November | 2007 | Dr. Marcus Nohlberg's Blog

Archive for November, 2007

Some Hints on Presentations

I love presentations. But only the good ones. That means that my love mostly go unanswered in a world where PowerPoint reigns supreme, and where people simply create poor (or worthless) slides. And never rehearse. Or care about making a point. Or keep their text to a minimum. Or even care if the listeners understand the subject, at all.

I tend to drill my students rather hard on the subject. I am a firm believer in the rule of seven, which basically means that you can keep up a (forced) interest for about seven minutes, meaning that you should somewhat change pace/area or something at least every seven minutes to help you audience be able to understand the subject. Far better, of course, is to be interesting all the time, but that is HARD.

My own personal solution to the major problem with boring presentations is to use mindmaps. It doesn’t help with all the problems, but it does make the presentation seem more focused and easy to follow, and the novelty itself makes the audience note it more.

I’ve just seen an extremely good presentation by Alexi Kapterev that should be mandatory for everyone who ever is going to use powerpoint to take a look at.

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November 18, 2007 at 16:02 2 comments

Dilbert & Security

At times Dilbert has some nice comments on security… Todays comic is simply great!

November 16, 2007 at 10:28 Leave a comment

Stora Nyheter: Greta Kom På Tredje Plats i Maxihund 2007

Fick just e-post om att Greta kom på tredje plats i Maxihund 2007 (Skövde). Vet inte mycket statistik om antalet röstande etc., men om jag såg rätt så var det i konkurrens med omkring 130 andra hundar, så det är sannerligen inte dåligt!

Återkommer när jag vet mer om prisutdelning, vad vi vunnit etc.

Tack till alla som röstade!

November 15, 2007 at 15:26 Leave a comment

Surprisingly Good Service From Lidl

A little more than two years ago I bought a USB-drive from Lidl. It was a really good price at the time, for 300GB’s, and I really could not resist the offer. They only got like five at the store, but I was first in line so I actually got two (one for my brother in law too). When it comes to products from Lidl, I really did not think all that much about warranty… They are, you know, cheap. The manufacturer where the mystic “Targus”, and no real information was available on the net. The disk worked fine, however, but was quite loud. After getting my new iMac, and a new 1TB external drive (Western Digital Home, silent and a really good buy!) the old Targus drive was “retired” as a drive to which I could do complete system backups using ?carbon copy cloner?. And it worked nicely, for a couple if weeks. Then the Targus died. It simply stopped working, could not be formatted and, well, did not work.
I thought, hey, what the hell, Lidl ARE offering a three-year warranty! Might as well check it out. I couldn’t find the reciet, though, but I called Lidl and asked for advice. I was told to call Targus directly. At Targus I got to talk to a person from Denmark, making the conversation kind of difficult, but manageable. I was told to send the drive, and power adapter, to a company in Sweden (CLC Infocare), they would then send the drive to Germany, where it would be repaired and sent to me. I paid for the cheapest possible postage (74 sek) and sent it away, not expecting to get it back for a couple of months… But, much to my surprise, it was delivered to me this Wednesday (even if I wasn’t at home to pick it up). They had exchanged the old, broken, 300GB drive with a new 320GB one. And it seems to work nicely now, even if it is as loud as before…
However, I am really impressed by Lidl’s customer care, actually. THAT is something I did not expect to say at all…

November 9, 2007 at 12:02 Leave a comment