I sometimes think this kind of thing sounds like a lot of fun. I wouldn't fret the competitiveness - 75% of the people in any race I've ever run are there to feel good and have fun, and maybe set a personal best time.
I'm probably overly confident about how easily I could return to swimming a fairly long distance.
Somewhere out there, there's a Swedish swimming instructor just dying to test that confidence and provide fodder for the blog.
triathlon. Is that totally crazy?
I vote yes. But I also think my cow-orkers who take the stairs to the 4th or 5th floors instead of the elevator are a bit unbalanced, so.
Is that totally crazy?
Well, there's the Sifu Tweety abuse to consider.
From my very limited experience of watching 3 or 4 kids' triathlons plus helping out at one adult one, for the bulk of normal people, it's done for your own enjoyment, and to test yourself, and improve on your own times. The other people are just there to make it a bit more fun.
Go swimming and see what you think!
I'm probably overly confident about how easily I could return to swimming a fairly long distance.
Depends if you basically like exercising or not, which it kind of sounds like you do.
I'd want to do it just because it's fun to run, bike, and swim. Period.
And you'd probably still want a medal, right? because you don't grok war, patriarchy and Caesar. Something is always lost.
In sport, running is a necessary evil. Those who actively try to get better at it impose that evil on the rest of us.
A lot of guys wake up feeling stiff, Stanley. I wouldn't worry about it.
I woke up this morning feeling very stiff
My guess is that the different muscles, used differently, is what makes a triathlon really hard.
If you don't care about the competition, why do you think you will enjoy the social aspects of an organized triathlon. Sure, most people are in for fun, but I'll bet the serious athletes ruin it for everybody else with the sidelong glances and dark mutterings.
If you are going to train, then swim, bike run. Why compete?
9: No worries unless the stiffness continues for 4 hours.
I say go for it if you're so inclined. Ultimately, running and biking and swimming will be better for you and less likely to produce injury than just running alone, since you're not just working on one thing in isolation. If you're in an open event and are just looking to beat your own time, the competitiveness won't matter or even be a plus -- it can help to motivate you but you don't really need to participate in the game, as it were.
Lift some weights, too!
12: Also, flee cougars and kill rabbits with your teeth. (Wait, you're a vegetarian. Catch up with the rabbits and snap threateningly at them, then.)
flee cougars
They're just after you for your relative youth.
Catch up with the rabbits and snap threateningly at them steal their greens!
Honestly, it's a miracle I manage to put on pants most days
Also, the swimming to cycling transition will help with this.
Wait, you're a vegetarian? Forget it then. Just go home and cry about your weakness.
14: Shhh, you'll make him wary.
17: I haven't had enough protein today to form tears. [Whimpers dryly.]
I'd say go for it if you hadn't asked. But since you felt the need do so, maybe not.
If you are going to train, then swim, bike run. Why compete?
This is a fair question to which I don't have an answer. It might be...fun?
I have mentioned this here before, but my younger sister has taken up triathloning, and she is at least a couple years older than young Stanley and had given birth to several children. She loves the triathloning. Also, someone was telling me the other day that triathlons are getting really popular, so maybe competing in them will make Stanley more popular by association.
Yes, it might be fun. You also might find a nice competitive groove, where being around other people makes you up your game without becoming a mad jock.
My personal triathlon involves going for a bike ride to a public staircase, walking it, then coming home and taking a nice shower.
I had a nice walk this morning using My Tracks. 264 m elevation gain! Unfortunately it did not record the fact that I had to run a gauntlet between chickens on one side of the street and chihuahuas on the other.
Is there a collective noun for chihuahuas? There should be.
I just learned a new one: "a business of ferrets"
Triathlon is awesome, but I don't understand the idea of doing it non-competitively.
But I don't understand the idea of jogging without the desire to get faster either.
24: A yap? A nip? A plague?
Where do those collective nouns for animals come from anyway?
A yap? A nip? A plague?
I was thinking a yip.
27: Apparently the history of venery? I also just learned that the name for human meat is "long pig." (barf)
28: You're right!
Now, how do we make it official?
I'm with you Stanley. Whenever I swim a little or run a little or bike a little I think "hey maybe a triathlon could be fun; is that totally crazy?" What sounds fun to me is that it's like an obstacle course. There must be some relatively easy laidback triathlons in existence. "mini-tri" etc. The thing I've heard people complain about triathlons is that they're very crowded.
