When I worked for Intel Supercomputers in Beaverton, OR, I was the user-interface guy. Thus, I was able to finagle a day-trip downtown to see Edward Tufte present in downtown Portland. It was great. Presentations like that make me realize how poor a presenter I am. Of course, he had a pretty much adoring audience, so it wasn't too much of a challenge.

I still get flyers about Tufte coming through town and I consider putting them up outside my office. Today, I noticed "Coding Horror" had a quick summary of going to a Tufte presentation:

His writing is fantastic, but it can be dry at times. I was surprised to find that Edward Tufte is a funny, animated speaker. We spent all morning reading through about a half-dozen sections in his last three books. Although I've read them all before, it was illuminating to have Tufte guide us through the reading selections and provide running commentary. It complemented the text nicely. He brought out a lot of nuances in the text that I completely glossed over in my initial read. The latter half of the day was split between sparklines and avoiding the pitfalls of PowerPoint. As usual, everything was presented directly from the books.

Source: Coding Horror: Reading with Edward Tufte.

If you can finagle like I can finagle, go. One big takeaway I got was how so much work on information visualization has been done since illuminated texts, and some of the quite old solutions are far better than what we come up with today, typically limiting ourselves to the progression of computer graphics vs. thinking outside of the graphical toolbox.