Presentation work

Despite all the stuff that’s been going on the past few days, I’ve been tasked with making a video for school side of the two conferences I need to attend. It’s not a bad thing, but there’s some extra work involved and there’s a bit of a timing issue. No one said doing all this at once would be easy. Even with all the stuff going on, we’ve got work to do.

Quick recap, I have not one, but two conferences I need to attend. As in mandatory so there’s no way around it. Both of them “require” that I be there in person, luckily the people running second one have agreed to let me present my work virtually. I was given several options to accommodate the situation and I thought the best option would be to give my presentation live while I had a free moment in the schedule of the conference that I will be attending in person.

Well it turns out that I’ll need to do both! There are two different times where I’ll need to present my work. The first was the time I thought I had available in my first conference schedule, but the second conflicted so I won’t be able to attend that one no matter what I do. In lieu of that, I’ll be presenting both live and via a pre-recorded video. Meaning once again I’m going to be doing it the hardest way possible, because I like having a well made presentation.

I’m not going to lie, the nice thing about recording the presentation will be that I can ensure that it’s exactly the way I want it. No mistakes, no extraneous noises in the background, and between us internet friends, I may just play the video during the first round and answer any questions following so I don’t have to worry about the presentation or any sort of delay due to internet connection.

Really I’m grateful that I have the option to do it this way because it could’ve very easily gone the other direction and I would’ve had a serious day of driving back and forth to make it all work out (which I would’ve missed something somewhere due to the drive and timing for both overlapping later in the day). It’s a not so nice reminder that despite school and work being virtually identical in terms of my responsibilities, they are not the same thing.

Also friendly reminder that there are conference seasons and they do tend to cluster whether I like or not. Things in general tend to cluster, meetings, appointments, experiments, I’m not sure why that is exactly. Probably because certain times of the day/month/year all are pretty universal for free time to hold these types of events. The DARPA risers and SfN conferences for example overlap despite being two very different conferences. That’s just how these things go I guess.

Luckily with the DARPA and SfN overlap, I only need to attend one of the conferences!