Scoot's Blog

PresentationZen Design

I have just finished reading Garr Reynolds PresentationZen Design which was an excellent follow-up to PresentationZen.

Image from Garr Reynolds site PresentationZen

The book is very easy to read and provides useful insight from Garr as well as other experts in this area. So what is the book all about? Firstly it provides a great grounding why design matters for you presentations and secondly it goes into how you can improve your presentation design following some simple rules or guidelines. The book really makes you think about your presentation and how can they be improved. I think this is particularly important given the amount of presentations I have written, used and attended where text takes over the screen with the focus on this rather than the presenters. The good thing is over the last 2-3 years I have seen a change happen in technical presentations where less content in terms of text, bullet points and information overload.

Hopefully the presentations I give today are an improvement and will continue that way

The book can be found on Amazon here

Boots

Now had my salomon boots for a month or two and have to say they have impressed me. They are very light, sturdy but strong and also very capable given the current weather conditions.

Image from Salomon Website

http://www.salomon.com/uk/?#/footwear/footwear/trekking/cosmic-4d-gtx

The boots have great grip and have coped very well in the snow and ice conditions whilst providing excellent ankle support plus have kept my feet nice and warm even with normal socks. In comparison with my timberland boots these have provided greater grip and have provided much better weather protection. Note the timberlands are old so to be fair I am sure the newer boots from Timberland would be able to cover these two issues without problem.

I decided to get these boots after seeing them twice on the Gadget Show where they came highly recommended so this really swayed my decision. They are quite expensive, but so far I cannot fault them The one thing that caught my eye was how the presenters were able to jog in these boots. Although I won’t be jogging in them they certainly allow you to run in them if needed, and this prove useful when I needed to run up our snow covered road to help push LCJ’s nanna car that had got stuck. They also help with grip whilst pushing the car as well.

Highly Recommended 9/10

Artist in the making

Here are some examples of LCJ artwork from a recent afternoon playing. As you can see he might have had some help from us

Social Networking presentation

Today was about finishing my presentation on social networking for the premium support team at work tomorrow. All was going well until I needed to depict tagging and dogears. So after having a quick look around on the web and not finding a royalty-free / free image of either I decided the only option was to take my own photos. I then had to make a decision quick and easy or thoughtful and professional. As time was against me it was going to be quick and dirty to get some images I wanted.

The first one was a simple request of a pick of a dogear, this is basically when someone folds the corner of a page in a book over, so first I grabbed an appropriate book in the shape of Wikinomics. Book set and it did pained me to dogear the book but these things need to be done. After a short time this was the image a I used, it was dark and moody due to no flash…

dogear

The second image was the need for a depiction of tagging so out came the post it notes and pens and off I went to produce some very simple tags, this was the outcome..

tagging

Let’s hope the presentation as a whole works, and I am loving using Keynote in anger for the first time..

Update on MBP so far

A few days have passed since the MacBook Pro order and I thought I would write a quick update for everyone. The nice UPS man called at about 3pm on Wednesday this week with two boxes from my friends at Apple. The boxes contained all I had ordered including incase sleeve, vga adapter, wacom bamboo and MacBook Pro. 

Unpacking was the usual pleasure they just know how to design fab packaging for Apple product, may be that’s where my money goes when you buy one of their products

MacBook Pro in a box

Once out of the box it was time to copy my data from the original MacBook so that I could get working straight away.

Software Update in progress

Data transfer

Once all things were transfer I installed iLife 09, iWork 09, Aperture, OpenOffice and Lotus Symphony. I then spent the rest of the evening installing the Bamboo software for the tablet and testing out the capabilities. I have only played with this a few time and only for a short period of time so will write an indepth review in a week or so. First impressions are its fab and looking forward to creating some pictures with it.

Pleased so far with the purchases and the screen is fab more to follow over the coming weeks

New Years Day 2009

so 2009 is here, after some fizzy stuff last night along with I Am Legend we watched the fireworks for London on the box and then retired after numerous text messages plus a couple of phone calls. Must admit I was surprised by I Am Legend it was a different delivery to what I had expected, but a very good film.

So on NYD we decided that it was worth a trip to Sweden to pickup some essential items for the house, OK it wasn’t really Sweden it was Little Sweden or Ikea to most people. So off we went up the A40 then North Circ until we reached Wembley and the Ikea store. To our surprise the store car park was fairly empty and we found a Family parking space and wandered into the store to purchase the following:

• Media Box
• Wardrobe
• Childs Table & Chairs
• Magnetic Board
• Mirror
• Shoe boxes

When we arrived we remembered that we were going to buy a new mattress as well for our bedroom, but forgot to check the size, damn that’s not good. So will have to order online instead.

