I now draw your attention to a little-seen, little-understood feature in Powerpoint.
First off, make sure the drawing toolbar is showing. View —> Toolbars —> Drawing. It will probably be on the bottom of your window.
Now, put a few shapes or something on the slide. Anything will do, but make them visible enough so you can understand what’s going on.
Now, hold down Shift and click on the objects you want to mess with. If you’re just working on a demo, you can select everything with Ctrl+A. You can also draw a box by dragging with the left mouse button down.
Now, click the Draw button on the drawing toolbar. Go to Align or Distribute. Hit Align Center. They now share a central y-axis! It works on all dimensions. Distribute is awesome, too. Especially if you’re tiling something and one gap looks bigger than another. Goofing around is the best way to get a feel for this.
Now, this is all well and good, but the real feature is unlocked with the “Relative to Slide” option. When this is checked, you can select just one (multiple is still allowed) object and click Align Center or something, and it will line up the object(s) with the slide itself. How many times has it been necessary to make sure a chart is in the dead center of the slide? Just hit Align Middle and Align Center once Relative to Slide is checked.
Another cool thing is that you can “tear off” these types of secondary toolbars. Click on Draw again and hover over Align or Distribute. See the blue bar on top of the sub-window that pops up with all the align menu items? Grab on that and tug it upward into the main Powerpoint window. Now it’s a separate toolbar. Once you’ve dropped it into the workspace you can then dock it onto the main top or bottom toolbar by dragging it up to the top of the window. I put mine right beside the Formatting toolbar (next to the animation and Common Tasks buttons).
Also, while you’re at it, hit Draw, go to Snap, and make sure the “To Shape” is depressed. I can’t believe I haven’t seen that before, but it’s a really good way to get lines and shapes to push up to other shapes.
Along the same lines are the Connector AutoShapes, which deserve to be much more prominently featured than they are. Go to the AutoShapes menu within the drawing toolbar and hover over Connectors. I would at least tear off that toolbar to be floating whenever you’re working with these.
Draw two squares or something a little distance apart on the slide. Click the one way arrow (“straight arrow connector”) button to start.
Normal drawing crosshair, right? Nope. Hover over the edge of one of the boxes. There should be blue dots at the sides’ midpoints and a new kind of crosshair. Click on one of the blue dots. Now do the same thing over on the other box.
When you move one of the boxes now, the connector stays attached and aligned. How many presentations have you seen where this is done manually with line segments and arrows?
The elbow and bendy arrows are much better for visuals.
One last thing within the alignment theme: I used to put text boxes inside AutoShapes and then group the objects when I was done getting everything set up. You can actually right-click any AutoShape that has an area (like a box or star) and click “Add Text.” Then, just type into the middle of the shape.
Once you have some text in there, you can do some tuning with the “Text Box” tab of the AutoShape’s properties, including getting the text to go flush with the bottom or top of the shape. The typical text alignment buttons on the Formatting toolbar work for horizontal alignment. You can mess with margins, and one of the best features is the ability to get the text to go vertical with the “Rotate text within the Autoshape” option.
The whole web original content creation business is out of hand, especially in the areas of restaurant reviews and home improvement tips.
Just snoop around on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (coincidence) and see how many companies will pay some sucker $2.00 to write a canned home improvement article.
I just spent some time reading a three page guide on how to clean gutters, the first page of which bemoaned the complexity and specialized tools required. By the end all that seemed to be required was a trash bag, a hose, a spade, a ladder, and some high-grade patience. Seriously, they spent a paragraph saying to tie the trash bag to your ladder. Scooping technique was given two or three paragraphs of treatment spread throughout the document.
The operative thing here is that I just loaded three pages of ads before I figured this out. And by that time, as they say, they already have you.
Apparently, you can license this junk from various content providers. Try a quoted-literal Google search on a special-sounding sentence sometime and see. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. This is essentially the cost of using search engines rather than portals to find information. We pay this gladly because the portals sucked worse.
Remember when we used to use Yahoo as a flipping web directory? You got all puffed up that your Hanson tribute page was on the Yahoo directory under Entertainment -> Music -> Popular -> H -> Hanson -> Fan Pages. It was like running a local phonebook by hand for the entire Internet. This worked for a while.
Web rings were another great phenomenon in this vein of thinking. The visual of the term is perfection: it was like tying kids to an interlocking leash to keep track of them at the zoo.
This is all very postmodern to me, the way things are now. Things are very mushy, less organized.
Websites and their associated starry-eyed entrepreneurs are all lined up for a shot at pulling Paul Graham’s sword out of the stone, seeking to be quickly gobbled up through M&A into a company that buys an idea and sells a business strategy. It works, and it’s efficient. Microsoft shifted to this in standalone software. We kind of got a cafeteria-style portfolio. Corporate America could be a “Microsoft shop” or a “Sun shop” because every time something showed up of interest on that platform, the mother company bought it. Much easier than an uncreative copy. Much more risk-averse than blending everything in-house.
For websites, outsourcing the actual creation of content is kind of where to go. Google News, for all its random Al Jazeera links and spurious stories, kind of does this in a passive, not-directly-commercial way.
Reading a blog like Coding Horror kind of illustrates that a proficient writer can sustain life for a family on advertisements viewed by people who like the content created by a knowledgeable non-professional writer. Who needs a publisher there? This means content creation is going to get really cheap. It’s already getting there, but of course competition will drive up the quality, even at a fixed price per byte.
Paying directly for content is becoming kind of like holding an American Express Gold Card. It’s like you know you could get it for free, but you just don’t want to screw around with the free market and kind of enjoy the perks on the side. I honestly looked at subscribing to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal today at $104/year. Went to money.cnn.com and saw most of the same headlines. But, money.cnn.com sucks and starts a streaming video every time you go to the front page. It’s one of the major reasons my computer stays on mute all the time. It’s ultimately a personal value decision.
