Well, the answer to that question is “right here!”. I guess the more accurate question is “what have I been doing?”.

One of the things I’ve been doing is restarting my homebrewing. It’s been going very well indeed – incredibly enjoyable work producing 4 batches of beer, 1 of wine and a batch of apfelwein (a dry German cider) so far. Made and enjoyed with (touch-wood) no failures or anything that wasn’t absolutely top-notch – I’ve been really impressed with the outcome (and, I guess, impressed with myself for producing it!). I’ve been photographing the hell out of the process and you can see the photos on flickr over here and maybe we’ll see about another form of documentation in the near future.

I’ve also left my Toastmasters club. I felt I’d gone as far as I could with them. Three years membership, half of it as VP Education taking us to two successive Presidents Distinguished Club awards. I definitely don’t feel I’ve finished with Toastmasters, but it was time for some new challenges for me, so I’m currently looking at new clubs to join.

Professionally, I’ve been doing some part-time consultancy work but I think it’s time to find a full-time development job. To help with that goal I’m going to be brushing off a couple of demo sites and projects over the next month. Always good to have something to show people.

The organization required for these competitions can be quite daunting to newer members but it’s very important that everything happens in accordance with the official rules. To help ensure that people know how to run a contest successfully there are training sessions held to help get them up to speed.

In the past, I’ve competed, judged, chaired and mentored speech contests so I’m fairly confident that I know my way around one, but I know that you can never know EVERYTHING, so last weekend I attended a speech contest training session run by District 21 Division B in Vancouver.

Despite having experienced many contests in the past and despite being very familiar with the contents of the official rulebook, I learnt LOTS. I took lots of notes and decided to pass them on in the hope that they might help someone else too.

This information isn’t a definitive guide on how to run a contest but it expands on the information in the Toastmasters Speech Contest Rulebook. You should probably be familiar with the rulebook in order to get the most out of these notes…

Why is it important to run a good contest? It’s important because the competitors have put time and effort into taking part, you owe it to them to ensure that your contest is FAIR and abides by the rules.

I was guest judge at a neighbouring club’s contest this week and noticed several things which didn’t go smoothly so I guess I can add a supplemental set of tips:

• Remember that if a contestant in the FIRST contest is also taking part in the SECOND contest then you shouldn’t interview them after the first contest. This is to prevent the judges for the second contest hearing anything that might sway their opinion
• Make sure that no competitors wear any badges or other indication of rank or awards
• If you’re using borrowed lights or anything else that isn’t your club’s usual equipment then make sure that everybody who will use this or be affected by it is given a full demonstration beforehand to ensure there are no slip-ups or misunderstandings
• Prepare your questions before the contestant interview – don’t be reading the bio on stage
• If you’re handing out participation certificates then do it when you interview the competitors. This saves you having to call them all up to the stage again later on

There were also plenty of things that went RIGHT, and I picked up some tips myself:

• If you’ve finished interviewing the contestants and the counters haven’t finished calculating the result yet then call up one of your visiting dignitaries to talk to the audience. If you’ve got an Area/Division/District Governor in attendance then everybody would love to hear from them and this way you don’t have to tag on extra time for that at the end of the contest
• I think it’s reasonably well understood that you only announce third place if you have five or more competitors in a contest. The reason for this is to ensure that there are at least two contestants whose names are not announced. This makes sure that nobody knows who came last. However what do you do if you only have three contestants? You need a second place because you need to have a reserve in case the winner can’t represent your club at the Area contest. But if you announce second place then everybody knows who came last. The answer is that you only announce first place and then you discretely present the second place contestant with their certificate after the meeting has ended. That way you have your second place backup but the audience don’t know who came last. (That tip came direct from our current District Governor, Tom Jones, who was in attendance)

I mentioned earlier “be sure you have plenty of copies of all the forms”. Here’s a quick checklist of the forms I think you need for a contest:

