Quantum Forest

As soon as I heard the news of Google Calendar I got really interested in the idea. As many other people, I found the service quite interesting but with three annoying missing features:

1. Option to set calendar hours, I mean start and finish hours for a day. I rarely make appointments at 3 am or 11pm. This makes life easier but one can live — at least for a while — without this being implemented.
2. Simple to dos, with keywords (tags) and due dates. This one is important but, again, I can wait for this or keep my list somewhere else.
3. The ‘almost a deal breaker’: lack of synchronisation with desktop clients (iCal in my case). How does one access the bloody calendar without internet access and/or a supported browser?

Spanning Sync has positioned itself almost as the de facto synchronisation product between Google Calendar and iCal. However, I still struggled with its price: USD25 per year or USD65 for a permanent subscription sounded very steep just for syncing; particularly when using Google Calendar is essentially free.

I then tried a couple of other approaches. I tested using Thunderbird + Lightning + Provider. I do not mind using Thunderbird as an email client: I think it is quite good, except for the lack of integration with Address Book in the mac. However, after following a very good description of the setup, I realised that the calendar is synchronised and visible only when there is internet connection, defeating the purpose. I am sure the developers are working in persistence while disconnected, but meanwhile is essentially useless.

Quick note here: Incidentally, if you have problems adding a second calendar, just use your normal login and password for the calendars, rather than the bigcode@group.calendar.google.com set up by default.

After not making progress with Thunderbird, I went for GCALDaemon. After fiddling around with download, permissions, editing configuration files, etc. I managed to make it run. Nevertheless, it crashed and trashed the contents of my online Google Calendar after one hour of use. Good thing that I had a backup. I can’t remember where I read a user commenting that ‘why would you pay for Spanning Sync if there was GCALDaemon’. Short answer: read the previous three sentences.

At some point, one realises that the time invested (or wasted) is certainly worth much more than the syncing service’s cost. So I was ready to pay for Spanning Sync, when one major improvement was announced: mobile browser access (http://mobile.google.com/calendar). I always carry my mobile phone, so if I have coverage (most of the time) I am OK. When visiting Australia last April I could still access Vodafone at domestic prices, making the system viable. However, when roaming in other countries the price to access calendar and email through the phone quickly becomes prohibitive. A good thing is that this type of trip does not happen that often, so I will rely on mobile access for the next couple of months and give the system a proper test.

I like coffee and, most days, have a cup of cappuccino, latte or mocha. Always the same size: regular. Always the same type of milk: regular. No cream, sugar or sweetener of any kind. Just coffee, milk and chocolate if we are talking about a mocha. I normally prepare it myself (mocha at home, cappucino with a plunger at work); but some times I feel like having a real espresso, rather than using a plunger and I go to a cafe.

The closest cafe to work is easy to deal with. I just have to order and answer two questions: regular (for size) and to go (as oppossed to have here). Done! Depending on the level of attention span of the dependant I could try to say ‘one regular cappuccino to go’, but that does not always work. In contrast, I can go to the shopping mall and visit Starbucks and get a glimpse of infinity while answering questions that are for the ‘grande mocha, double shot, vanilla syrup, light soy milk, fat free cream’ crowd. Probably there should be two lines: no options paying cash, bells and whistles paying with a credit card. Imagine the extra time available for actually drinking the coffee while reading a book!

How many service or product interactions would benefit from the same streamlining? Not long ago, Joel Spolsky wrote an essay (or may be a rant) about the start button in windows, which I could not agree any more about. Normally, when I finish working with my mac laptop I close the lid and that’s it. Later I open the lid and there I have my computer, in the same state as when I closed it. Simple. I know, there are other options for turning it off — particularly if one is not going to use it for a while — but I use that less than 1 in 10 times. So, why bother with interrupting my easy flow with options? May be computers should have an advanced preference somewhere, that would make available all sort of options that I do not need, including: the ones for the start menu, the overwrite key in the wordprocessor, the popup windows for updates of operating system, F12 for dashboard junk in OS X, etc. Life would be simpler this way.

