Category: Uncategorized

[via AKMA] I’m going to be at the Evans Data Corporation’s Developer Relations Conference in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday, which means that it’s very likely that I will have to sit through who-knows-how-many PowerPoint presentations. Perhaps I should bring along a USB key loaded with Gary Turner’s slide for derailing PowerPoint presentations, pictured below:

Gary writes:

This should create the required disturbance in the PowerPoint

forcefield and, with a little luck, force them to let go of the wheel

and actually talk to you as humans without the crutch of 78 slides to make a point that should take only 3.

I’ve written about one of the unintended consequences of PowerPoint before in an entry titled The Breakup Style of PowerPoint, from which David Byrne (yup, the Talking Heads guy) borrowed for his presentation. Check it out!

Once again, another reminder about the meetup this Sunday. The details:

We’ll be the table with the accordion, which should make us hard to miss, even though they passed a law saying that the piano accordion is the official instrument of San Francisco back in 1990.

The invitation

is open to all. We’ll probably talk a little tech if enough techies

show up, but it’s really a “Hey, we’re in town and we’d like to see

you” kind of gathering. I plan to have the accordion with me, so it’s

likely there will be some kind of performance. The timing may not be

the hottest — this Sunday is Superbowl XL — but it’s the only day

that Ross and I could be available this trip.

(Boss Ross and I will be in San

Francisco to catch the Evans Data Developer Relations

Conference on Monday and Tuesday, and Wendy and I are making

a mini-vacation of the trip.)

If you’re planning to

come, please let me know via

email or in the comments so we know how much room to set

aside!

For my more technical readers, I’ve posted part 2 of my notes from the Bell Mobility/ESRI Location-Based Services seminar on the blog I get paid to write, The Farm.

In case you missed part 1, those notes are here.

Click to see it at full size.

Before I begin, here are the meetup details:

The invitation is open to all. We’ll probably talk a little tech if enough techies show up, but it’s really a “Hey, we’re in town and we’d like to see you” kind of gathering. I plan to have the accordion with me, so it’s likely there will be some kind of performance. The timing may not be the hottest — this Sunday is Superbowl XL — but it’s the only day that Ross and I could be available this trip.

(Boss Ross and I will be in San Francisco to catch the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference on Monday and Tuesday, and Wendy and I are making a mini-vacation of the trip.)

If you’re planning to come, please let me know via email or in the comments so we know how much room to set aside!

These days, if you go to any developer conference where the focus isn’t on “emerging technologies” and not “the enterprise” (read: boring old accounting software and most Microsoft conferences), you’ll see a lot of Macintosh laptops. Mac OS X hasn’t even been out five years — the fifth anniversary will be this March — but it’s already become the preferred platform of the alpha geek.

It wasn’t always this way. The macho undercurrent of nerd culture — quit laughing, there actually is one — is one of one-upmanship and showboating one’s IQ and mental fortitude, which is counter to the user-friendliness and aesthetics of the Mac. Hence the remark a lot of hackers used to make: “Macs are for fags”.

Nowadays, the only people who’d say that are the folk behind this short movie: Broke Mac Mountain [2.3 MB Quicktime, safe for most non-uptight workplaces]. Tech support was never so man-on-man tender!

Click the image to watch the movie.

In case you were wondering, Broke Mac Mountain is the creation of the comedy troupe Mighty McPilgrim.

New comic series typically take months before they produce a strip that makes you sit up, take notice and say “hey, that’s interesting”, and that goes double for webcomics. So when I discovered that the Home on the Strange strip shown below is only the fourth one in the series, I was completely surprised. The first four panels appear below; click the image to read the whole thing…

More later…