• contestant eligibility & originality form
• contestant bio form
• a sheet to record the speaking order for both contests
• humorous speech judging form
• table topics speech judging form
• tie-breaker judging forms for both contests
• timing record form
• counters record form
• notification of winner form

I’ve got one final tip that I put into our Club Contest agenda when I last ran a contest and has now spread down the road to our neighbours. When you’re giving a prepared speech in a contest and you’re NOT speaking first, you gain an advantage over the first speaker as you have one minute of silence before you take the stage in which to gather your thoughts. This is the one minute that the judges are using to write their scores for the preceding speaker. With nobody speaking before them, the first speaker doesn’t get this time. In order to balance things out and make everything as fair as possible I added one minute of silence to the agenda before the first speaker speaks – I think it’s a nice little touch.

I was pretty depressed about it going into our meeting… I’d only had replies from two of our members and they’d both said “put me on whichever side you see fit”. They were just trying to make life easier for me but it rather short-circuited my evil plans: if they don’t tell me their personal preference then I can’t switch them to the opposite team. And I’d wanted SIX volunteers.

I got to the meeting early and had a quick word with the Chairman and asked him to call me up for 5 minutes before we got to the speakers.

So I stood in the middle of the stage and explained again what we were doing for Table Topics: “we’re having a mini-debate with two minute speeches. The topic is ‘Money is corrupting sports’ and I want 3 volunteers for each side of the debate”. I gestured theatrically with my arms and said “I’d like 3 people who believe that money IS corrupting sports to come and stand on my LEFT and 3 people who believe that money is NOT corrupting sports to come and stand on my RIGHT”. By asking them to come up to the front and stand on one side of me or the other I forced them to make a commitment to one preferred opinion or the other. I got my six speakers up front and then I gave them the twist.

The response was fantastic: some looks of horror, some looks of confusion, some “oh Jon you are EVIL” looks and some wide grins. I explained it again… “the people on my LEFT who’ve come up here because they believe that money IS corrupting sports, I want you to each talk about why money is NOT corrupting sports. The people on my RIGHT who believe that money is NOT corrupting sports, you’ll be talking about why money IS corrupting sports”. I explained that the purpose of the debate wasn’t to persuade people that your personal opinion was right but to make the speakers think and exercise their speaking skills.

I suggested that they think of possible topics during the first half of the meeting and then confer with their team members during the break to make sure that they’re not all saying the same things and to decide on their speaking order.

As I sat down, the person sitting next to me, one of the debate speakers, turned and said “Jon, that is SO evil”. I replied “I know. Awesome isn’t it?” – she grinned and nodded.

During the mid-meeting break, the room was a hive of activity. I could hear people brainstorming ideas and dividing up topics. Non-speaking members joined in – they went over to join with the groups and share their ideas.

Just to add some further spice, I asked for a secret vote before the debate and again afterwards. According to the pre-debate vote, we narrowly believed that money IS corrupting sports.

The first affirmative speaker talked about the Olympics and the vast quantities of money that flows in and out of that – a strong argument with which to lead off. The first rebuttal talked about children and their love of playing sports – a good argument that reminded us that ‘sports’ isn’t just professional sports.

The second affirmative looked at superstars like Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant – do they still love sport or have the multi-million dollar paychecks led to their problems? The second rebuttal brought us back to the Olympics again but this time looking at the investments that the Lower Mainland has got out of the event – would we ever have got the Richmond Oval or the Canada Line without the Olympics?

The third affirmative talked about sports gambling and the billions of dollars which change hands based on the results of sports games. The debate finished with the third rebuttal speaker who talked about how money led to professional sports which in turn redefined what was possible in the field of human achievement.

Six great two minute speeches with six great opinions. I was glad I was sitting down to listen because I was just blown away by how well our members stepped up to the challenge.