If I know what I want — which is often the case — I do not want options: they are distractions that waste my time and I feel grumpy about it. The default state may not be perfect, but I can live with it. If I do not know what I want — well, I am not perfect — I would like to be exposed to only few options, say two, so it is easy to make a decision. Once I have more decisions to make, I can guide the process to a much more customised solution; however, I am not any happier and I keep thinking that I may have chosen the wrong combination of traits.

I give a fair number of presentations per year, some to university students (in classes from 6 to 90 students), some to people from industry (in groups from 4 to 20), and others in conferences (100+ people). Despite that I have stage fear for most activities (and I could not save my life by acting) I have to admit that I do enjoy giving presentations (a lot, really, well, most of the time).

Once in a while I like visiting Presentation Zen, which is one of the best resources providing a critical appreciation of different presentation styles and tools. I guess that one of the typical mistakes is to accept one ‘style’ or method as THE absolute truth. I believe that a ‘horses for courses’ approach works best and will shamelessly borrow from different methods as I see fit. Aiming to make clear to myself what works and what doesn’t I decided to write down a few notes about my experience giving presentations. I want to make something clear: this is what works for me that does not pretend to be a one size fits all recipe.

Although many comments on this post refer to presentations using slideware (either Keynote of PowerPoint) it is important to remember that they are only support tools. When giving a presentation one is basically selling an idea (or product) to the audience. One is acting as an intermediary between the idea and the audience, and success will be measured by how people buy (understand, learn, adopt, take ownership) the idea. These people may be students, customers, clients, etc but the elements are essentially the same: the idea, the presenter and the audience. No, PowerPoint is not on the list.

The resources that I use the most are:

1. Analogy, presenting new concepts relating them to something familiar to the audience. This is an excellent way of presenting complex topics, although it requires some care to avoid stretching the analogy too far and misleading the audience.
2. Humour, using a lighthearted approach to my topic. I am not talking about the typical opening joke, but of finding ways of making the presentation memorable through the use of interesting associations, the occasional joke and showing that one is having a good time presenting.
3. Images, lots of them. In my experience, diagrams work better than bullet points and good quality pictures make the presentation stand out. I use some of my own pictures (photography is one of my hobbies), istockphoto, flickr and a few Getty stock photos too.
4. Slides for questions that I am expecting. At the end of my presentation I normally insert a blank slide followed by two or three slides that explain questions that I think may arise from my presentation. I have rarely used them, but when I have they have been a real bonus.

Things that I avoid:

1. I avoid as much as possible breaking thoughts on bullet lists. There are very few cases where I think that they are really useful, but diagrams tend to take their place in my presentations.
2. Corporate templates with logos on every slide, which are a distraction and take too much space. I use Keynote’s ‘Modern Portfolio’ template because it is quite neutral and I can adapt it to many different types of presentations.
3. Complex transitions, flying objects, etc. However, some times I use transitions for only a few slides just to show off the mac to my colleagues .
4. Compressing and dragging/dropping figures, because they are the first casualty when running the presentation in a Windows machine. This is the typical ‘quicktime and a TIFF/JPEG decompressor are needed…’ placeholder instead of the picture.
5. Equations, unless they really add value. In my job I have to use fairly advanced numerical and statistical approaches, but I always keep in mind that the concepts (rather than the formulas) are what really matter to my audience. I leave the equations for publications in professional journals and endorse the ‘Look Ma, no equations’ approach for presentations.
6. Using too many slides: I tend to use between 12 to 18 slides for a 45 minutes presentation. I know, some people like Guy Kawasaki advocate ten as the optimum, but once you count overlapping objects he is probably close to 15. I have seen excellent presentations with 50 slides, mostly pictures and diagrams, but one really needs to be an excellent speaker to pull that one off. If in doubt, drop the slide from your deck (another use for those slides is point 4 on my list of resources).
7. Overestimating the audience: even if you are in a room full of experts they want to hear a good story showing that one knows where the topic is coming from. I first read this advice in ‘A Ph.D. is not enough: a guide to survival in science’ by Peter Feibelman.

