I should say that I had interesting experience this evening — a tornado warning in downtown Chicago.

The alarms went off as soon as we tried to get out of the restaurant. Below is a year old example but it sounded exactly like that + it was much darker — like if the skies fell on us:

We had to turn back and were stuck in the pub for another hour or so sipping Guinness while the mother-nature had some fun around us. Funny, looks like it decided to come back now — skies are falling again with heavy rain, clouds and lightnings everywhere. The thunder is very loud and sirens went off again — can’t even sleep. But I digress so let’s get back to the overview of the day…

I love small classes! I mean small rooms with all chairs taken when people are close to me as I present and close to each other. The audience today was exact fit for the room — 20 people could fit on the chairs around the desks and few more (organizers and presenters) next to the back wall. What I like about small classes is the intimate atmosphere in the room. I also like live speech where my voice delivered natively without electronic distortion keeping all the beauty of the Russian accent (some people *still* noticed bits of German influence there).

The only small problem was the location of the stand where a speaker hosts the laptop — it was in the middle of the room. That felt somewhat odd and I kept running between the middle of the room and the stage (well, or the place where it’s supposed to be). I used to the fact that I have another view on my laptop screen — speaker’s view with next slide/motion and my reminders. I also had to do several demo’s on my RAC cluster and I obviously needed the keyboard badly for that. I should apologize that 8 people had to observe my back instead of my face for some time and I also couldn’t see how they were taking the material but I tried to look back from time to time and as soon I did that — I could see confirming nods so thanks for that!
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