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First off, congrats to John for figuring out how to post a picture. And a cool one, at that.
Now, time for some links for your pleasure and fun! And because you have nothing better to do today.
It is so rare for someone to admit they do something unpleasant and yucky. It’s also rare for someone to be so logical about something that people generally feel so stringly about. Je am talking about smoking, and though I would love nothing more than to see the tobacco companies be shot through the head—a decidedly reactionary and cruel stance—I have to agree wholeheartedly with Robb’s latest treatise.
Speaking of nefarious plots, how about that RFID in our passports thang? How about it, indeed! Wired has a good article called “Fatal Flaw Weakens RFID Passports.”
Speaking of speaking of nefarious plots, did you know Sony, in their latest stupid bid to prevent music piracy, has placed a little trojan horse program on audio CDs that install themselves on your PC (Windows only, of course) and can then be used by third parties to hide any file from the system and perhaps do truly disastrous damage? No? Well, Wired to the rescue again! Read “The Cover-Up Is the Crime.”
Off of the speaking of speaking ofs, I enjoy this little item regarding Microsoft’s not-so-hot presentation design. This is what I do for a living, these presentations, and have to agree that Steve Jobs does beautiful if spare presentations, while Microsoft, like everything else it does, gums up the works.
That is all. FOR NOW…
G-Man Expounded Thusly:
I too create presentations for a living. it blows my mind, that at the last minute, one of the big-wigs or many times the Executive VP will come to me with a piece of shit PowerPoint that needs “cleaning up.” The file usally consists of about 100 different styles, all different slides that have been cloojed (sp?) together year after year. Then they always say to me, “But don’t spend too much time on it.”
PowerPoint sucks. All it’s done is given the brass the ability to create presentations that they have no right designing!
Good job Bill Gates…you still suck. Steve Jobs has a posse. Let the revolution begin.
I am,
G-Man
Steve Expounded Thusly:
You have just described the story of our lives here. EXACTLY! That crap happens all the time!
We use Apple’s Keynote for our major presentations. It has some flaws, but in general kicks PowerPoint’s ass. It creates the most beautiful, professional presentations. Of course, we have to have a system in place for converting those to PowerPoint after our big meetings so people can show the decks in meetings and things.
After our last meeting, we had to defend our practice of using Keynote because one Sr. VP did not understand why we should go through all the trouble of taking something in PP, put it in Keynote, then convert it back yet again after the meeting. We had the hardest time convincing him we needed to use Keynote! But these reasons seemed to make it through the fog of executive cluelessness:
1) What they give us is so crappy, it needs to be entirely re-designed anyway, whether we use PP or Keynote.
2) Using PP will not help us with all the last-minute changes that always come through. In fact, Keynote is better at taking changes.
3) Bumping our meetings down to PP level—crappy transitions, poor font rendering, awful graphics, and 100 other issues—will take away a level of quality that we need. It is important to sweat the little details no one notices.
Among others…
And you are so incredibly right… these people, because they know some PP basics, think they can “design” the decks themselves and we just have to take them and plop them into the computer. Oh, that is so very not the case! Even my friend Marcy, who works for the Pres., took some time to realize that, yes, we have to pretty much re-type everything she gives us to make it work with what we’re doing. (Even in PP, we have to do that! PP is SO bad at executing master slides and slide templates…)
WHEW! Enough ranting! It’s so good to know someone else out there gets this. You are G-Man!