By the way, what’s with these credit cards that don’t have “spending limits” but don’t allow you to spend an unlimited amount of money?
Isn’t this like saying “we don’t give credit limits because we choose to approve transactions on an arbitrary, one-by-one basis?” I’d rather have a limit.
I’ve heard people say they have to call their banks in advance of making a large debit purchase to make sure the account doesn’t get locked down at the point of sale.
In Spanish, the last thing you want to hear is “It’s a subjunctive thing.” In Turkish, the last thing you want to hear is “It’s a participial thing.”
“Evde adam peynir yiyor.” = “In the house, the man is eating cheese.”
“Evdeki adam peynir yiyor.” = “The man who is in the house is eating cheese.”
The above sentences are of course subject to possible rookie translation errors, but the idea is there. In English, we have that/which/who. Spanish does this a lot with que, to the point that we as English speakers don’t really have to worry about the grammar too much when we’re learning it.
Turkish of course handles this case with suffixes, like virtually everything else.
Typically the third-person singular of a verb tense doubles as the participle, so “tren duracak” = “the train will stop” is pretty much the same as “the stopping train” or “the train that is stopping” or “the train that will be stopping.” In a language that is effectively spoken in backwards order to English, this gets a bit twisty for the mind.
I think that making participles more inline is actually easier for cognition in native speakers, but it makes for some confusion coming in from the outside.
I know the vast majority of the world really hates this stuff, but I kind of enjoy the canned corporate training modules that occasionally show up as requirements. I guess because I’m a fan of crudely-drawn archetypes. My three favorite ones from the most recent conflict of interest training:
The Bumbling Idiot Who Is Surprisingly Like You, The Man, and for some reason the always-required Cool Guy.
Normally the Cool Guy is kind of a Beelzebub-type character. In this module he just had a cruddy old laptop computer. Not a great Cool Guy.
I personally believe the guy who poses for the Cool Guy is typically something like the creative director of the production. It’s amazing how big of a bunghole you can portray by simply donning a pair of volleyball sunglasses.
I’ve developed a somewhat grouchy habit of measuring the character length of particularly nice, minimalistic prose (witty one-liners, brief stories, etc.) to see if they would work with Twitter. I’m finding a trend that most really entertaining or informative quick thoughts tend to align around the 150-200 character range, of course comfortably out of Twitter’s bounds.
Of course, “Going to the store now… running low on milk!” works just great. No problem there. Tweets are just so cool, it doesn’t really matter what they say.
Shell has apparently recently enabled a new multi-tier web filtering architecture. You have a few things like, say, a gaming website or something, that gets an “What you think you doin’, homes?” sort of outright denial. They’re not as bad as KISD’s old “BESS” system that would block things just based on having “game” in the URL. This was of course a false positive machine. Something educational like Conway’s Game of Life would never get through.
But now, they have a second-tier filter, devoted to things such as Facebook, which now says “Business purposes only, are you using this for business purposes?” and you have to click a little button that says, “Yes, I am prepared to lie and say that I am using this for business purposes.” Or something like that. I neither read the announcement nor clicked the button.
It’s high time for companies to realize that “business purposes” should include reinforcing sanity and keeping plugged in to the world outside of work. Especially for someone in my situation, but for anyone that is true. And imagine how much unofficial, undocumented recruiting work goes on between new hires and people still in college (still a pretty major demographic on Facebook, of course; who else has the spare time in those quantities and regularity?).
Shell got pissed that employees started using Facebook instead of the internal social networking platform that was installed by IT on our intranet. What’s it called? MyShell.
I understand. The employee time lost on Facebook is probably out of control. Especially now with the chat functions. They can keep you on the page not clicking on ads all day.
There is nothing at all wrong with MyShell, except, as the ghost of Academic Decathlon whispers in my ear, the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of its nodes. It’s hard to recreate Facebook. I mean, look, probably half or more of Facebook’s active members actively and passionately carp about how terrible Facebook has become, but virtually nobody is willing to jump ship and swim elsewhere.
Why? Simply the threat of say halving one’s personal network would be devastating to the utility of a service. This is what made what the news and other media “portals” did with social networking so obscenely short-sighted and greedy. The very idea of joining some “MyFoxNews” network with two of your friends and tweeting back and forth in a virtual environment not big enough for Barbie and Ken after a donut run is completely absurd.
Just like owning a stock, or joining a country club, or buying a gaming system, getting into anything that costs a limited resource (money, time, …) requires faith.
This is why you see the “fanboy” concept arise on the Internet. Fanboys fanboy in an attempt to build their network up. If you joined Facebook early on, you became Facebook’s personal PR guy, drumming up business, building friend counts, posting on everyone’s wall, etc. Because you want it to work. Otherwise, you screwed up and will have to start over somewhere else.
So, I remember Gabe and Tycho talking about how absurd it was to troll boards arguing about the relative benefits of different game platforms. True enough regarding the trolling, but it’s really just the unconstructive alpha male version of trying to get your friends on the boat. You don’t want to hear that the Genesis has better graphics, because clearly Mario is better than Sonic. What you’re really saying is you want to have everyone playing your game because it’s more fun that way.
There needs to be a specific category of friendship for those who will reliably tell you if you have something on your face, nose, or teeth. Especially at work, it’s hard to know if anyone is covering you. Once it happens, you can pretty much relax in all cases when that person is around.
I think of this as I down a çok güzel chunk of Turkish chocolate and get that tell-tale back-of-hand smear of molten chocolate. You have to wonder if there’s more where that came from. But, aside from going all the way to the restroom across the floor (hence advertising any possible malady to the whole office), there aren’t a lot of options.
