I had to give a presentation yesterday for the Director of Autonomic Computing. This was a big thing because he was the head honcho of IBM for the area that I do research in. I looked him up on the internal org chart and he was 4 steps away from the CEO, which seems like pretty far but I think it’s a matter of a lot of management people. I also looked up me and apparently I’m only 5 steps from the top (!), but the top in my case is the general manager of IBM Canada and not the CEO.

Anyways, I was delivering a couple of slides plus my demo that I had previously done at CASCON, which was pretty lucky because I had put the old adage – “practice makes perfect” to work and could do my demo on auto pilot. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to fly to the States to do this face to face, so we did it via conference call and e-Meeting (an IBM product). Funny thing however, was that the e-Meeting server was down during our scheduled time so we had to resort to using Microsoft NetMeeting. In the end there wasn’t a lot of pressure because it was all digital and there wasn’t anyone staring me down. The caveat to that is that I couldn’t really tell if they were paying attention or not, for all I know they could be doing email and IM.