Handouts

Considering the way I prepare my slides, there is no much point on using them as handouts for the lecture. I tend to prepare a handout starting from my notes for the presentation or the presentation notes from a well written handout. I avoid like the pest preparing a deck of slides without having something written first. The length of my handouts varies from two to six pages, depending on the audience and the complexity of the topic.

A typical question is when do you hand out the notes? It depends. If I am talking to students that I will see again over several lectures I will give the handouts either at the start of the lecture or even several days before. On the contrary, when I am giving presentations that are completely self-contained (not part of a course) I tell the audience that I will hand out the notes at the end. I do this to ensure their full attention, particularly considering that I may not see them ever again.

In case you are using a mac

When I am teaching I can always use my own laptop. However, in meetings with industry, conferences and the like all presenters usually have to put their presentations in a machine running windows. For these cases I usually have two additional versions of my presentation exported from Keynote: PowerPoint and PDF. I always test the PowerPoint version in my windows box and if I am not satisfied with its appearance I will use the PDF version. In many projectors, presentations look better using PDF rather than PowerPoint (and there are no problems with missing pictures). Still, Keynote is much better than any of the alternatives with its presenter screen displaying current and next slide, notes (with a few key points to remember) and a clock. No need to mention the remote control that now comes with mac computers…

Odds and ends

I always take with me a cheap ($3) laser pointer that was given to me ten years ago; I have been in many meetings where the pointer runs out of battery. My laptop battery is fully charged before presenting (just in case). I carry copies of my presentation and handouts in a USB disk and, when travelling from work, I also load copies of the files in my web server. If talking to industry I take printed copies of the handouts in good quality paper (with a yellow shade, like Moleskine paper). It is a bit more expensive, but I think it is $10 well spent.

Most times I do not practice my presentation, but I only read my presentation notes a couple of times and go over the slide desk a few times trying to remember key points for each slide. I do not memorise the notes, but try to convey the yeast of them. Thus, if I give the same presentation twice there is a fair amount of variation between versions. I think this is a good thing and I always think of it as a jazz performance: the core is the same, but there is a good amount of improvisation. Anyway, I try to know the presentation material quite well, so I can give my talk even if all audiovisual material fails (it has happened before!). I never apologise if things don’t go perfectly, except if I arrived a bit late by some delay outside my control (this has happened only a couple of times).

Finally, I smile. A lot. I walk quite a bit looking at different persons in the audience as if I were talking only to them. This helps them to pay attention and to me to gauge how I am doing on keeping them awake and interested on the topic. I always tell myself ‘remember to have fun’ before presenting.

Most of the time I work with small files, mostly text, even if they have a fair amount of equations. Equations are not a big deal, particularly if I am using LaTeX (with TeXShop in the mac or MikTeX in PCs). Nevertheless, some times I have to deliver presentations or—in this particular case—receive someone else’s presentation for my classes.

If I am producing teaching material I use Keynote, which is a sucker for file size (my main pet hate with it), but it looks great. I can go for Keynote because I am using my Macbook Pro. If I am giving a presentation to industry I normally have to put my presentation in to someone else’s computer, so I go for PowerPoint (and do not use any compressed images), to avoid errors.

Anyway, this time I was supposed to receive a PowerPoint file from a guest lecturer, so I could print copies of the presentation for the students. The problem was that the presentation was 16MB (not big for these days, mostly pictures), and the university has an attachment limit of 6MB. Google mail has a limit of 10MB and I wanted to avoid taking time for the guest lecturer partitioning his presentation in to 5MB chunks.

