“What an encouraging evening” summed up Ellie, our general evaluator for the night who had nothing but praise for the entire session. Our able Toastmaster this time was the lovely Chrissy, who’d clearly laid the groundwork well, leading by example how to chair a great Toastmasters evening.
Our first speaker this evening was Dave B, this time starting out with his first speech in the Storytelling manual titled “The 1645 to Nottingham”. This speech was side-splitting entertaining! A thoroughly engaging story of how Dave came to be stranded without pants on the 1645 train from Birmingham to Nottingham some 25 years ago! “Fantastic, well told and highly amusing” summed up evaluator Jennifer. Thank you Dave!
The next speaker was Tim, with a project from the Technical Presentations manual titled “The use of dense stereo range data in augmented Reality”. This speech was based on a technical white paper of the same name set around the development of 3D digital holograms and methods for interacting with these. Beginning with a video of Microsoft’s new Hololens technology to set the scene, Tim presented the work and discoveries of the authors, illustrated with examples.
Next was Sergie, already on his 3rd Competent Communicator speech titled “Do you mind?”. This speech was clever. It was beautifully structured, taking the audience on a journey with Sergie some 25 years back when he decided to give up smoking. In an interesting twist, Sergie talked us through the mental strategies he used to overcome the addiction, playing on the speech title ‘Do you mind?’. Awesome. “Sergie grabbed up right from the word go” remarked Ade in her evaluation of this monumental speech. Awesome.
We welcomed back Ben tonight as he lead a great tabletopics session based on the topic of winter. Jan talked for two minutes on being ‘Cold outside and warm inside’ and David K spun a story around how ‘Snow means a year of plenty’. Dave Y told how Seoul was the coldest place he’d ever been and Ade described her favourite activity on a cold day.
See you all next time!