My blog has been dormant for the past six months, as I have embarked on a series of new management adventures. However as things are thawing out, I’m back to reflect on the technical management world that is my work life.
I’m guilty of using this phrase:
Which leaves the question: can I be trusted as an engineer? I hope so…
Tags: Dilbert
xkcd explains how computer people actually solve computer problems:
I love this Intel ad:
This is a great take on the techie world. The people who are famous in my world, for example Whitfield Diffie, are people who the rest of the world has never heard of.
Tags: Video
After five glorious years with my old laptop, it finally became too slow to do much of anything. Finally, I decided it was time and bought a new one. Today I type this blog from a new vanilla ThinkPad. Getting a new laptop is nice, but it also allows me to do something I have been putting off for a while: starting fresh. Here’s what I’m planning to do now I get the opportunity.
Operating System: Ubuntu 9.0.4 (Jaunty)
One year ago I found my old ThinkPad was running very slow under Windows. I ran across Ubuntu’s dual boot installer and fell in love. Ubuntu ran so much faster on my machine that I almost immediately switched over. However, I found that I still needed Windows for a few tasks, most importantly synchronization with my iPhone. This is why I am not just installing Linux on my laptop, but I’m taking advantage of virtualization.
Virtual Machine Environment: VirtualBox
I chose VirtualBox because it is nicely full featured and cheaper than VMWare Workstation. One of the key features is it’s support for remote USB devices. I use this to sync my iPhone on Vista.
VM 1: Windows Vista Business
I have Vista running in a virtual machine for things like iTunes that don’t work on Linux. It performs fairly poorly as a guest operating system, but it gets the job done. Still, it likes to consume 100% of one of my CPU cores at all times.
VM 2: Windows 7 Beta
I figured I would use the excuse to spinup Windows 7. To be honest, it’s not terribly more exciting than Windows Vista. So it’s sitting around my computer chilling. Maybe some day I will spin it up again. 
PowerPoint animations reduce retention, from ARS Technica:
Seems turns out to be the key word in that sentence, at least according to the study. The authors created a single PowerPoint presentation, and then eliminated the animations from it (on average, there were 3.4 animations per slide). They then recorded a single sound track and synched it to both presentations, so that the class would be identical except for the animations. Five weeks before the experiment, the class was given a quiz on the topic to provide a baseline assessment of knowledge on the topic (which was information security and privacy issues); the quiz was given a second time following the presentation.
Both presentations dramatically improved the students’ scores, which were a bit below 40 percent correct in the first administration of the quiz. But the animated presentation brought scores up to 71 percent, while the animation-free version got them to 82 percent. Of the nine questions, only one saw the animated group outperform their static peers.
This is facinating. I’ve been guilty of teaching using effects to reveal each bullet point. However, it seems like our brains like the data up front. In the area of PowerPoint, it appears that less equals more.