Quasi-Evil

Posts Tagged ‘university’

“We didn’t want to do a load of bullet points.”

I had a group presentation at university today and I’m pretty confident that it went well. Once I’d remembered that my MacBook does in fact have a mini-DVI port, I was able to run the presentation from it and so use Apple Keynote rather than the horror that is Microsoft PowerPoint (it can be done well, it just generally isn’t. See: Death by PowerPoint).

We had planned to produce a printed document to be given out but time (and the 20 hours I spent making my slideshow pretty) meant that it fell by the wayside. We do have to produce written individual reports anyway though and it’s probably better we save the factual stuff for that.

One thing I learnt from doing this presentation is that I’m better at it than I give myself credit for. I never usually prepare enough which lets me down and whilst I’m perfectly capable of making it up as I go along, this also causes me to get the nervous shakes and start stumbling over my words. This is the first time I’ve rehearsed a group presentation with an actual projector and really gone through the whole process (including the actions and demonstrations we’d be doing) which enabled me to do my usual trick of making it up as I go along (because I’m most creative that way) but then to write that down. It made a huge difference to my confidence levels and I’ll definitely try to do that in future.

If anyone wants to see the presentation, there’s a PDF (20MB!) to download although obviously it doesn’t have the fancy special effects (or the gorgeous cast of presenters).

Organisation Rediscovered

I appear to have rediscovered my old organised, productive pre-Scarlett self. I didn’t want to say anything too soon in case I jinxed it but then when I was tagging all my old posts, I realised that far too many of them are filled with worry over my procrastinating ways and I thought it might do me good to focus on the positive. So I am:

1. University is going well. I’m currently acheiving a very solid First and though it’s early days, there’s not many other people managing it so it’s something to be proud of especially with the current workload. Of course, now I’ve got a website, an event budget, a presentation, a PR plan, market research pilot study, an outdoor event plan and an updated portfolio all due within the next two weeks. I’m on it.
2. Scarlett is still the best baby ever. She’s a little angel, everyone adores her, she’s super well-behaved, has progressed to talking in sentences (mostly “Where are you? I am here.” and “In the Night Garden.” and “Can I have milk….than-q.”) and I’ll stop now.
3. Conventions are mostly in line. I’ve got an online committee meeting for Discworld Con 2008 later today (and I haven’t been to bed yet, oh well), a whole lot of planning to do for LX 2009 (I don’t know why I don’t just stick it all in a Project Manager, for some reason I feel like I shouldn’t use project management software for SF cons and then it all takes three times as long as it should), a possible proposal to produce for a conference and a couple of bits for an as-yet-unannounced con in 2009.

So that’s me being positive. It feels good.

Protected: I should write better notes

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The Basic Concepts of Web Design

If you had to explain the basic concepts of web design to people who will be producing web pages with little or no knowledge of design, where would you begin?

Basic accessibility would have to come into it but I think the concept of separating content from styling may be too much. Is just explaining about screen readers and being able to increase font sizes enough?

I think it’s important to cover the big no-nos like iframes (and possibly frames), tables, image maps (because there’s no way they’ll work on image replacement techniques) with some suggestions on how to do it right. Anything else for that list?

Anyone know how easy Frontpage (or whatever the current Microsoft Office programme is) makes it to do these things?

Also, SEO. How do you put ways to increase your traffic into terms that someone who doesn’t know what a meta-tag is can understand?

When I figure all this out, there may be an article.

It’s all over, sort of

The portfolio has been handed in, the sponsorship proposal presentation was done this afternoon (after some tech problems – despite my multiple checks that no matter what computer we plugged it in to, it would work – apparently, university laptops operate in some alternate dimension of complete incompatibility with the universe) and so now it’s back to normality.

Of course, in the time I’ve been staying up all hours working constantly on these two things, everything else has piled up and so it’s not so much back to normality as back to the grindstone.

I think I need a ‘To-Do’ list and it may well be time for another read of Getting Things Done by David Allen.