Finally got my OSCON presentations submitted; gnat's note had the intended effect :-) One is on OpenInteract, another on SPOPS. We'll see.
Transplanted the keyboard from my LCD-not-functioning NEC laptop to the LCD-functioning-but-keyboard-borked NEC laptop. And now I have a functioning laptop again. If this thing holds up and I'm able to get to San Diego I'll be one of those 1337 folks with wireless.
I get very nervous when taking apart laptops. With PCs, I've not only done it a million times but I know that if I screw something up it's easily replacable. With laptops, once you screw something up you're out some serious $$ and you can't even do it yourself. And with these (they're 5+ years old) I don't even know if they can be fixed.
From someone's note here (Dave?) I started poking around with kpresenter. It seems decent enough, but I'm always afeard of playing with software like this because it's got so many time-sucking bells and whistles. I might stick with HTML + Javascript because I can tarball it up and run it on anything, even a Win32 machine if the aforementioned laptop breaks down. Another (X11 only) alternative might be Magic Point, which keeps everything in plaintext but has an option for generating postscript and it has a simple viewer for transitions, etc. I suppose the thing to do is keep it in plaintext until everything is settled, then move it to whatever platform I'll use.
I saw Jurassic Park III the other night. I figured it was probably dumb, but I remembered reading a review (from one of the Washington Post folks, I think) saying that it was a sparser but more fun dinosaur movie. I figured anything with lots of dinosaur action can't be all bad. I was wrong. Many of the action scenes were great, but they were far outweighed by the insulting "plot" and "motivations." I feel dumber for having rented it.
Re:kpresenter
lachoy on 2002-02-18T22:57:12
The point about effective presentations is a general business one, so one of the umpteen thousand business-help folks probably made the message in 36-point arial
:-) But it is an excellent point, so I think I'll keep plugging away with KPresenter and see how it goes. This reminds me of an article I read a few months ago in the New Yorker about how Powerpoint has changed business communication. (Unfortunately, the New Yorker doesn't seem to have back issues online. Lame.) Not just PPT, but computer-aided presentations in general. If people aren't fed bite-sized pieces of information, if the presentation is more than 3-5 bullets per page, or any of the other ways that default presentations get created, people don't pay attention and don't learn. This was, of course, mostly anecdotal, but it went into some detail as to why this was so and provided some historical background to the world of presentations. Interesting stuff.
Re:kpresenter
paulg on 2002-02-19T09:26:19
I'm not terribly experienced in giving presentations, but I do subscribe to the 'bullet at a time' approach. I remember when I was at University that some lecturers would put up OHP acetates containing huge blocks of text and then proceed simply to read through them. Not really the best way to impart the message, but great for students who want a complete set of notes, as we'd just copy it all down.
We're pretty much an MS shop at work here, so PPT is the only software I've used. I've got mixed feelings about it. As with any display-oriented software, it's far too easy to fall into the trap of worrying about the look rather than the content; it's also far too easy to end up with a distracting mess full of animations and transitions (not to mention weird colours and fonts).
