Mike Pulsifer Photography mike-pulsifer.org

25Apr/080

Envisioning Information

I've recently finished reading Envisioning Information and it's a book I highly recommend no matter how you're presenting information. Now, as far as presentations are concerned, the most valuable chapter is that discussing color. There is a lot of the book that advocates creating easy to read, yet condense tables and other displays of information. However, such displays are not appropriate for slides because the audience would be spending most of their efforts reading instead of listening. The valuable lesson, though, is condensing the message into a simple and easy to read display.

22Apr/080

Oh Deer…

I got this in my email today.  It was funny enough that I had to share...

For those of you who hunt deer, want to pet deer, or anything in between....this is too funny! Names have been removed to protect the stupid! This is an actual letter from someone who writes, and farms.

I had the idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it.

 The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not 4 feet away), it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down) then hog tie it and transport it home.

 I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it. After about 20 minutes, my deer showed up -- 3 of them. I picked out a likely looking one, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me.

I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation.

I took a step towards it...it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and then received an education.

The first thing  that I learned is that, while a deer may just stand there look at you funny while you rope it; they are spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope. That deer EXPLODED.

The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope and with some dignity. A deer-- no chance. That thing ran, bucked, twisted, and pulled. There was no controlling it, and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined.

The third thing I learned, the only upside, is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals.

A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head mostly blinded me. At that point, I had lost my taste for corn-fed venison & I just wanted to get that devil creature off the end of that rope.

I figured that if I just let it go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die slow and painfully somewhere.

At the time, there was no love at all between that deer and me. At that moment, I hated the thing, and I would venture a guess that the feeling was mutual.

Despite the gash in my head and the several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer's momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think clearly enough to recognize that there was a small chance that I shared some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in. I didn't want the deer to suffer a slow death, so I managed to get it lined back up in between my truck and the feeder - a little trap I had set before hand...kind of like a squeeze chute.  

I got it to back in there and I started moving up so I could get my rope back.

The fourth thing I learned! Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years would have thought that a deer would bite somebody, so I was very surprised when I reached up there to grab that rope and the deer grabbed hold of my wrist.

Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse where they just bite you and then let go. A deer bites you and shakes its head; almost like a pit bull. They bite HARD and it hurts.

The proper thing to do when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back slowly. I tried screaming and shaking instead. My method was ineffective.

It seems like the deer was biting and shaking for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds.

I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that claim by now) tricked it. While I kept it busy tearing the bejesus out of my right arm, I reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose. 

 That was when I got my fifth  lesson in deer behavior for the day.  Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right up on their back feet, strike right about head and shoulder level, and their hooves are surprisingly sharp. And needless to say, they hurt like hell!

I learned a long time ago that, when an animal,  like a horse, --strikes at you with their hooves and you cannot get away easily, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and make an aggressive move towards the animal. This will usually cause them to back down a bit so you can escape.

This was not a horse. This was a deer, so obviously, such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy. I screamed like a woman and tried to turn and run.

The reason I had always been told NOT to try to turn and run from a horse that paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head.

Deer may not be so different from horses after all, besides being twice as strong and 3 times as evil, because the second I turned to run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down.

Lesson six...  Now, when a deer paws at you and knocks you down, it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What they do instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you while you are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head. I finally managed to crawl under the truck and the deer went away.

So now I know why when people go deer hunting they bring a rifle with a scope so that they can be somewhat equal to the Prey.

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15Apr/080

Mac Consumer Market Share Breaks 20%

Well, this ought to give the Microsoft cultists seizures.  According to Piper Jaffray's chief Apple analyst, the Mac's market share in the consumer space is now at 21% in the US and 10% world-wide.  Almost every day, I'm surrounded by people who consider using any non-Microsoft product is heresy.  Much to their chagrin, I was able to get Safari to our list of supported browsers.  If they had their way, we would support only Internet Explorer and leave any Mac or Linux user to basically screw themselves.  Such closed minds are a wonderful thing to waste and have no place in our line of work.

9Apr/080

Rockefeller: An Embarrassment To West Virginia

Proving yet again that our senator, Jay Rockefeller has no shame, he told the Charleston Gazette,

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit.  What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

This is beyond the pale.  For the sake of the many veterans in this state, this shameful waste of space needs to vacate his senate seat.  Now.

