Fugato

aibohphobia = an irrational fear of palindromes

aibophobia = an irrational fear of creepy Japanese robot pets

Delivering a lecture or presentation? Whatever your content, here are some basic ways to suck.

Read verbatim what your slides say

Might as well just email them your slides and stay home.

To suck less: Rephrase it. Or shut up. Or (perhaps best) leave it off the slide. Keep slides ultra-concise.

Disengage

• Look at the screen/whiteboard most of the time, turning your back to your audience
• make no eye contact with anyone
• seem uninterested in your subject
• drone

To suck less: Seem as interested as you want them to be. Fake it if you have to.

Spout clichés …

• “To understand what the client wants, even when he doesn’t know what he wants himself”
• “At the end of the day” (melodic, with a drawn-out daaay)
• “Moving forward” (when you’re going to end a sentence with this … don’t. Please just don’t.)
• “So let’s go right ahead and …” (oh yeah, do sound like Lumbergh, the cult king of the annoying.)

… and hesitative filler

• Uhh
• Umm
• Okay
• So
• So there you have it

You don’t notice it when you do it. But they notice. Oh, how they notice.

To suck less: Overcome this. Record yourself and listen for it. Practice.

Speak in the valley-girl accent

This is not a question? But I make it seem like a question by putting a question mark at the end? That is all kinds of annoying? It’s annoying in speech too, and it’s done by making your tone rise at the end of a sentence?

To suck less: Ditto above, record yourself and listen. Practice.

Use grievously predictable jokes

• “… supporting legacy browsers like Netscape 4 and … Internet Explorer 6!”
• “There’s always an evil genius planning to take over the world … ”

Don’t get flattered by the giggle you get from those 4% of your audience who didn’t see it coming.

To suck less: Be funny if you can. “Not funny” is still OK. But predictable means anti-funny. Just don’t.

Indulge in proud self-deprecation

• I realized early that I’ll never be a programmer, I’m just not a logical person.
• I’ve got these wonderful assistants, sometimes I feel like I’m more their assistant than the other way around.

Sincere modesty is fine — but generally does not need announcing. Fake modesty is worse than sincere arrogance. Your personal merits, whether proclaimed or denied, are just an uncool topic, and probably not one your audience wants to spend time and money hearing about.

To suck less: Skip it completely. To be endearing, just be sincere.

Here is one way to improve your presentation style:

1. Get a video of a presentation by Rafal Lukawiecki, or Stephen Boyd, and watch it.
2. Get a video of yourself doing a presentation, and watch it.
3. Compare.
4. Seek crisis counseling.
5. Repeat.

Richard Dawkins is on tour promoting his new book, “The God Delusion,” in which he “asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.”

He is going to appear in … Lynchburg, Virginia!

This can’t be good.

The start.com News blog announces (with a heading in all-lower-case letters; that used to be trendy):

we’re hiring developers

Want to work on one of the coolest projects at Microsoft? [...] Do you want to take ideas from concept to live on the web in just a few hours or days?

That is the latest entry on the blog. It is dated November 17 2005. Ouch.

I know, I know, priorities, cost-benefit, concentrate on features, etc. But still.

It’s 2006. Eight years of development and four major versions released. Why does a 250-billion-dollar company’s flagship development product still squeeze large, frequently used, tabular user interfaces into non-resizable dialog boxes?

Tables with tens of thousands of rows, some of them containing astounding stretches of text such as TeamFoundationContextMenus.SourceControlPendingChangesSourceFiles.Compare.TfsContextPendingCheckins.CompareWithWorkspaceVersion (honestly!) — squished in a 374×49-pixel porthole quivering in its puniness in the center of my 1920×1200-pixel screen. Who perpetrates this kind of obscenity?

In that last one, how do we tell the four different ActiveDirectory exceptions apart? Well, we can mouse over them to get a tool tip. Or we can drag the eminently draggable-looking column separator line such that the checkbox columns disappear off the right edge.

I don’t doubt that this product got usability tests up the wazoo. Some triaging group meeting must have reviewed the (surely inevitable) suggestions of resizable dialog boxes, and concluded: “nah.”

Hey, maybe in late 2008.