After the debate the second secret vote said resoundingly that money is NOT corrupting sports. That doesn’t mean that we had winners or losers in our contest though… everybody put on a great performance. Several members said to me afterwards that it was the best Table Topics they’ve seen. I can only take some of the responsibility – the original idea wasn’t mine and it was the amazing performances from our members that really made it a winning evening. It just goes to show that when you shake things up at Toastmasters you really get the best out of your club members.

It’s a role I’ve done a dozen times before and the format is always the same: the Table Topics Master poses questions and invites members to come up and talk, spontaneously, on the topic for 1-2 minutes. Stuff like “my favorite vacation” or “how would you feel if you had no internet for a day?”. It’s a lot of fun and we hear some great speeches and some not-so-great speeches but it’s always the same format.

This week I’m changing things around and we’re having a debate.

I got the idea from the Toastmasters officer training that I went to tonight. I’ve seen a mini-debate done in Table Topics before but one of the other VP Education officers at tonight’s training mentioned a twist. Something evil. And I’m stealing the idea because it makes me do a little evil happy dance inside.

The subject that I’ve chosen for the debate is “Money is corrupting sports”… a topic that I hope many of our members will feel passionate about one way or the other but also I hope that nobody will feel offended by people arguing against their point-of-view. I chose the subject from an incredible pair of lists at http://www.ada.org.nz/moots.php

So I’m looking for 3 speakers for each side of the debate – I’ve emailed out the subject in advance and asked for volunteer speakers for each side.

Usually with Table Topics you don’t tell anybody the subject in advance… that’s sort of the point. But I need to this week because I want people who are passionate about the subject to step forward. I’ve also warned them that I’d like it to be in the spirit of a normal Table Topics session – i.e. even though you’ve had the question in advance I don’t want you to do a lot of preparation for it.

Except… here’s the kicker…

At the start of the meeting I’m going to tell them all that they’re speaking for the opposite side of the debate to the one that they’ve signed up for.

It’s beautifully evil. But it’s also totally valid. The point of a debate at Toastmasters is not really to persuade people about the opinion that you hold but to make you think on your feet and exercise your speaking skills. Being forced to talk against your personally held beliefs is a perfect example.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the club members. I’ll be sure to post again after the meeting.

I took the 12 week ‘XML For Web Applications’ COMP2899 course downtown. My first course at the downtown campus – it’s really nice there: very modern and shiny. Course was also excellent – interesting material… I never knew you could do so much with XML and there was so much XML capability built into every browser. I knew about basic XML, DTDs, XPATH and parsers already but the course also taught schemas, XSLT and web services – overall very interesting. The course required quite a lot of learning but the labs, assignments and tests were all very fair – basically just to show that you’d done and understood the lecture content. I got a 99% mark which I’m very pleased with – especially so because the final exam was closed book with no ‘cheat sheet’!

I took the XML course for several reasons. Partly because XML interests me – all applications need configuration data and free-format text files are a recipe for disaster. Partly because I’m trying to complete the Advanced Java Development Certificate program and none of the courses I still needed were running this term. There’s one required course which hasn’t run for at least 18 months! I emailed the part-time studies director and he recommended the XML course. The course isn’t on the Java program but apparently there’s a re-organization coming which will put it on there (although another 5 months have passed now and the XML course hasn’t been added to the Java program and the lost required course still hasn’t run).

Having looked at the XML course I noticed that it’s also part of the Web Application Software Development Certificate program. I looked at that program and was amazed… not only are all the courses on things I’m interested in, I’ve already done half of them! So now I have TWO goals.

Over the last year, I’ve come across small pieces of PHP in several places. Tweaking WordPress themes has exposed me to some, and the BCIT AJAX course has required writing some PHP to handle the server-side functionality but this has pretty much all been self-taught. So when I noticed that a PHP course, COMP1920, was part of the Web Development program and there was an accelerated version coming up, I signed up immediately.

The PHP course was really eye-opening. For starters, it was the standard 12 week syllabus condensed into 6 Saturdays – you do one ‘evening’ in the morning and the next ‘evening’ in the afternoon. The course itself started out at the basics as some of the students hadn’t even programmed before, let alone seen PHP. But with the workload doubled, I was very happy with the pace.

