When I was a little kid I called my grandfather Gramp. The only thing was that so did everyone else. Much latter I realized that the other people were calling him Grant, which was his middle name.

R

Not only do I not want to speak after you, I don’t even like leaving blog comments after yours.

Russ

One thing I’d add that I think helps a lot: include a little social proof that shows you’re a good speaker. My favorite trick is to link to complimentary tweets that people sent out after I spoke somewhere. Something like this, for instance.

I’m afraid that my, not-so-nice way of dealing with those kinds of conversations is to say something like “Well if must be A, B or C and it’s not A and not B and not C, then well it must work and I’m done. See Ya!” Usually then we find out that, well, it might be A or perhaps B or just maybe C.

Russ

When internal and external reality don’t match, something I think I know is wrong.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been the knight in shining armor, coming to the rescue of a stuck debugging session, with conversations like this”

“So, as you can see, x is being set to the page width, and then…”
“How do you know that?”
“What?”
“How do you know x is being set properly?”
“I can see it in the code here. The bug is obviously somewhere else.”
“Let’s have a print statement.”
“What a waste of time.”
“Humor me.”
…
“Well, I’ll be darned…”

My only problem is that I’m not as persuasive when arguing with myself as I am with a fellow programmer, so my debugging sessions can go a bit long until I realize I need someone else to play my role for me.