasons behind these rules and recast them in a more positive light? I think NSU Law's Dr. Einstein--BE QUIET (people are studying)--is a good example. Not that we still don't have to employ shushing as a reminder.)

Back to Pecha Kucha, for more about it, see Wikipedia on Pecha Kucha or check out the Pecha Kucha Night website for information about Pecha Kucha meets worldwide.

It sounds like fun. I've been trying to focus on images and use no more than five words per slide in my recent PowerPoints (with an ideal of no text at all), but I'm not sure I'd really want to do it competitively with a 20-second per slide rule. 20 seconds is longer than it sounds, and I'm more likely to want to flash through a number of images quickly, then settle on one while I talk. Still, it's an interesting alternative to Toastmasters.