The course lecturer makes an incredible difference to any course and the PHP course reintroduced me to the best lecturer I’ve had at BCIT. Jason Harrison is a programmer’s programmer – he isn’t there to teach you the theory, the 20 different parameters you can use with a function, he’s there to teach you how to get results. Jason teaches the course as 80% programming and 20% business. One of the things that PHP is great for is rapidly developing web-based applications and so a lot of people make a lot of money from using it. It seemed that most of the students had signed up for the course with that in mind and so we were all as spellbound when Jason started offering advice about business strategy as when he introduced the fopen() function. Actually… maybe more so!

I’m used to lecturers emphasizing the evils of cheating and the need for students to complete their work on their own but Jason’s approach is the opposite. Yes, work that you hand in has to be written by you, but there’s nothing wrong with consulting other students for advice. After all, that’s what you’d do in the real world. In the PHP course, Jason takes it a stage further – there are sections of the course which you MUST complete with other students – some parts in pairs and the final assignment as a team. The final assignment was something I’ve never seen on a BCIT course. The brief was to form a team, research something related to the course material that might be of interest to the other students and then give a 30 minute presentation – complete with demonstration and class exercise.

The course work was great. Because we were working at double pace, the first half of the course was heavily loaded with labs to be submitted each week. The second half of the course had coding assignments, the final assignment and revision all falling over each other. This generated a terrific buzz – I was writing up our class exercise, struggling with PHP session management and guiding other students through their problems simultaneously. Again, just like the real world.

Everything came together wonderfully. The final coding assignment had two options: the easy option was marked to a maximum of 100%, the hard option was marked to a maximum of 115%. Unfortunately there was no overlap between the two projects… so you had to make a decision at the beginning and stick with it. I chose the hard option and got bogged down in session management for a bit but once I’d conquered that it came together well – I even had time to extend it beyond the requirements with a bit of personal flourish. Our presentation on email injection, form validation and CAPTCHA went very smoothly. I presented the class exercise on getting the other students to add a CAPTCHA test to an existing PHP form – went OK, most of the students managed to complete it and I think I answered all the questions well. It seems my Toastmasters experience showed through… I’d mentioned that I was in Toastmasters at the beginning of the course but not had any feedback. After my presentation I had THREE different people come up to me and ask me for more information. Because of the compressed timetable we had a short break after the presentations and then straight into the final exam, no time to rest on our laurels!

Overall I loved the course… content, lecturer, format all worked very well. Oh and I was very pleased with my mark as well… 100%

Jason also teaches an advanced PHP course but for some reason it’s only scheduled once a year. I’m itching to get on that course!

My club’s VP Education had to leave us a couple of months ago and I eagerly volunteered to step into her shoes. She’d been doing a fabulous job, especially with regard to pushing the Competent Leadership program so her shoes were big shoes to fill! I hope I’ve managed to keep going with the things she was working on and add a couple of new items of my own.