Of course, if the party affiliations were reversed, the press and the democrats would have been calling for his resignation and not quit until he caved.

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9Apr/080

Obama’s Red Tendencies

It's been no secret that Obama is one of the most left-wing members of the Senate.  However, just how far left wasn't as clear before as it is now.  In fact, he's not that far removed from Robert Mugabe.

Apparently, Obama framed his value system around those of his communist father'sPrestoPundit dug into Obama's book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which spurred the following questions:

 

There's a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance.  What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college?  Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio- political counselor in high school?  Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of "the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialsm", in college?  Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?

And there is more mystery in the book.  Why does Obama consider working in a consulting house for international business like being "a spy behind enemy lines?"  Why does he repeatedly find it so hard to explain his political views to others?  Why was he driven to become a left-aligned political organizer?  It's a question Obama again and again can't seem to answer to the satisfaction of the interlocutors in his own memoir.

 

Those are very important questions.  This source of his values advocated the following:

  • Communal ownership of the land and forced confiscation of private land.
  • Taxing citizens as much as 100%.
  • Pursuing an "active" program to achieve a classless society.

Those are just a few of the many disturbing political stances.  If we let this man occupy the White House, this country would be on the fast track to ruin.

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4Apr/080

How Much Are You Worth In Bed?

With the Spitzer scandal, you've got to figure that something like this was going to crop up (click the image to see how much you're worth):

 bedroom toys
Powered By Best Vibrators

(I originally found this at www.coalitionoftheswilling.net)

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4Apr/081

Presentation Hell

 

One of my areas of personal improvement of late has been in the area of improving the way I give presentations.  This was spurred on by being fed up with having to endure presentations such as the one below (go to the original at pcweenies.com).

 

Presentation Hell

Presentation Hell

 

 

This happens all too often and it happens everywhere.  Nobody wants to watch someone else read from their slides.  It detracts from the presentation and conveys to the audience the sense that either the presenter doesn't really know what they're talking about or they weren't considerate enough to prepare ahead of time.  Besides, if the information is going to be read word for word, the presenter might as well just give hand-outs and not bother saying a word because the spoken presentation doesn't contribute to the audience's understanding of the material.

 

One book I would recommend to anyone that gives presentations with slides is Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds.  In this book, the author promotes keeping the slides simple, yet powerful.  Slides should help reinforce what the presenter is saying and not "be the presentation," if you will.  If the audience is reading the slides or putting effort into interpreting a complex chart or graph, then they're not listening to the person speaking.  If the audience isn't listening, they're not paying attention to the presentation.

 

Making slides that are simple, yet effective isn't easy.  It's far easier (and lazier) to just slap a bunch of bullet points on the slides.  However, bullet points are the easiest way to kill your presentation.  I'm not saying there's never any value in them.  They need to be used judiciously, intelligently, and sparingly.

 

This is something I will be blogging about a lot more as time goes on.

2Apr/080

Ewww

Now April Fools is behind us, let me just say I feel dirty after that "Switching" post.

1Apr/080

Switchin’ Back

I've been doing a fair bit of thinking lately, and perhaps my previous post about Windows users was a bit hasty.  You see, Windows does have 90% of the market.  That must mean they're doing something right.  There's no way they would have gotten that market share without being the best platform.

 

Well, the point is, I'm switching back to Windows and to make sure the switch back is done right, I'm promising not to install any non-Microsoft software if there's a Microsoft product in that space. In fact, here's what I'll be replacing my Apple, Adobe, RealMac software library with:

 

  • Windows Vista Ultimate (If you think about it, $400 is a steal)
  • Office 2007 Ultimate
  • the Expression Suite
  • Internet Explorer
  • Windows Media Player
  • Zune (yes, screw the iPod)

 

Market share doesn't lie.  Open standards don't mean jack.  Let Microsoft define the standard.  Interoperability doesn't matter either.  Think about it.  If you're not using Windows, you're probably just some heretical zealot trying to brainwash other people into using something twice as expensive and proprietary with no software options.