some really interesting and useful stuff

Just thought I might share some cool stuff that I found in my travels in the internets...

Death by PowerPoint

From: thecroaker, 3 months ago

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Fighting death by PowerPoint... How to make a presentation and not to bore your audience to death.


Link: SlideShare Link

I just found this today. I think we can all learn something from this, people.

I found another rule that is also, in the words of my CS1 professor, "perfectly valid." It somewhat contradicts what the above says, but it applies specifically to sales pitches and proposals. It is called the 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides, 20 minutes, with font size no smaller than 30 point. Convincing, and very true. Of course, there's the one rule about presentations: if you are not passionate and/or knowledgeable enough about your topic to give an oral presentation without powerpoint, don't present at all.

On a different note, if you have not heard about TED, you really should: it's one of the most inspiring things I've found in the Net. It is a conference with talks by the greatest people on the planet today, sharing ideas that can change the world. Of particular note is the Talks section, where you can actually watch videos of said talks; they can definitely get you thinking. It is probably one of the best ways to procrastinate online, in my opinion.

Finally, there is woot! For those not in the know, woot! is a rather unique site. It offers one, and only one, item for sale every day, at a fairly cheap price, though in limited quantity. They also offer one creative shirt a day. Now sometimes they have what's called a "woot-off", where lots of items are up for sale in a single day, especially the coveted "random bag of crap", which could be anything, from , well, a piece of crap, to whatever your imagination holds, all for the price of $1 each. I recently was lucky enough to get only 1 of these, which is a feat in itself (you really should get three), since it immediately sells out within mere seconds of its appearance: people around the world are participating in it as well, and when it appears, the site servers immediately flood with orders, to the point of almost overloading the servers and certainly overloading its bandwidth. So, yeah, it's all good.

I'll post more stuff later.