Alef Arendsen

Sometimes they call me the PowerPoint king. Actually that’s incorrect, as these days I’m using Keynote to do my presentations (I switched to the Mac half a year ago or so).

But yes, even though I’m not using PowerPoint anymore, I always pay a lot of attention to my slideware. One thing I almost never use are slide transitions. Keynote offers some really cool 3D slide transitions. I’m currently in a presentation that uses all of those slide transitions in random order and it never really appeared to me, but it’s unbelievably annoying and not just that, it’s plain distracting.

So please!!! Stop using those slide transitions.

This summer has been pretty hectic. Usually the summer in Europe is quite easy going, but this one proved to be full of trips to places like Berlin, Antwerp, Rome, Helsinki, Hong Kong and more.

It looks like this is not going to slow down any time soon. I have several gigs lined up all over Europe and the conference season is also starting very soon:

• September 18th: Cap Gemini is hosting a Java Night in Utrecht. If you’re interested in hearing what the future of Spring will offer, register and drop by. Patrick Linskey of JPA fame is going to be there too. Update: I just learned that there is a waiting list available for this event. The conference itself is already fully booked.
• September 24th – 26th: JAOO, in Aarhus, Denmark. I’m hosting a session there on web frameworks. I will be discussing with the audience whether or not stateless web framework architectures are still relevant and for what types of applications. I’ve actually never been to JAOO, so I’m looking forward to it!
• October 6th: The Greek Java User Group (JHUG is organizing a one-day conference early October and I will be speaking there about some of the future development in the Spring world. I still have to turn in an abstract (note to self: I need to spend some time on that tonight!) and this will probably be a brand new talk! I was in Greece last July and I had great fun, so I’m already looking forward to this again.
• October 11th: This is the day for the annual J-Fall conference, organized by Klaasjan Tukker or the NL-JUG (the Dutch Java User Group). I’m not sure if I will host a session here, but I will definitely be at the conference. I definitely look forward to seeing all Dutch Java people again.
• December 12th – 15th: this is the week in which we’re organizing The Spring Experience in Hollywood, FL for the third time. I will host three talks here. One together with Ramnivas on architectural enforcement, one on finding AOP in corners of your application in which you would never have thought it would be and another on complex deployment scenarios.

See you there.