Not a screen test…
2008-02-20 1:47pm by AnnDespite my having no on-screen experience whatsoever I somehow was invited to do a guest segment on a web broadcast show focused on tech. Unfortunately, it being unscripted AND my first time in front of a video camera, I was way too nervous to say anything intelligent and resorted mostly to “um” interspersed with barely coherent babbling that utterly failed to reach the point I had set out to make. Also my hands were shaking pretty uncontrollably and I think I blew through the demo without narrating anything. By the time I realized that what was going on wasn’t just some kind of screen test it was already over and apparently not quite bad enough to edit out of the show entirely…
While I have only a vague recollection of the whole ordeal, I do know with absolute certainty that I embarrassed myself quite thoroughly and no doubt came off as some kind of blithering idiot. It’s amazing how the simple presence of a video camera (actually, make that three very large video cameras plus a shocking number of super bright lights) somehow has the effect of wiping my brain completely clean. Ah well… at least there would be ample room for improvement. The show “airs” on Friday and my segment is pretty short, so maybe nobody will really notice it!
My sincere apologies to FreePOPs. I was sadly unable to properly convey how and why I consider the FreePOPs project to be the best of its kind, due to an appreciation for the application itself with its flexible configuration options and the extensive number of webmail plugins already included (that load on the fly via another plugin for easy updates!), and also for the great community of users and developers that respond QUICKLY to webmail interface changes by contributing their feedback and fixes (hooray for open source!). Hopefully I at least got across the message that it is extremely useful free cross-platform software and easy to configure, thus people will be inclined to check out the project anyway.
My setup (since no one asked): cron periodically calls fetchmail to forward (via postfix) all my fetched webmail to my usual POP/IMAP accessible email account. YAY! I set it up once and promptly forgot it was even there.
You have to start somewhere.. It would be good to have someone with your background on the show.