I tried using Mediamax, which allows anonymous uploads to registered users. It did not work that well, because the files would take several hours to show up in my Mediamax file manager. Then we tried with a much simpler solution: Mailbigfile. This worked flawlessly, I immediately received an email with a web address from where to download the files and the interface was quite clean. There were only a few text ads to support the service. Simple, reliable and free: what else do I need? In some cases encryption could be a concern, but they do offer a ‘pro’ encrypted version for USD18 a year. That aside, I do not need hosting big files in a permanent basis, so Mailbigfile has spot on features for me.

I started browsing the web near the end of 1994, at a mind blowing speed of 8.6 Kbps. That is almost 12 years of web sites, news, changing tech, bad writing, etc. It woud be fair to say that internet has been my main time waster for over a decade.

Having an interest in personal productivity, GTD and the works, and maintaining such a time waster are completely incompatible things. Thus, it is time to dump the old habit and move on. I am stopping all non-essential use of the net, which includes everything but:

• Search of professional information (e.g., scientific papers or class materials).
• Maintaining the ASReml cookbook, which is the software that I use for genetic evaluation.
• Basic blogging using a blog client (most likely Azure talking to Textpattern—yes, I want to use my Palm for this—using XML-RPC through a plugin) to keep documenting work related issues and my family informed on what is in my head. The use of a client is mostly to avoid being online as much as possible, although it has the advantages of being able to autosave what I am writing at the moment.

Will it work? I hope so, because I have so many things to do that I need the extra time. Will I miss the web? You bet—particularly at the beginning—but I can not possibly fit the rest of my plans with my current usage.

PS 2006-03-14: Azure wanted my Palm to be connected to internet just to set up a blog profile. Too much to ask just to try it: not worth it, so I deleted the program. I may just use a text editor to write the posts.

I decided to revise my old post on using a Palm for GTD. There have been a few changes during the last year or so, which justified a closer look at what I was doing:

• I changed jobs (and country), so I’m not stuck using that lousy Groupwise collaboration software anymore. Given that I work at a university, I can use whatever I want, and I have Outlook in my PC and Entourage in my Mac.
• There has been a real explosion of new applications that promise a nirvana for GTD freaks and ease of collaboration.

Firstly, do I need an ‘AJAX based’ collaboration suite to keep my to-do list? Most likely not, a piece of paper will do. Actually, this is my permanent struggle:

• I prefer paper over electronic form for writing. I am a slow typer and using a stylus in a Palm is very slow. However, there are two things that are easier electronically: updating information (rescheduling or changing contact details, for example) and reminders (alarms). The first problem has a simple solution: write with pencil and carry an eraser. The second one is the crux of my complications: I forget to check my paper diaries and reminders are the key to my survival. Thus, a service will be interesting to me only if it has reminders.
• I want synchronisation. I want to avoid duplication of effort as much as possible. There is no point on wasting time writing down appointments in different systems, which relates to the next point.
• I want consolidation or ‘one page to rule them all’. One of the main tenets of GTD is to keep only one system. Although there are several examples of ‘hacks’ to connect a number of of different tools to organise activities, I believe that in most cases they are just a bloody waste of time.
• The system has to be simple: I do not want fifty lists of things, endless configuration and tweaking. It has to ‘just work’.

Thus, my current work flow now has Outlook/Entourage that synchronises with my Palm Tungsten T3, which I carry with me all the time. The Palm just acts as a diary with alarms. The only added software is still Agendus Pro (which I have not bother on upgrading) and Bonsai (which I have not used for a while, but that I will try again).

So now there is synchronisation and consolidation (Outlook/Entourage and the Palm are mirror copies), I can carry this thing with me (the Palm) and if the Palm dies (as it did during the weekend for some strange reason) there is always the chance to check my items through internet, either using the Microsoft Exchange or connecting to my computers using Remote Desktop Client.