• At the beginning of the meeting, after the functionaries have described their roles, I make a point of reminding people that if you’re performing a role you should pass your Competent Leadership manual to a neighbour for evaluation. It’s not hard and 80% of the work required for the CL award comes from just doing the normal things that you’d do in a normal Toastmasters meeting. Even the more unusual projects like Motivating People or Delegating are achievable within a 6 month time-frame, so there’s no excuse to not be getting that award.
• We have such a good time in our meetings, I kinda feel sorry for the members who can’t make it on a given week! And also I know that, if you do skip a week, there’s a feeling of separation that makes you less likely to join us for the next week’s meeting. In an effort to solve both these problems, I’ve started sending out weekly meeting recaps. About 500 words describing the more significant features of the meeting: a sentence or two about each of the speakers, comments on humorous events or members who did something particularly worthy of praise, maybe a reminder about something important happening at the next meeting. I try to keep them short but there always seems to be a lot to talk about! In the long term I see this as maybe becoming one of the responsibilities of the meeting Chairman – take notes during the meeting and send out the recap, but for now I’ve taken it upon myself to do it each week just to see how it feels and if members find it worthwhile.
• Functionary responsibilities. There’s lots of descriptions out there of what the various functionaries do. The trouble is that every club is slightly different. If it’s your first week as Chairman then the chances are that you’re going to base your tasks on what the Chairman you saw the previous week did. But it might have been their first time too – by learning like this there’s a danger that the functionary’s tasks becomes a game of Chinese Whispers. Also, in the heat of the moment, maybe you’ll forget to ask for one minute for written comments on a speaker or you’ll forget to call for a toast. So I’ve started writing a collection of one page job descriptions for the more significant functionary roles. I’m writing them as advisory frameworks i.e. “this is what we typically do but you’re welcome to tweak things or change things if you’d like to”. I think I’ll post them up here in the future.

We’ve taken on several new members recently and I’ve really enjoyed talking to them about the joys of Toastmasters and the ways in which it can help them. Our club is holding elections tonight for the next year’s Executive and I’m standing for VP Education. I’m hoping I can continue the work I’ve started and help to make the club, and all of its members, successful. It’s going to be a very exciting year!

I’ve been in Toastmasters for just over a year now and greatly enjoying it. When it came time to elect a new executive for my club, several of the more experienced members suggested quite strongly that I take the post of VP Education. Now something like that takes a lot of time to do right and really my extra time right now should be dedicated to getting a job. Added to which, when I do get a job who knows if I’m even going to be able to make it to the meetings at 7pm, let alone have the time to dedicate to a VP role. So I decided not to get myself involved in the executive and stood firm.

In a way it was lucky I did because I’m now taking an evening course on my Toastmasters night so I won’t be attending any club meetings at all for three months!

We have a new Toastmasters club forming in my neighbourhood with a specific focus on business and technology people. “Perfect,” I thought, “let’s go network there”. So I attended a couple of meetings as a guest during the summer. One of the experienced Toastmasters mentoring that club took me aside and asked me if I was interested in being the new Area Governor. Whoa! That’s a heck of a vote of confidence (or desperation *LOL*) – but also something that sounds quite exciting. The Area Governor is responsible for serving the needs of the clubs in their Area (in our case, 6 clubs), visiting them and motivating them.  Despite my reluctance to be on my own club’s executive, I did consider this for a bit. But again, it’s a commitment of time and energy that should be going somewhere else so I said no.

Fast forward a month… and one of the experienced members of my club announces that she’s decided to accept the offer of becoming the new Area Governor. Good for her!

Fast forward another month… and I get a frantic 3am email from our new Area Governor begging me to help her out as she’s too busy to do it all herself. Of course put like that, that’s a request that I can’t turn down… and so I’m now Assistant Area Governor.

What does this mean for me? Well, I’ve attended a couple of Toastmasters training sessions, networked with a lot of experienced Toastmasters. I’ve also become a regular at our new still-getting-off-the-ground club, taking on whatever roles are vacant to help make sure they’ve got enough experienced people to conduct each meeting. And last week I visited two other established clubs in our area, with my official hat on.

A club visit is a major thing. It takes preparation (contact the club president, find out about the club, find out what the president’s direction is for the club, prepare a presentation that fits along with that), then the visit itself, then a meeting with the president afterwards to discuss things face to face, then a write-up, a thank-you email and some form-filling.

Historically speaking, all the clubs in our area have kept themselves to themselves – not a lot of contact between them. Which is a shame because I find you get a lot more out of Toastmasters if you’re listening to different speakers, and it’s more of a challenge for you when you’re presenting to strangers. So one of the things that I personally want to do this year (and fortunately our Area Governor wants the same thing too!) is encourage the clubs to communicate with each other. Get some of the members to drop in on other meetings, maybe organise a debating contest or two between clubs… that sort of thing.

