I posted recently about some presentation tips, and after doing so, I found one more link with a great deal of suggestions.

Venkatarangan's blog has a post laying out over 60 tips, but he has three basic steps: Watch the great speakers, read about speaking, and speak often. But, read all of the tips. Lots of good stuff there.

Mark has a very nice post detailing how you can record your actions on your computer, in conjunction with voice, and have a nice visual how-to.

This would be awesome for canned demos and training! And all you need is Windows Media Encoder 9.

Scott Hanselman has a great post about some more in-depth interview questions for .NET developers. These are much tougher than the ones I posted about earlier. If you can answer all of these questions correctly (and want to work in Michigan), I have a job for you!

In case you haven't entered yet, there's still time to enter the First Annual Tourney Logic Match Play Pool Contest. The deadline is Wednesday at 7:30 AM EST, so you need to enter soon. It's based on the Accenture Match Play starting tomorrow - that's golf if you're not familiar.

Don't know anything about golf? Well, you could check out Brian Wacker's picks. He's an assistant editor for GolfDigest.com. Or maybe Bob Harig's, who's an ESPN.com contributor.

Of course, you could also read the first round preview by Jason Sobel. He lays out what he thinks will happen in the first round. Then you can see his full picks.

Want out of the ESPN family? Ok. It's not a full pick, but Paul Grant over at SportingNews.com says the final will be "A battle for the ages" between Tiger Woods and Vijah Singh. Judging by the picks in the pool so far, that's seems to be the concensus there so far too - with Tiger winning!

So now that you've got the background, why haven't you entered yet?

I'm catching up on some podcasts that got back logged while I was in California. The top of the list? The Daily Source Code.

I was listening to the 2-17 DSC (mp3) on my way home from work today. If you were ever a rap fan or a Snoop fan, and know the song Gin and Juice, you have to listen to this one! Skip ahead to about the 5 or 6 minute mark (I was driving when it came on, so I couldn't find the exact time) and that's where the song starts. I cracked up listening to it! This was better than the 50 cent mix from a week ago or so!

Adam was in New York City last week, and he stayed at the same hotel my wife and I stayed at for our honeymoon back in 2000. I guess that makes Adam and I like this (you can't tell, but I'm crossing my fingers, indicating we're pretty close!).

Sounds like he's in San Francisco now. I guess I was there one week too early!

Tourney Logic is happy to announce that we have the Match Play Tourney Contest up and running! The brackets are set, so here's your chance to win a $25 gift certificate to Best Buy - if you win!

The deadline for entry will be Wednesday morning before the first match is played - around 7:30 AM EST. Sorry for the short notice, but the brackets were only finalized today!

So, this is also your chance to test out the Tourney Pool Manager if you're considering using it this year! If you do enter, please let me know what you think. We'll take all feedback into consideration, and possibly have time to incorporate some changes before the "real" tournament goes live!

And, if you encounter any issues, please let me know that too. You can send any and all feedback to support@tourneylogic.com.

Good luck!

Well, not exactly in the news, but there are a couple of exciting things going on right now. First, Jason Salas has invited Brian and I onto his radio show. He's a jack of all trades in Guam, and fortunately for us, his tasks include developer and radio show host. So, he's been emailing us back and forth about the Tourney Bracket Control, and he asked on his show. Of course, we're going to do it! Once it gets closer, we'll post some more details.

The other piece is that I have the Accenture Match Play all set up and working. The bracket is out, and all I have to finalize is some of the text with Brian tomorrow, but we'll get it out and anyone who wants to give the Tourney Pool Manager a true test run can! The matches start Friday, so you'll have all week to enter! I'll get the link up tomorrow!

I made it back home yesterday morning, after a long flight back. It was a very productive week. We got exactly what we hoped to accomplish done, and I think it went faster than expected.

So let's recap how the week went. No, I can't go into details about the what I did while working there - confidentiality and all that.

But the best part of traveling is the food. You always get pointed or taken to some very interesting places. This week was no different.

The weekend was uneventful. We did go to a Round Table Pizza and even had their featured Skinny Crust. We ate outside - something I haven't done in Michigan for a few months!

Tuesday night we went to a very interesting restaurant - one I would definitely recommend if you are in the Santa Rosa, CA area. It's called Tex Wasabi's. The name gives it away, but yes, it is a combo of Southern BBQ and Sushi. We had a nice sampling of the Sushi, and then I had a nice steak. Very good food!

The last place I want to highlight is Mike's Burgers. You have to go for the atmosphere. As a sample, here's part of what Mike's menu says at the top: "Many restaurants charge .10 to .75 cents for cheese. Mike charges a nickel to take it off, 'cause he thinks it should be there!" I agree with Mike. The burgers are huge - once you get it up, you better not put it down! Of course, you won't want to because it's that good!

So there's my food week review! I'm glad to be home. Now if I could just convince my body I'm in the eastern time zone!

Who needs a notepad replacement? Rory says we don't. Why? Because there's a new version coming!

If you've never read Rory's blog before, you might want to go get a grain of salt first.

Mark saved the day today. We were having some performance issues with a large number of users going over a limited pipe. He brought up http compression, and after implementing it, we saw the pipe utlization go from 95% to 50% (and users were more productive!).

So, based on that, I thought I would post what you have to do to get it going. The first step is make sure you have IIS 6.0 (Windows 2003).

Assuming you have the right version, you need to get to the service tab under the Web site properties (overall website properties, not instance web site properties). Then check the two checkboxes to compress application files and compress static files.

Next, you have two options: stop IIS, and change the metabase, or tell IIS to allow metabase edits directly. If you are running a live site, and want to make changes without the site going down, do the second. To do this, get to the properties for the IIS web server, and check the Enable Direct Metabase Edit checkbox.

The IIS metabase is located in c:\winnt\system32\inetsrv\metabase.xml. BACK THIS UP FIRST.

There are two sections that you need to find. Both are IISCompressionScheme nodes. Check the location attribute for the ones ending in deflate and gzip. Add the extensions you want to compress to either the HcFileExtensions section or the HcScriptFileExtensions section. The first is for static files (htm, html, txt, css, etc.) and the second is for dynamic files (aspx, asp, etc.). The extensions are carriage return seperated, so make sure to insert a new line between each extension.

Now, lastly, what kind of performance increase did we see? Using Fiddler, we were able to see the file sizes and compare them to a test server that didn't have it enabled on. The file sizes averaged between a 60 - 80% reduction in size (43K down to 5K for example), and one was over a 90% reduction in size (522K - don't ask! - down to a 43K file).

Overall, a very easy change for the kind of performance gain we saw!