I think a Mud Run sounds like fun too.
I also just learned that the name for a certain cut of human meat is "long pig."
"It is thought that many of the bizarre words used for collective groupings of animals were first published in 1486 in the Book of St. Albans, in an essay on hunting attributed to a Dame Juliana Barnes. Many of the words are thought to be chosen simply for the humorous or poetic images they conjured up in her lively imagination." From here
One more emoticon and I'm turning to cannibalism.
Go for it, Stanley! I did a triathalon after the birth of my first child and it was a very positive experience. Everybody on the course was so supportive and considerate--it was practically a group therapy session rather than a competitive event. There are mini-ones and sprint distances that you can do (800m swim, 12k bike, 5k run and even some smaller distances). 95% of triathletes are terrible swimmers, so don't worry too much about your swimming. Many events also have a duathalon--just the bike and run.
33: A peep of chickens!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collective_nouns_for_birds
When I was a youngster, I saw two or three miles (in a pool). And boy did the back of my thighs get sunburned.
40: I think you mean "fucksaw two or three miles".
I'm taking 37 to mean "immediately after the birth of my first child," and I will ignore all evidence to the contrary.
AWB, you'll be pleased to learn that "Long Pig The Movie" appears to be available in its entirety on DailyMotion, if you're willing to watch it one chapter at a time.
Many events also have a duathalon--just the bike and run.
I thought the duathalon was the one where you biked across county and then shoot a rifle.
Or maybe that's what they call "Critical Mass."
You should go for it, Stanley. From everything I've heard triathletes are completely welcoming and nice and supportive even if you're terrible at two out of the three events like most of them are. There are also all kinds of triathlons; you should easily be able to find one that you can manage. Also, a lot of triathlons let you compete in a team, so you could quite possibly find somebody to take on one of the legs if you didn't want to do it.
I've vaguely considered doing one, and in fact tried some "I just biked 20 miles, now I will run!"-type impromptu workouts last summer. It hurt.
I used to make fun of marathoners, "Look at them. Don't they know that its named for the guy who ran from the Marathon to warn Athens of an invasion, and then died after giving the message? The guy died! Why would I want to do that?"
Then, of course, I picked up running during my "freelance" (read unemployed/desperate job seeking period), and just ended up running a marathon, because it seemed like the culmination of everything after joining a group, then getting better, then running a half-marathon.
All in all, these events are not super competitive except for the very top people. Usually you can meet some interesting, fun folks, or you go into training with someone and get to know them better.
I don't think I am going to do a triathlon; I like running okay, but if I was going to do something on a bike I'd probably want to do something interesting on a bike. Plus the swimming would be an afterthought, but that's par for the course. In general I don't think I'd get any more satisfaction from doing a triathlon that I would get from doing a longish brevet, a file mile running race (on a different day) and splashing around in the ocean for a bit (on either or both of the above days, as a nice way to relax). Plus, then I wouldn't get kicked in the head by people in wetsuits.
I'd probably want to do something interesting on a bike
Bike polo seems to be taking off here (and maybe in Richmond, VA, too).
Only very vaguely related: I just found out about slacklining, which is, um, something.
Hah, man, a certain variety of "the kids" are so into slacklining. It's like juggling for a new generation of hippie.
Bike polo also strikes me as a bit silly. I was thinking of something like this.
Why don't you just invent your own multiple-sport exercise, call it the Stanley-a-thon, and declare yourself the best ever at that? E.g.,
Run 6 miles
Bike 10 miles
Have sex
Climb 7' tree
Lift four heavy rocks min weight 30 pounds
Bike 5 miles
Push annoying person underwater
17 puns in 20 minutes
Have sex
Run 3 miles
Just don't do the thing where you email everyone you've ever met that you're training for a triathlon and would they like to contribute and 10% of it will go to fighting Dutch Elm Disease. Except actually it's just my own personal pet peeve and most people probably don't find it as irritating as I do, so maybe go ahead.
55: Then in 2012 you can pick up the pace a little bit.
55 needs car hurdling and paradiddles.
My great-uncle died of the chestnut blight, and I find your dismissiveness offensive.
It's like juggling for a new generation of hippie.
Hippies? Huh. I always thought that the set of people who liked to juggle and the set of people who were really good at math olympiads were approximately coincident.
Juggling is, IME, characteristic of the nerd/hippie overlap.
