PTP Blog

if you’re ever faced with trotting out Tufte vs. some other means for conveying why maybe Power Point isn’t the best way to communicate, take a look at this:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

And read more over at the author’s site.

thanks to Presentation Zen for the link

I upgraded to Vista today, and was suprised to find that my machine feels more responsive than it did under XP. Even more interesting is that under Vista, Firefox runs far better - using less memory, not crashing, etc. It even deals with PDFs far better than Firefox did under XP.

I’ve only used the OS for a few hours, so the novelty may wear off shortly, but I’ll post back here with more notes as I get a feel for whether this is a worthwhile upgrade or mostly windows dressing.

We’re in the middle of our Community Organizing and Technology Institute right now. Part of the program involves participating organizations working on a technology project, and as is often the case, a lot of people are interested in improving some aspect of database use in their organization.

Today, I got a question that I don’t have a good answer to - “what does it cost to work with a consultant to build a database?”

The question comes up a lot, and we say that we don’t have a good answer for that because there are just too many variables involved, but one of the biggest unknowns on the pricing question for us is what a “good consultant” should cost for an “average” database project.

By good, I mean someone who knows the technology well, has experience doing the kind of work they’re contracting to do, has good “bedside” manner/can talk to the organization in terms that non-techies can understand, and ideally has some understand of community organizing. I also tend to think that someone who’s good isn’t going to charge an organization for their learning curve, is up-front about projected hours and costs, and can work with the organization up-front to develop clear milestones and a process for coming to agreement on whether each milestone has been reached.

I don’t think that that’s asking too much, but all too often, I hear stories about database consultant relationships that start well, but end poorly because of cost/time/communication issues.

And so, I’m asking you all - what ballpark do give for building a custom database?

my first thought on opening Outlook 2007 was “hey, they made it look like Entourage.”

People are either going to love or hate the new outlook interface, I haven’t decided yet.

I will say that it is much more readable - the font and style changes are much more comfortable to look at, and generally, the application looks less crazy.

More after I’ve used it for a few days.

clearly, I must be crazy, because I’m about to install Office 2007, which will likely guarantee that I’ll be completely unproductive for the next few days weeks months if what I’ve read is true. The reviews I’ve seen so far say that there are some substantial differences in the new office applications, especially in terms of where menus and commands are located. Apparently, the new version of Office does away with menus entirely.

So, why am I doing this? Well, one is to give it a whirl so that when people ask about Office 2007, I can answer. The other reason is that I suspect the learning curve is going to be so steep as to render upgrading a non-option for most folks, which to my way of thinking increases the likelihood that open source software can get more of a toe-hold in more organizations.