Wandered around and by the time we had got to the cafe we had a trolley full and none of it was on the list, please note this was before we had been down to the market place where we normally get sidetracked

So coffee, tea and muffins etc were consumed and Cameron had a good run around, plus had fun organising the stools in the children’s area. Still it was relatively empty which was good so down a floor to the market place to get those essentials or not  

Twenty minutes later we are in the warehouse looking for the children’s table and chair, after having checked with staff who pointed us in the right direction all good loaded it is time to head to the checkouts. God I cannot believe it no queues

Several pounds later we are back in the car park with a grumpy boy and heading home with a few of the following things:

• Children’s table and chairs
• Veggie peeler
• Onion slicer
• Chef Pan
• Shoe boxes
• Media Storage box
• Plate (to replace one broken by cameron)
• Bag clips
• Mat
• Cot Duvet
• Picture frame
• Bedlinen

So a word of warning, Ikea is dangerous, very dangerous to your wallet. Or am I a sucker for all things swedish?

Camera

So on Saturday got my camera out, the first time for about two months to take a few snaps of the little boy and his reaction to the Xmas tree, now that these have been taken I must get round to downloading them to my mac to have a play to see if any are up to the job. Its been so long since I have used my camera in anger that I have decided that over the Xmas period I will try and take at least 10 photo’s a day on general stuff to get my eye back in. I will also start looking at more abstract subjects so that I can start to build a stock photo library for my presentations.

Why the stock library? Well that has come about when I was looking for some photos for a presentation and found it very difficult to find free one, although there are lots of sites that do have free photos some times they just don’t have the style of images I want. As you can expect all the really good shots cost money which is fair enough. So  decided that how about tackling some of my need by taking my own photos. 

We will need to wait and see how I get on, I also must sort out my current photo libraries as they are in the usual chaotic mess, I feel the need for another clear down and reorganise so I can find the photos I want.

Leopard taken in Kenya

countdown continues

so days are slipping away fast and on Friday its the little boys first Xmas concert at nursery so that will be interesting how they will herd so many cats, I predict chaos  

Just jazzed up one of my presentations on Lotus Quickr to take some of the words out to be replaced by visuals, will see how it works tomorrow. I am hope to pick another presentation and spend some serious time revamping to see if I can make wholesale changes to bring it away from the boring/dull technical presentations that I give on an almost daily basis. Watch this space to see what comes of both of these activities. I can see it now and the techies will say its too marketing, which I will have to disagree with as why do they need the word written down if I am presenting the fact verbally. The plan would be to provide the recipient with a document to confirm the details and not a soft copy of the presentation.

iPhone

So had the iPhone for about two months now and I am very happy so far with the device. Having used many device manufacturers in the past and have seen how some of my friends and colleagues get on with their devices I can say that it is up with the other main vendors, there are pro and cons of the iPhone and I suspect that some will be addressed over time.

iphone

I do find it interesting that many people have stated that the camera is not very good, but I would counter this argument that not many cameras are very good phones OK may be thats not fair, but in reality if I want to take a decent picture I will always use a camera and not a phone (regardless of make of phone) as cameras will alway take better pictures. I might be proven wrong there, but only time will tell. I have used many phones to take pictures and it is great to capture that moment when this is the only device available, so the picture quality is not fantastic, but you do get the moment and any picture is better than no picture. 

So here are the things I like so far:

• Design – Overall fab design and excellent UI / UX
• Apple Integration – It just works so well with my MacBook and Mobile.Me. 
• Phone quality  - reasonable call quality so far, but have had a few drop outs, but suspect more to do with carrier
• iPod – Yes I am a fan of iPods, I have three plus the iPhone and each has its place. For short trips I use it a lot, but on longer journeys I would take my 8GB Nano as its is more convenient on planes etc and won’t drain the battery on my phone.

Things that are not so great:

• Locked to a Carrier – This is pain in the backside, I wish this would be sorted for the UK as it restricts users choice. To overcome this I have brought on Pay as you Go and then purchased a SIM adpater by TurboSIM to allow for my work vodafone sim to be used in the iPhone. The TurboSIM is a no-cut sim adapter that works great. There are some downsides to using this solution, software updates to the iPhone are likely to break the adapter requiring an update to the TurboSIM software. You need to swap back to your O2 SIM to be able to sync with iTunes
• Calls not getting through when using some of the applications. I have seen this happen when browsing my mail or surfacing the web.