Speaking To The (Sort Of) Beemer Folks
The BMW Club of Colorado website.
I was pretty darn surprised awhile back to check my email and find an invitation to come speak to the BMW Motorcycle Club of Colorado at their monthly meeting. (They don’t all ride BMWs, thus the “Sort Of” in the title above.) Apparently Carl was familiar with this website and this blog and he felt that I would be able to make an interesting presentation. Would I come talk about my writing and my travels? OK, if you think so I’m willing to do it.
First I had to prepare. I wrote out an entire presentation, not that I intended to read it, but just to draw my thoughts together. Then I distilled it down to a list of words and phrases, figuring that would be all I would really need to keep track of where I was going. Finally, I put together a PowerPoint slide deck with photos and images to complement the oral presentation. If you read this blog you know I end each post with a “Biker Quote for Today” so I interspersed some of my favorite quotes among the images.
I would be taking my laptop, which has PowerPoint on it, but just to be sure I saved the deck as a .ppsx file, which is supposed to be a presentation format that can be played even if you don’t have PowerPoint. I copied the file onto the laptop and also onto a jump drive. Redundancy, you know.
So the presentation was to be at the February meeting but the weather was getting nasty that day. Also, I had a minor cold–nothing that would have stopped me from going but when Carl called to say let’s postpone till March I was not unhappy.
March 11 came and I was ready. I thought I was getting there in plenty of time but figured it made sense to get everything set up right away. That was a good plan.
We needed to hook my laptop up the flat-screen TV that so commonly now replaces the old projection screen. But the TV did not want to make nice with my laptop. After several people of increasing technical competence tried and failed to get them to talk, Carl pulled out an old tablet he had on hand and hooked it up. The TV liked his table, so we inserted the jump drive. Redundancy!
This was just at the point when the meeting was starting. So they had their usual business to attend to and then it came time for the speaker. (Oh yeah, that’s me.)
I double-clicked on the file and got a message saying the computer could not open this file because it did not have the right program. More tech-savvy folks jumped in to trouble-shoot and I figured I’d better start talking even minus my visual aids.
I don’t know if it was apparent to the folks in the crowd but it quickly came apparent to me that I needed my visual aids, so I was pretty relieved when someone else pulled out another laptop that had PowerPoint on it and presto, I was in business. Now instead of just talking about my articles published in Rider magazine I could show them. Instead of just talking about my bikes I could show them. And perhaps most importantly, I could show the slides of quotes. Truthfully, I had the impression those were the highlights of the presentation for quite a few of the group.
When it was over I hung around and several people came up to talk to me. I have to tell you, writing this blog is very much a leap of faith. I write stuff and put it out there but I have no idea who might be reading it, if anyone is reading it at all. So it always tickles me when, as happened here, people speak to me about this or that blog post I wrote that they read. Wow, people really do read my stuff!
Apparently, you do. Thanks. I do appreciate it.
Biker Quote for Today
You know you’re a biker if every time you hear a vehicle with headers you look for a Harley.
