I’m going to be doing an Ignite talk at the MySQL Conference on the Wednesday evening. Exactly 5 minutes long, where I have 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. Oh dear.

I haven’t done a presentation since university, and those were always to a few dozen classmates and a teacher who already liked me because they didn’t really know me. The last time I felt moderately comfortable talking in front of people was in high school, and the realization that that was 15 years ago is so not helping me.

I hope by the time I get on stage everybody’s drunk.

See, last week my friend Mark suggested I submit to do a talk on something non-technical to round out what’s going to be a lot of MySQL- and database-specific content. I didn’t really think my proposal would get picked, as the synopsis began with “Mark told me that if I didn’t submit this proposal he would drown my cat”. Of course, this is completely false (as far as I know…), so perhaps this is their way of punishing me for slandering their colleague. Good job!

My talk is tentatively titled “The Safety Guide to Database Administration”, and for half a year it’s been a blog post draft that I couldn’t finish. It’s a list of rules of how to survive being a DBA, some of which are common sense and others which will probably make people wonder about me a bit, but that’s okay, I never pretended to be normal. I’m hoping it’ll be mildly amusing but I’m hoping more that I don’t pee myself from fear.

One thing that especially bothers me about this is having to make Powerpoint slides. It seems so cruel to sacrifice a kitten for an unnecessary public speaking exercise.

Also, I can only remember making one Powerpoint presentation before, ever. I’d be much more comfortable putting up transparencies on the overhead, but I bet that’s just so last millennium to these people.