My club visits went very well. Both clubs are stable and well run. Both clubs would like to have more contact with the other clubs in the area. I’m greatly looking forward to facilitating that!

Instead I’m Table Topics Master. It’s an interesting role… you get to stand up and, to a certain extent, be the focus of attention… but on the other hand you can’t let your creativity run riot. You have to set table topics questions which are fun and interesting but not too difficult – especially as we usually try to get our guests to come up and speak during Table Topics.

The first time I was TT Master the theme I set was “Spinning Bad News Into Good” and had people pretend to be politicians taking subjects like “an earthquake has just flattened downtown Vancouver” and tell us why this was good news. We can safely say it was one of the harder Table Topics sessions!

Tonight’s meeting theme is “New Beginning”… and what’s the ultimate “beginning”? Why, a birth of course! So I’m going to be presenting the names of several people born on the 7th August and asking people to talk about them. I’m not expecting anybody (apart from me!) to know who Alexei Sayle is – it’s more for people to just talk randomly for two minutes about what they imagine when they see the name they’ve picked. And then I’ve got 15 seconds of info to give after their speech about who the person actually was. I think it could go down quite well – wish me luck!

As usual I ran over time – I’m yet to completely compensate for the way the speech expands in length from my practising at home to when I give it for real and 7 minutes just turns out to be far too short a time to convey much useful information. When the warning lights started to come on I made a decision to cut two paragraphs that I’d earlier marked as optional… and I still ran over.

But apart from the timing and a moment when I lost my thread and had to stare at my notes, it went very well. We were in a different room to our usual one and the noise levels were much higher – we had a busy swimming pool the other side of plate glass windows all the way down one side of the room. They helped force me to push myself and really project my voice – which was a good thing because it was a speech project about using your voice effectively!

I talked briefly about what goes into a good speech and how these are things that you should look for when evaluating. I also mentioned the things that are looked for in the Toastmasters speech evaluation contest – logically it makes sense to also think about those when doing an evaluation. But the focus of my speech was that speech evaluation is a personal thing. Everybody is affected differently by a speech and, given that three minutes isn’t enough time to talk about everything that the speaker did, I think it’s important to concentrate on the things that move YOU. For me personally, that’s the introduction. If you can’t grab the audience’s attention in the first thirty seconds of your speech then you’re sure as hell not going to have it by the middle of your speech. I also recommended that, after you’ve given your first couple of evaluations and found your “evaluation style”, type-up a crib sheet… something that provides a skeleton for you to hang your evaluation on… headings about things to look for, spaces marked out for things you know you’ll want to comment on, that sort of thing.

And then… my secret technique… when you’ve written all this stuff down during the speech, you have a mass of scribblings all out of order. Remember that an evaluation is like a mini speech in itself: it needs an introduction, a body with transitions between your points and a conclusion. So I write sequence numbers next to the things I want to talk about on my crib sheet. That way, when I’m standing up and speaking, my thoughts will flow in a coherent order.

The audience went wild *LOL*. I felt like a rock star – never had quite that many congratulations after a speech before!

This week I’m chairman… I have a good theme but I’m not feeling desperately enthused.

I’m seldom totally happy with my evaluations but last night I thought I really nailed it. And won Best Evaluator again! Not that I’m not very pleased to be recognized, but I do feel a bit sorry for the other evaluators sometimes. I’ve always found speech evaluation to be the most challenging thing we do at Toastmasters, when I first started I HATED it… basically you’re doing a 3 minute speech and you’ve only got about 20 minutes to prepare it. Everybody who steps up to do a speech evaluation has worked hard… and yet they seldom get the ribbon for it.

Well, it’s time for me to give something back. Next week I’m giving a speech and, given that everybody seems to think I’m good at speech evaluation, I’m going to give a speech on speech evaluation! See if I can pass on some of these tricks I apparently have