Dilbert on corporate rules – brilliant.
Dilbert on useless corporate rules
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Category Archives: Creativity
PowerPoint, the Bullet Points and the Story
Does the bullet point enhance the story, or destroy the story – the choice is yours.
Many things are best communicated through humour and Rowan Manahan has a great way of communicating the absurdity of much of what I see every day.
Rowan Manahan at Ignite #6
I’m not one of those PowerPoint bashers who blame the tool for the things that people create with it. People need much more help than they currently get with presentation skills. In the hands of a good presenter the tool can make the experience wonderful. I sat in a breakfast session on Saturday morning where a friend amazed us with an overview of the sun. It might not sound like the most exciting subject, but believe me, we were all transfixed. The experience simply wouldn’t have been the same without the wonderful videos and picture, there wasn’t a bullet point in sight. The point that people miss time and time again was that the presentation was complementary to the story, enhancing our experience.
(I suspect my friend wasn’t using PowerPoint, but using Keynote instead, the point still applies though. I’ve seen some pretty dreadful Keynote presentation too)
I’ve put the pictures back
As part of trying to resolve some performance problems on this site I got rid of the pictures in the header.Over the last couple of days I’ve put them back along with some new ones because some people commented that they missed them.
You might be wondering where some of them are, others are a bit more obvious:
This is San Francisco harbour.
This is Grasmere taken from a beach at the Rydal end. It was taken just before we went swimming on a lovely summer evening.
Lavender in our garden which is a favourite with the local bees.
Another garden picture.
On holiday in Italy we were at the top of the Tower of Pisa as the sun set. This is the view back towards the duomo.
A more local picture this time, taken at Cobble Hey gardens in the Through of Bowland.
From north west to north east, a lovely sunset taken from the beach at Banburgh.
One of my favourite places is Borrowdale in the Lake District.
More lake district, looking across Derwentwater towards Borrowdale.
One summer we decided to try out a Maize Maze. This was the sculpture in the middle.
More sculpture, this was on display at Chatsworth, and on sale – we decided not to ask about the price. They are contemporary terracotta warriors designed by Yue Min Jun.
Another sunset, this time at a local nature reserve called Brockhole.
More lake district and more swimming, this time it’s Buttermere, it’s late spring and the water hadn’t really warmed up yet.
From Lindisfarne looking back towards the mainland.
Finishing off with a view from the far north of Scotland at a little hamlet called Tarbet which is the place where you go to if you want to visit Handa island.
The pictures are configured so that you will get a random one for each page and post that you visit. If you want to see different ones then you need to click around a bit.
There are some others and I’m likely to update them from time to time.
Back online now
Teenagers still prefer face-to-face
In an age of highly connected teenagers you’d think, according to the popular stereotype, that young people were living their lives as bedroom recluses unable to be parted from Facebook.
A recent study by Ericsson ConsumerLab of US teenagers paints a different story:
In an era of online social networking, it may come as a surprise that teenagers’ preferred form of communication doesn’t rely on technology. Asked what form of communication they would miss most if it were taken away, the vast majority of respondents replied “face-to-face.” Less than half as many said they would miss texting the most, putting it in second place. Meanwhile, Facebook use came in as only the fourth most popular, after talking on the mobile phone.
Graphically it’s quite stark:
The report goes on to say that although teenagers have a huge array of communications available to them they see them as tools to create real-life interactions. I quite liked the diagram of how Ericcson envisaged how these tools fit into the Teenage Dating Timeline:
Speaking as a father of a couple of UK teenagers it correlates quite closely with the way that I see interactions happening around here.
A fuller summary of the report is here.