Back to internet services

Anyway, with my current system out of the way, I want to explain why I did not go for an internet service. The main reason is because I need to keep things easily accesible for when I am offline. Yes, I could try to access some of these services via my mobile phone, but it would cost a fortune to see things in a very small screen. In addition, a lot of the AJAXy interface would not work. Most services do not allow for synchronisation with a PDA.

There are also other issues like: Can I trust the data to the company? Will it go belly up in the next three months? Can I save or export my data in another format, so I’m not stuck using an unreadable mess?

If the programs or services promise to deliver collaboration features:

• Does my dad know about it? Would he use it without me spending more than five minutes explaining how to do it? For example, Skype passes this test.
• Does it require that all parties install or use the same web site? Yes? Discard the service, unless the economic advantage and features make it a must have. Skype comes to mind again.

Another question, Can I run it under my control? I always prefer something that I can install in my server over some ‘hosted by a start-up solution’. Yes, I am a bit paranoid about losing my data, but shit happens and one learns.

Finally, do not believe all the hype. 37 signals may be the poster child for that amorfous web 2.0 label. However, I do not think that their programs are of much use, and I rather prefer the software delivered by other companies. I mentioned writely (the equivalent to 37’s writeboard) before. There is also Zoho Planner, which is certainly nicer than any other web planner that I have seen. So, if you are interested in web software shop around.

PS 2006-03-17. In another example of reducing complexity, Rui Carmo got really excited about using Tracks for GTD. A week later he dumped the whole thing for Outlook and Citrix. The latter to allow for crossplatform access.

This month I started working for the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, where I am supposed to teach, supervise and research all sort of nifty things. One of the things with research is that one needs constant change and permanent challenges. For a while I stepped outside research because I was feeling tired, but I then got back the love for the trade.

Last week I read a transcription of a very inspirational presentation by the late Richard Hamming (via Paul Graham): You and your research. In two parts of the presentation Hamming presents summaries of his experience. First:

Let me summarize. You’ve got to work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe to Pasteur’s ‘Luck favors the prepared mind’. I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years—great thoughts only—means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. what was and what was not important. I found in the early days I had believed ‘this’ and yet had spent all week marching in ‘that’ direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why do I march in this direction? I either had to change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did and I marched in the direction I thought was important. It’s that easy.

At the end of the talk, he stated:

If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault to an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven’t got enough manpower to move into a direction when that’s exactly what you need to do? I say again that I have seen, as I studied the history, the successful scientist changed the viewpoint and what was a defect became an asset.

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!

In a non-completely unrelated post Robert Fripp explains (via Scobleizer):

We should not expect good work to be acknowledged; and where it is, we should not expect it to be welcomed. Rather, the strength of a creative impulse is measured by the strength of opposition it meets.

It is not often that one is exposed to a really motivational text, which is really uplifting compared to the ‘teamwork rocks’ lame posters that one finds in most companies. I have been talking with a few people trying to, first, determine what are the ‘big issues’ in my area and, second, what would be steps toward tackling them. I am trying to combine two strategies: fishing for ideas that I can extend until they become a real contribution and, more importantly, growing new ideas into something useful.

Last week I had my fourth trip to New Zealand in less than a year. Apart from almost being fined NZD200 for forgetting to declare a pair of boots in my luggage (I got away with a warning about the dangers of soil attached to boots) and missing my domestic connection the trip was OK. Air New Zealand is upgrading its planes in the Melbourne-Auckland route, and this time I flew in a Boeing 777-200 with an ‘on-demand’ entertainment system. It is nice to be able to pause the movie (any of the 40 ones available) if one wants to go to the loo.

And the perils of presentations

Every time one goes to meetings PowerPoint makes its appearance, and one gets endless bullet points, people reading slides (the teleprompter approach), chart junk and obvious recycling of old presentations. It really annoys me when someone is going over dozens of slides skipping the ones that are not useful for the current presentation.