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Does anyone know if there are PowerPoint for Dummies classes/books?
The software itself isn't *that* hard, but I'm not a visual person, and I find making nice presentations hard.
Also, any quick guides to EndNote and OneNote so that I can claim that I really do know how to use them? I've fooled around with EndNote a bit, but...
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63: hm, that's possible. Keep in mind, I mostly know nerds. But I think of [ juggling / slacklining ] as being a leisure activity of those nerds most likely to really dig the chance to be barefoot on the grass in a park.
62: Tragically, condoms are of limted effectiveness what with splinters and all.
65: About four people can make nice presentations using PowerPoint. Don't worry about it.
I think Edward Tufte has something about how to avoid using PowerPoint to inadvertently blow up the Space Shuttle.
Keeping the number of words on each slide low is a good rule of thumb, but Moby's right -- PP presentations always suck, so why should yours be any different.
Avoiding clip art and effects will both improve the presentation esthetically and save trouble.
Oh, now I'm remembering how we made very nice-looking PowerPoint presentations at the graphic design firm I used to work at: someone made each slide in Illustrator, then exported it as a TIFF or something, then placed it in PowerPoint. I'm telling you, they looked really great.
PowerPoint for Dummies is redundant, he said haughtily. It is the communications tool of the damned. (With no slight intended toward BostonianGirl. I just really, really hate PowerPoint. Like 2.5x as much as I hate being solicited for people's marathon training. My god I am crabby today.)
Make sure to use comic sans to put people at ease.
Does anyone know if there are PowerPoint for Dummies classes/books?
I'm not trying to be a smartass here, honest, but wouldn't google answer your question way faster than posting it here?
I've seen some pretty good presentations here at work, but they mostly rely on having really interesting information presented in graphs, diagrams and tables, and not much in the way of typical powerpoint slides.
77: I spelled "dummies" wrong when I did that and it still worked.
Is it even controversial that this kind of indier/rootsier-than-thou overstatement ostentatiously hating PowerPoint is the scourge of the "with it" internet?
The most important PP tip is to make sure the last slide says "Questions? Comments?" Because otherwise people won't offer any questions or comments.
Google is no fun. Google doesn't let us talk about how PowerPoint reduces adults to making possibly important presentations in a professional setting with the narrative sophistication of an elementary school science fair.
81: if you're in a hurry it can just say "Quomments.?"
Is it PowerPoint in particular that the haters among you hate, or any sort of presentation using slides? (Keynote, LaTeX with Beamer or the like, the ancient days of printing or drawing on transparencies, etc...?)
I tend to prefer blackboard talks (both on the giving and receiving ends), but they take a lot more work and are not so great when you have a lot of actual visual information (plots, illustrations, tables) to convey. So I don't really understand what the alternative is.
I don't really understand what the alternative is.
Interpretive dance.
85: powerpoint for scientific presentations is really a different beast than powerpoint for business presentations; "I have a bunch of data to show you" is much nicer than "I want to emphasize some of the words that I will be saying".
One helpful rule: use your slides to illustrate, not summarize or repeat, your presentation. I.e. no lists of talking points. Pictures, charts, etc.
Lifehacker runs an occasional "how to suck less at presentations" feature.
Stand-up comedy powerpoint is quite the thing among the, you know, kids. Or at least it was a few years ago.
55 sounds like the best exercise program ever.
I would eliminate the running and rock-lifting events, and might cut way down on the bicycling, but the rest of it sounds perfect.
Xeroxed handouts that are point-for-point summaries of the talk suck hard, too.
71: Edward Tufte killed my Dutch Elm Tree, you insensitive bastard.
91: So what's the overlap between the slacklining/juggling crowd and the PowerPoint stand-up crowd?
93: I always use the Ditto machine. That way if somebody asks for a change, I just say we're out of the sheets.
Also I am about to draw the same freaking PowerPoint slide for the fourth time (for business with annotated graphs you haters) because my computer, my mother, my boss, Edward Tufte and me all hate me.
97: Have you considered turning to Christ for advice? Jesus saves, I hear.
62: My great-uncle died of the chestnut blight, and I find your dismissiveness offensive.
Nice attempt at linking, Jimbo. Here's Zenas expiring.
Most bad powerpoint IMO comes from not thinking about your audience, and pulling overdetailed or overgeneral slides from a preexisting deck.
