Presentations

I have an utter disdain for Microsoft PowerPoint, and I’m not alone there. Edward Tufte, the famous information design author, just came out with a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

I’m debating about buying the book. I’m sure it’s excellently done and compelling, but I just don’t use PowerPoint if I can help it. And normally I can (so can most if they try hard enough). I’ve purchased Apple’s Keynote but I have yet to even start it up. Why? Because when I give presentations, I give what’s called verbal cues about my outline and where I’m at in the presentation. I don’t need slides to give an effective speech.

Perhaps, though, I could use slides to give my presentations more visual appeal. I guess I’ll have to look into Keynote a little deeper.

[UPDATE: Aaron Swartz posted The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint recast as a Powerpoint presentation. Ironic.]

[UPDATE 2: Peter Lindberg just posted his review of Tufte’s booklet. He generally likes the tome, but thought that it should be about how to make better cognitive use of PowerPoint instead of deriding slides instead of paper handouts. Personally, I’ve found Tufte to be something of an antiquarian about such things.]

IDEs and TDD

I’m always on the lookout for a good development environment. I’m presently using jEdit, but I’m considering evaluating Eclipse to replace it. Dave‘s recent blog entry singing its praises convinced me that I should give it another look, but that’s the latest in a long line of recommendations.

VisualBasic

In my class we’re working in VisualBasic. What a wretched language! It’s not as bad as AppleScript, but it’s verbose and seemingly without structure (or the kind of structure I’m used to in Java). Don’t even get me started about the Studio versus jEdit! I’ll grant, however, that it’s a far sight better than VBScript.

Good Thoughts

Good postings on Peter Lindberg‘s blog today on becoming a better programmer. He suggests doing a mind map of what you regard as important; I’ve got to look into mind mapping—there’s too many smart people using them for there to be nothing of value there.

Also, if you’ve got a couple of days to kill, read through his archives. He’s been posting thoughtful, insightful entries for years now.

Day’s Events in Portland

Today I went to Powell’s Books, specifically the main City of Books location, and bought a lot of books:

• The Onion: Dispatches from the Tenth Circle
• Essentials of Cooking
• Serene Gardens: Creating Japanese Design and Detail in the Western Garden
• The A List: 100 Essential Films
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
• Oxford Lectures on Poetry by E. de Selincourt
• The Poetry of Robert Frost
• Hercule Poirot’s Casebook
• The New James Beard

I know what you’re thinking—”How the hell is he going to get all of those books home?”—and I’ve already thought of that: I have no freaking idea.

In other Portland news, I had sushi for lunch. I decided to try something new. Previously, the extent of my sushi experience was California rolls from Samurai Sam’s so I ordered the combination platter. This smorgasbord of sushi had maybe eight different types of sushi including eel and octopus! The eel was surprisingly good, but I almost puked on the suction cups from the tentacle. Ugh, I’m getting a little choked up thinking about it—steamed cartilage is very, very chewy and gives you ample time to ponder exactly what it is that you’re chewing.

[UPDATE: I’m now quite hooked on Jamba Juice. I only had 15 minutes this morning to make it from my hotel to the JJ store to Corillian. I drove so fast that I actually made it in 9 minutes. That’s the depths of my newfound addiction.]

I’m not sure I want to know…

This site showed up in my log files. There are times like this that I’m glad I don’t speak or read Dutch.

Training Comment

My trainer is in his own little world. He’s completely abandoned any pretext of guided instruction and started writing code at the pace you would do during development. He’s copying and pasting with wild abandon and flipping between source files looking for pieces of data while muttering inaudibly about what he’s looking for. He’s also completely forgotten that we may not have caught up to where he is.

The perils of pedagogy—or, more properly, the perils of non-pedagogy.

God-Awful Morning Shows

What is it with morning television shows? You know, the ones with a trio of anchors aflutter with the need to chit-chat publicly. I thought the Phoenix ones were bad enough, but this Portland crew is the worst I’ve seen.

This morning, they had a segment on a local lady who was arrested for not returning a video game rental for over six years—the usual newsworthy stuff you see on these programs. The main anchor—he did most of the talking in the show—responds to the voiceover comment of “Why did she go to jail?” with “You know it wasn’t because she was sexy.” At this point, I double-taked. I cannot believe that he said that. The other anchors also paused for a split-second then they started gyrating in their chairs and saying “Snap!” etc. Snarky, though completely unprofessional. My local talking heads would never have acted that way and they’re pretty bubbly. In fact, that seems harsher than anything that my previous candidate for worst morning show, Good Day LA, would do.

This comment (and the general rowdiness that preceded and followed it) strikes me as mean-spirited and wholly unnecessary. Granted, these shows are mainly just filler but shouldn’t they still rise above the common rudeness of everyday life?

