Friday, October 19, 2007

Wish me luck

I've never been so glad to have a major project finished - all that's left to do is to present about 400 slides at the "Genealogy Online - Discover Your Family History" seminar tomorrow at the Chula Vista Genealogical Society meeting in the Chula Vista Civic Center Branch Library auditorium from 10 AM to 3 PM.

The four presentations are done - the word charts are written, the screen shots are annotated with circles, rectangles and arrows, and I'm tired of improving them...

I have the OpenOffice presentations installed on my flash drive and also on my laptop. I need to transfer them to the laptop that we use for the presentations with the LCD projector. I'll do that when I get to the library.

My briefcase is chock full of seminar syllabi - 24 pages of links and advice for doing online genealogy research. I also have the flyers for our October programs and the seminar agenda program for handouts. Tonight, I wrote up my pre-presentation bullet points - the goals and objectives of the seminar, and the caveats about the presentation.

I even made a list of things to take with me so that I wouldn't forget anything important. Lozenges - check. Water bottle - check. Raffle prizes - check. Syllabi - check. Programs - check. Signs - check. Laptop - check. Flash drive - it's on my desk. Everything is in my pack and laptop bag except for the flash drive, which I just put in my pants pocket.

The "doomsday scenario" is a morning heart attack, food poisoning at my men's Bible study in the morning, or a Saturday morning accident on the way to the library. I guess they would just move the venue to my hospital room...um, maybe not...maybe someone else could present it.

We go into the library about 30 minutes before it opens and set up the podium, projector and laptop in the auditorium, the refreshments in the conference room and the registration desk with handouts and sales items in the auditorium.

The CVGS board has worked really hard to put this together - we think we will have a fair number of non-members attending - hopefully, some will join CVGS when they see what a dynamic organization we have.

After this is over, I'll be ecstatic to get back to my normal blogging, research, testing, transcribing, reading and writing routine. I must have modified the presentations ten times each over the past four weeks. Fortunately, I couldn't modify them too much these last two days since if I did the charts wouldn't match the syllabus.

So wish me luck -- I'll probably post something about "how it went" on Saturday night. If there are good questions from the audience, I may use them as blog fodder in the coming weeks.

5 comments:

Miriam Robbins said...

Randy, as they say in show biz, "Break a leg!"

Jasia said...

Good luck, Randy! I hope you have a great turnout given all the work you've put into this!

footnoteMaven said...

Good Luck, Randy! You'll be fantastic. I can't wait to read how it went.

fM

Terry Thornton said...

Good luck --- sounds as if you've got all the bases covered. Now just don't come down with a bad case of the mully-grubs! LOL!
Terry Thornton
Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi

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