1-1.5 min/slide with very few words on each; no more than 3 graphic representations of data in the presentation, and that organized to make one single point, not just a graph clipped from the article. If screenshots of a website, then plan carefully how you'll magnify selected fine print and explain usability, don't wing it.
The interface for creating slides within PP is abysmal, allow many hours for figuring it out. Use no animation, and mac->PC or version transition can damage graphics, so test beforehand on the platform where you'll talk with enough time to remake 4 of your slides. Both figuring out what you want to say and learning how to use the shit authoring tools by trial and error take time. The how-to books are written by imbeciles who couldn't themselves find productive work, IMO.
This was a good talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj4FozCSg8g
so was this:
http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/30578
I thought it was the Hacky Sack more than juggling per se (or is that simply counted as a variant).
Oh, one non-obvious point: import you data into PP and make the charts there; importing charts made in a spreadsheet can generate conversion problems. The limit on max data volume in PP is low, but you shouldn't be putting thousands of points on a slide.
92: Really ?
"17 puns in 20 minutes" seemed like it was designed to exclude everyone except Stanley.
And "Push annoying person underwater" just seemed like the usual gratuitous Halfordian cruelty.
Still, it was funny.
gratuitous Halfordian cruelty
Is this a thing?
Urgh, no, I am not dissing Power Point to increase my cred with some internet in-crowd I didn't know existed. I just think (aside from, apparently, scientific presentations) it tends to encourage a terrible style of presenting and is used for no other reason than other people use it.
A footnote to my disdain is that it sometimes gets used in the worst kind of language pedagogy, to wit: the time I was at Middlebury and my language-learning excercise was to put together, with two other students, a Power Point presentation as if we were executives at a sporting goods company trying to get Americans to like soccer. Because, as we all know, technology makes language learning BETTER. ¡Me cago en Power Point!
Alright I don't feel quite that strongly about it. I'm just crabby.
It doesn't offer much specific advice but I like eric's defense of PowerPoint.
"I have a bunch of data to show you" is much nicer than "I want to emphasize some of the words that I will be saying".
Thing is, PP was really designed with the latter kind of presentation in mind. If you want to do the former kind of presentation, you need to create your visuals elsewhere and just use PP to advance the slides.
I used to find the "I want to emphasize some words" style of PowerPoint very annoying. However, in teaching I've found that if you convert it to "I want to emphasize some basic assertions," it is very helpful for some students, and I've come to appreciate it as an audience member, too.
Thing is, PP was really designed with the latter kind of presentation in mind.
I realize that.
I have a bunch of data to show you is usually like reading a lab notebook, rarely informative unless the viewers already know the subject extremely well.
If it makes you feel any better, BG, the compentency bar on PowerPoint is set very low.
105: I've never heard it. But I only found out about captioning kittens a week ago.
Oops, that what comes of not refreshing.
Is this a thing?
I, for one, imagine you as a Cormac McCarthy character.
I just found out about the TED presentation software and am pretty interested in the concept. I like making fancy presentations and this looks super fun.
I'm banned from learning about new things until my dissertation is done, though, so I don't know if it actually works or anything.
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God save me from getting caught between my boss being persnickety and the client being persnickety, especially when it's on an issue where I'm, for once, persnickety myself. It's all resolved now, but wow was that irritating.
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I thought your client was an impersonal political construct, which I wouldn't have thought capable of being persnickety?
116: My fourth grader is using that software in school. I'm mildly horrified, but they seem to be basically using it as a spiffy-looking wordprocessor for final drafts of short essays.
118: Sadly, the impersonal political constructs I serve are embodied in mundanely human civil servants, fully capable of persnicketyness. Generally, they're lovely clients compared to the ones I had in the private sector -- I don't think I've once had to talk any of my current clients out of lying to the court, and that used to be a fairly common occurrence. But occasionally they get fussy.
But occasionally they get fussy.
While they're being paid with taxpayer money?!!
120: Somebody here just had a client who submitted a document with obviously forged signatures. The prosecutor asked about it on cross, then dropped the matter until the jury was sent to deliberate. The judge declared a mistrial at that point, said that double jeopardy doesn't apply, that Ray Charles could not miss the forgery, and that the defense attorney couldn't have possibly known about the forgery because they were old friends.
Trial by ordeal seems more impartial.
116 I just found out about the TED presentation software and am pretty interested in the concept. I like making fancy presentations and this looks super fun.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but doesn't it sort of look like those awful PowerPoint transitions on steroids? I don't like being distracted by fancy animated things happening on the screen.