I do enjoy presenting and most of the time spent quite a bit of time thinking and preparing:

• Who are the members of the audience and what do they know about the topic?
• What is my core message and the best way to deliver it?
• Then I write a little ‘script’—which is also the basis for the handout—and then I create some slides. By the way, when I say handout is not that ‘cute’ printout of your slides, but text actually written to support the presentation. This time was 9 slides for a half an hour presentation.
• I always remember something that I read in A Ph.D. is not enough by Peter Feibelman: ‘never overestimate your audience’ (page 28). I read that as always provide some context so even people that have little idea about the topic can get something of my presentation.
• I do not use a specific style for all slides (like, for example, the Takahashi Method of few large words, or the Kawasaki method, although I use few slides), but I combine them. I use as little text as possible, almost never in bullet point form, tend to use good quality pictures (taken by myself, from istockphoto or, if lucky, I get a freebie from stock.xchn). I do use simple diagrams and sometimes one or two slides with just one number or word.

A good resource for presentations—not necessarily PowerPoint— is Presentation Zen.

This post is about people “saving time” doing the wrong things. The whole ‘life hacks’ area has become much more visible since the presentation by Danny O’Brien on 11 February 2004, who presented results of interviews with highly productive hackers (notes of the presentation taken by Cory Doctorow). There was a second presentation (notes by Cory again). This has spawned a number of sites treating more or less seriously; for example, 43 folders and Life Hacker.

Originally, the idea was very simple. These ‘high achievers’ all use mainly one application (and one file to keep EVERYTHING). This can be a combination of text file + editor, a private blog or wiki, etc. There are a few scripts using data from that file (if text) or RSS feed (if blog or wiki) to keep things synchronised. Now, how come that this concept has been expanded to cover such a diverse array of approaches?

First, different things work for different people—fair enough. However, the main problem seems to be that people have been developing all sorts of hacks for the wrong reasons. An example of the first approach is the Hipster PDA. Why bother with big electronic files if there is a simpler, low-tech approach (more about this later). Another example would be this article on dealing with email overload. The second approach, however, implies just a simple waste of time. Some examples:

• Why do you need to worry about how to organise thousands of RSS feeds? That is clearly too much information, unless your job description is ‘to summarise thousands of feeds per day’.
• The last few weeks there have been plenty of people worried about watching too much TV, so there are ‘life hacks’ to reduce time seating watching TV, movies, Tivo, etc. Just turn off the bloody box! Easy. There are some people clearly using too much disposable income for getting more ways to be distracted.
• And anything iPod (in its many incarnations) related.

Let’s go back to simple and important problems and drop the fluff. Talking about fluff, I put in that category most online approaches to keep your life sane (e.g., Backpack). They imply constant connection to internet, which at least for now it is not possible, unless you are a completely urban-being with your rear permanently glued to a chair in front of a computer.

While some parts of my work are quite exciting, other parts are, say, uninspiring. I call the latter ‘compliance statistics’. This means that there is no much interest in the final result, nor there is a need for actually getting a specific value: the aim is ticking as many boxes as possible. Yes, we calculated the power to detect X. Yes, there is a protocol to assess Y. If one ticks enough boxes the result is a good evaluation, certification, or other types of not very useful tokens.

In just another example of serendipity, I visited Paul Graham’s site and just found him complaining about similar issues. He rants about the way work is organised and how work is evaluated:

…the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can’t measure their productivity.
…
If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn’t need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don’t care.

and

Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.
…
Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there’s the cost in fragmentation—breaking people’s day up into bits too small to be useful.

I find very interesting that someone may question the time I spend working in this—particularly considering the important ramifications of this type of work—and prefers me spending my time ‘ticking boxes’. The problem comes at the time of evaluation, when time spent doing important things count very little when compared to all those little ticks people think are a measure of productivity.

I would say that, in many cases, tick-compliance is a cost without any useful return: people feel that they are measuring progress but in reality are making me take time off from producing real value and not letting me work as an amateur.