The Matrix Reviewed

I saw The Matrix Reloaded last night. This, for those of you just coming out of a coma, is the second part of the story of Neo (Keanu Reeves, luckily speaking only marginally more than in the first one) qua The One. All of the regulars from the first one reprise their roles for the sequel (and presumably will for the third part as well since they were filmed more or less concurrently). I didn’t find it terribly difficult to follow, but that could stem from just having seen the previous one two weekends ago. It’s hard to express my opinion of the movie because most of what I said in my earlier review still applies. When I think of The Matrix Reloaded two things immediately spring to mind, one a sound and the other a word: “Enh” and “tedious”.

“Enh” is my catchall expression of indifference. It’s usually accompanied by a shrugging of shoulders and cocking of head. I didn’t find myself worried for Neo or Trinity or any of the other characters in the movie as they faced virtual peril. First, I know there’s a sequel coming and that completely blocks any thought of Neo’s imminent death. Second, all of these characters have morphed into superheros in a world ungoverned by any laws of physics. Trinity falling off a skyscraper and Neo’s 500 miles away in the mountains? Oh, well, he’ll just fly faster than the speed of light to catch her. Neo getting zapped by Agent Smith and about to be turned into one of his clones? Oh, well, he can push Smith’s magic hand out of his body, unlike any other virtual person in The Matrix. These deus ex machina moments force the incongruities of the movie into your awareness. Rather than flowing seemless in a comprehensible world, the events are jerky and require some thought to understand what even transpired. Plus, they make you feel like the writer couldn’t come up with a believable or valid transition and copped out. Finally, these characters aren’t growing at all. They’re the same people as in the first one. Their world is in imminent danger and they’re facing an overwhelming force. What’s their reaction? Calmness, ease, nothing. The closest we get is Neo’s trouble sleeping. Oh yeah, Councillor, he’s definitely human.

“Tedious” stems from the movie’s interminable pacing. “Interminable” doesn’t quite express my boredom last night. The tedium took form in two ways: action and dialogue. The action was way too lengthy and often unnecessary. I know that action brings in the dolts, but they could easily have shortened the scenes quite a bit. I remember actually yawning during the so-called Burly Brawl between Neo and the multiplicity of Smiths and the freeway scene, though well-crafted, should have ended before the blond Milli Vanillis came (by the way, who the hell were those ghost guys, why hadn’t they confronted Neo before, and why do they have special powers that no one else does? Oh wait, they’re special programs. I can just picture FreakyBlondDreadlockTwins.exe or The Architect coding in their TurnIntoGhosts() methods. Uh huh, deus ex machina.) The wire fighting is getting very old, the pinnacle was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it’s all been downhill from there. If you’ve seen the first movie, you’ve seen the fight scenes in this movie—only the locales and weapons have changed.

The dialogue suffers from the same problems as in the original. It’s ponderous, stilted, and pretentious. It sounds deep at first blush, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I’d give examples but I can’t remember any of the lengthy speeches offhand. I do recall thinking that Morpheus’ speech at the Zion rave—where were the glow sticks?—was mercifully short though not terribly inspiring.

There were also countless issues that I found myself pondering while watching the movie, but I won’t go into those details because they come from plot hole and we’re supposed to suspend disbelief. Okay, one gaping one: if these damn machines are smart enough to craft sentient sentinels, burrowing machines that can reach the center of the earth, and the most complex virtual reality ever imagined (including, tellingly, power plants to supply the city with electricity and that need to be taken out of commission in order to get to the source), why the hell can’t they create their own electrical generating plants that would surely create more electricity than billions of humans and the virtual reality “needed” to keep them alive? One commentator on the Web suggested that they (the machines) should have used cows instead of humans since grassland is a much easier virtual reality to construct. Too true!

[UPDATE: There have been some good reviews out there on the Web: check out Jason Kottke‘s brief review and the tons of comments it generated to see a broad selection. From there, I particularly liked this review and this one.]

[UPDATE 2: One other gripe: what is with the clothes/rags and environs in Zion? These people burrow beneath the earth and construct space ships, defense systems, and life support machines but they can’t make decent clothes or design some cleaning machines? Strains belief.]

[UPDATE 3: I’m still not sure if I think Carrie-Anne Moss aka Trinity is pretty or not. She looks really good in her leather bodysuits, but the close-ups emphasize that her hair is that weird length between short-cute and short-weird. I definitely think she looked prettier in Chocolat and Memento.]

Dang!

Just when I get excited about Java again, James Duncan Davidson rekindles my interest in Objective-C.

I think I’m just going to stick with Java and move to Objective-C once I’ve got my bearings right. Can’t hurt, right?