Probably depends how you use them. I find animations (in keynote, I don't really know anything about powerpoint) really helpful for showing relationships between things, between states of being, etc.
Plus I like the potential of the zooming in and zooming out structure way better than linear narrative. At least for teaching.
Anyway I don't think animations are distracting if they are part of what you're trying to talk about.
Mrs. K-sky on that software:"I've seen a few presentations done with that software. They made everyone seasick."
Okay, I can imagine that that might work really well. I was just checking out some of their examples, though, that seemed to be zooming and rotating things a lot for no apparent reason. Maybe they need to design better examples to show what can really be done with it.
For reasons both scandalous and weather-related in the OP triggered the ThunderCats Snow theme in my head.
well, like I said, I haven't actually tried it. Or spent much time looking at what's on there. I think though that the "examples" are all just things that random users made and uploaded, so it's safe to assume that they are all terrible.
I had a student two semesters ago tell me that my powerpoints made her seasick. It turned out to be because the projector was vibrating, though. I didn't even use ANY animations in that class.
Off-topic Alan Simpson quote:
"I think, you know, grandchildren now don't write a thank-you for the Christmas presents, they're walking on their pants with the cap on backwards listening to the enema man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg, and they don't like them!"
You know, I don't think I want to be on his lawn.
|| I've listened to about an hour of PBS and NPR in the past week and been treated to no less than two interviews with David Brooks explaining his discovery that humans have emotions. Also, they asked me for money.
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Shit, that should say "Also, they asked me for five dollars.". Sorry for the house-style violation.
130: it truly was a terrible day for the world when David Brooks discovered neuroscience.
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Emergency bleg: can anyone identify big omissions or problems in this report, or have other feedback on the day it examines? I might be able to provide some high-level input on it in 45 minutes.
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That is to say, input to relatively high-level people.
133: I can report only that it froze my machine for a few minutes.
72 and 73: I think that there are supposed to be some kind of transition or something. And I mean, more than that any kind of presentation thing is hard for me, because I'm so visually challenged. Where to put text and where pictures is torture for me.
I saw someone try to use powerpoint to do an entire proposal for municipal finance. It was a bitch to work with. Someone tells me that publisher would have been a better tool to use, but when you're at the bottom, you don't have much choice.
75 made me laugh. I agree that PowerPoint sucks, but it's in the damn job description. Why don't they just use Apple's keynote? Why isn't there something that super easy and intuitive to use? In the meantime, I have to use the shit until I'm senior and decide not to give a damn.
133: First, it froze my browser for a long time. Second, it is 138 pages long with no abstract. Third, the map on the last page was made by print the google map, sticking post it notes on, and the re-digitizing the thing.
WHile we're hating on Microsoft, Access also sucks. I'm not yet familiar with OneNote, but this firm seems to like that too.
It has an executive summary, though that could be a lot shorter.
Well, is there something like graphic design for dummies with non-verbal learning disorder?
The recommendations on page 101 seem good.
Here's the summary in HTML: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/06/14/prb-summary/
See, lw is already more advanced than I am with this timing thing per slide. I'd me happier with a slide projector, and even then, I wouldn't like it.
137: I have to use the shit until I'm senior and decide not to give a damn
Don't bet on it. By the time we're seniors, adult day care activities will consist of constructing PowerPoint presentations of people sitting in a circle and passing a ball to each other. All to a soundtrack of Donna Summer, Nine Inch Nails and Right Said Fred. "That's the music they liked when they were young!"
77: I should have said good books which teach what the for-dummies books claim to teach. I find those to be super simple to the point of being dumb, but then they make a leap that I don't understand conceptually, and I'm behind.
I found a typo on the last line (in the footnote) of page 77. Also, it is very clear and concise writing, especially for a committee thing.
145: Christ, have mercy.
On that note: Oh boy! Lent!
132: when David Brooks discovered neuroscience.
La-la-la-la-la, I don't hhhearrrr you! la-la-la-la-la.
Excepting Latin text, on page 88 is the first time I've seen 'sequitur' used without 'non' as a prefix.
150 was me, but I stopped reading now.
This may be a stupid question, but have you read through the PowerPoint Help, BG? If you go to the listing of help topics, you can start with 'Creating a Presentation' and go from there.
