"Presenting" my best foot forward

All I have been doing in the past two weeks is reading papers, and more papers, and more papers, and putting together, hold your breath, a 12 minute-12 slide talkfor a conference in Montreal next week. Who knew that it could take so much effort to do that, to have a background, or at least pretend to have background knowledge for every figure, every word, every bullet point.
Last night, I got onto Googletalk for the first time, so that I could communicate real-time with one of the authors for this paper I am presenting.
Getting online, got one of my former colleagues in the company I worked at to ping me. And he was surprised that I was spending so much time on this presentation, knowing that I could whip out reams of such material for training and clients at the drop of a hat.
But this is different. No one has done it before. Here one is not trying to teach or market. One is trying to Prove oneself. It is Personal.