Panic

So as I sit on a plane, the panic Thursday seem so distant, but at the time it was hurry hurry hurry, flurry flurry flurry.  Since the reason I am on this plane is that I am on the first leg of a two week expedition.  The first leg takes me to Grapevine Texas, Grapevine is just outside of Dallas, so I will be landing in about 1.5 hours at Dallas Fortworth.  The purpose of this part of the journey is to attend IBM Rational User Conference.  A 5 day conference about software design with a UML/Model/SOA spin.  I'm really excited, there are some great topics, and it is the first time I have been to Dallas (actually there are a LOT of places that I have never been, Dallas just happens to be probably the farthest I've travelled (either that or Calgary, but Calgary has Tim Horton's so it seems less exotic.)  Anyways the conference is entirely paid for by my company, I just have to go there and learn.  I get one day, today, to myself to see the place, so hopefully I will get a chance to go out on the town and have a look around.  I have a strong encouragement from a guy at work to go to Resistol Arena for the Rodeo!  I think I will look into it, but you won't catch me playing Cowboy poker anytime soon. The second leg of my Journey will be... Calgary, where I have in fact been once before, this time around it is for my brother's wedding.  I will be going out direct from Dallas on Thursday, where I will meet up with the rest of my family, for what promises to be a great vacation, once we get past the wedding.  I wish someone would listen to me when I say I'm scared out of my mind, I think I have more cold feet then the groom.  You see the problem is, I am both the MC and the Best man, both of which involve an inordinate amount of public speaking, and at the moment I am stuck in a downward spiral of public speaking disaster.  My last great performance was my OAC English ISU presentation, (that's Grade 13 Independent Study Unit in layman's terms.)  Prior to that I acted in all sorts of school plays, but from that point on it all went down hill, each one worse then the last, until  I got a C in first semester of forth year, and decided for the safety of my group I would run the computer during our Thesis presentation.  It must have been the best run computer in the universe because it netted me a job interview with IBM, that didn't pan out to anything, but damn, that was so fly mouse work!  So with this in mind I think this is how the cycle works.

• 10 presentationStress = 0;
• 20 assignedPresentation;
• 30 presentationStress ++;
• 40 presentationQuality = 1/presentationStress;
• 50 if(presentationQuality <>
• 60 else(presentationStress --);
• 70 goto 20.

So you see how this is a terrible loop, where quality continually gets worse, until at infinity the quality is 0!  So at the moment my presentation stress is at about a million, so I am just a little nervous, I have sometime to prepare, but I thought I would share my jitters with the empty void.