The PZ Myers review of Brooks's new book is amusing. Though it is lengthy. See here for the (amusing) excerpt. Perhaps you've all seen this.
I liked the part about wiggling Ken and Barbie in simulated carnal relations.
Juggling is, IME, characteristic of the nerd/hippie overlap.
How a benevolent and omnipotent deity can permit such horrors to exist is beyond my theodocicapacity.
Wait, Julian Assange raped Boney M??
This was my handout as a grad student instructor for oral presentations. Now that I'm older and wiser, I see how dickish it is--but I really thought I was being helpful at the time!.
Guidelines for Oral Presentations.
In many of the seminars you will take during your academic careers, you will be asked to give oral presentations of your work. For some reason, the skills required to deliver successful presentations are almost never taught, with the result that many student presentations are mind-blowingly boring and uninformative. So here are a few general guidelines for improving your presentations for this class and for future classes.
1. Respect the rules laid out by the professor. Some professors will give strict time-limits for presentations. If you give a twenty minute presentation for a class that asked for five minute presentations, your fellow students will be annoyed and your professor just might humiliate you. Often nobody will cut you off (academics tend to be polite to each other), so you need to prepare your presentation with the limit in mind and keep your eye on the clock as you talk.
2. When organizing and presenting your material, remember that your goal is to instruct everybody in the room--and not just to impress the professor. Students often pitch their discussion at too high a level, thinking that abstract terms and name-dropping will show how intelligent they are and how much work they did. If abstract terms are necessary, define them and give examples. If big-name theorists are important to your thought, explain why. Take your audience through the steps of your thinking so that they will be able to ask interesting questions afterward. Then you'll really look smart.
3. When preparing your presentation, decide beforehand whether to make a handout of your talk. If you do create a detailed handout, your talk should have sufficient additional material that audience members don't start wishing that they could just read the outline and go home. Material that is good to put on a handout might include: key terms, long important quotations, bibliographic references, easily misspelled names, and dates.
4. Some speakers can give a lucid and intelligent presentation from papers with only ten words; others can read with passion and clarity from a densely packed, full-text essay. If there's one method of presentation you want to avoid, however, it's the school of staring-straight-down-at-the-paper-and-reading-in-a-monotone. If you're nervous and want the protection of a full written statement or if the presentation has to be very formal, practice reading it at home until you can sound reasonably natural.
5. Remember that arguments have to be structured differently for oral delivery. When you're reading, you can skip around, reread, underline, or consult an index. When you're listening, you're stuck in linear time. In order to help your listener understand where he or she is in your argument, you need to mark clearly your transitions from point to point, what debaters call "signposting."
6. Slow down and speak up.
When you're listening, you're stuck in linear time.
I think I've heard several talks that hit exponential time.
If I'm going to be boring, I hope I can manage "mind-blowingly boring".
Thanks for the suggestion, Blume, and it's not a bad one. What I need help with is more: what font should I use? Where should I put the text? What kind of borders would look nice.
What I really need help with is graphic design stuff?
It is hard to be more boring than your natural abilities dictate. You can, with only a bit of effort, become really frustrating if you have any talent at being boring. You just be your boring self, except starting less than 1/2 way through, drop phrases like "just to conclude," or "in summation," or "one more thing."
And I've never had to use it for real presentations, only fake ones for professors who were technically challenged themselves. I don't use it in my current job at all.
The important thing, and I learned this from an episode of The Brady Bunch, is to picture everybody in their underwear except that people that could actually turn you on. Technology doesn't matter that much.
If I'm going to be boring, I hope I can manage "mind-blowingly boring".
Yeah, that's probably a phrase I wouldn't use for a student hand-out today.
But I also think my cow-orkers who take the stairs to the 4th or 5th floors instead of the elevator are a bit unbalanced, so.
Apo, not a prime candidate for a sixth floor walkup. Also would probably think I'm crazy for my habit of running up stairs in subways and at home as a form of no extra effort exercise.
I've lived in tenement flats in Glasgow [basically like a classic New York brownstone] with no lifts, and it never bothered me up to about 4 floors. However, whenever the lift is out on our current flat [6th floor] it's a pain in the arse, as crappy stairs that were never intended to be used as the main method of entry are a bastard.
That said, due to sports related knee pain, at work I take the lift just to get to the 2nd floor.
Oh, hey, speaking of injury, after the run/bike combo on Monday and a run yesterday, I've awoken with a mild pain around the scapula region of my back/shoulder. Maybe I'm growing wings.
That would make for a fun, unique stanathalon.
What I need help with is more: what font should I use? Where should I put the text? What kind of borders would look nice.
I think choosing a 'theme' is supposed to help with that. Also, for any individual slide, there are slide layouts to choose from, with boxes for text or for images in various places.
Further to 171: Or if you don't have a natural feel for that sort of thing, just go minimalist. White background. Black text in a sans-serif typeface (Arial/Arial Bold probably being the most common; maybe Futura if you've got it). Niggardly deployment of both words and images.
If it works for selling iPods...
My list of sports injuries is long. I'm seeing a new doctor who is all holistic and shit.* So fingers crossed.
I endorse the Stanathalon concept [perhaps with minor modifications to the events].
* He's a proper NHS doctor, not a woo merchant.
171 gets it right. If you do choose some non-minimal theme, make sure it's dark text on a light background and uses only fairly muted colors. Certain things that look okay on a computer screen (bright green lines, for instance) will often be almost invisible when projected on a screen. If you need to use any kind of image (graph, illustration, whatever) that involves lines, make sure they're fairly thick; again, just because they show up on your screen doesn't mean they will when projected.
Err, I meant 172. Though 171 also helps.
That said, due to sports related knee pain, at work I take the lift just to get to the 2nd floor.
ttaM is basically a Dalek. He can exterminate you in a second, but if you run away up a flight of stairs, you've flummoxed him.
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I've been waiting for a better place to drop this in, but whatever: I know I linked to bamboo bikes but you asked for hardwood, you get hardwood.
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I know I linked to bamboo bikes but you asked for hardwood, you get hardwood.
Looking at the pictures, I'm curious does it make sense to think of those wooden/bamboo bikes as cousins of Carbon Fiber? In both cases you have fibers that have rigidity from resin/laminate/epoxy.
Well, people have been using wood to make bike rims for years, but the rise of carbon fiber as a frame material is basically what gave people the idea of using wood for frames, and (most) all of the people building commercial wood/bamboo bikes got their start building carbon bikes, so yes. And, like carbon fiber, it's questionable whether wood is well-understood enough to make durable bikes out of, and like carbon fiber wood has impressively catastrophic failure modes. So, you know, if you buy a wooden bike don't blame me if you get splinters.
Good luck competing in the Stanathlon without Stanozolol.
White people have 40 words for bike frame materials.
I was just wondering how long until someone tries to bring back the penny farthing, and of course it already happened.
Having shoulder/neck pain after cycling is really common, Stanley. It might be an issue of fit on your bike. But it's more likely a result of needing to build up muscles in the right places.
Especially if muscles that you usually use to support yourself on the bike were tired from running, I'd think.
re: 176
Heh. Just running away would work.
I kicked someone clean across the room a few weeks ago, which was a source of major embarrassment.
"Look, you need to push through this kick more, drive with the hips."
..
"Ok, look, hold your gloves like a pad against your stomach and I'll show you. I'm going to push, so you need to resist the kick."
...
"Shit, sorry ... are you OK? Did you forget to brace?"
[Lots of laughter from round the room, and me feeling like a prize tit.]
182: those were insanely dangerous, IIRC. Tendency to flip their riders over the handlebars. If you were smart you put your feet on the handlebars when going downhill, so if it flipped you'd land on your feet rather than your head. Normal bikes were originally marketed as Safety Bicycles for that reason.
BG, more on PP:
Think clean, clean, clean. Remove every bit of clutter that isn't necessary. That includes things like boxes around chart legends and the tick marks on the x- and y-axis on a graph. (And drop the y-axis entirely if you're going to label the individual columns.)
Always use the preset boxes for the titles & such. That'll keep things consistent and make it easy to change the font, size, etc.
Robin Williams (a different one) writes good books about design for non-designers. I haven't seen the one she wrote on presentations, but I her book on layout is good. She can be a little fancy -- like assuming you have money to buy a bunch of different fonts -- but she's good at explaining the basic principles of design.
187: Regarding his precautions, someone comments "It may be feet first, but I bet it's face second.".
Thanks to this post's title, I've had the Eddie Izzard bit about transvestite boy scouts running through my head nearly all day. Damn, that guy is funny.
190: Well remembered! That was in fact the reference.
Also this horsebike is probably relevant to something somewhere.
