Certainly, a better role model than any pundit.
Stunned, I have few relatively important thoughts this morning. This is the primary one.
Civilized people know they do not need “a militia.” The time for that has come and gone.
The retention of this false assurance is maintained by deluded fools, and arrogant liars. Neither of these should be allowed to hold any power in our society.
This has to be quick. Sorry for any typos or errors, but I’m packing, medicating, and generally running about today and this could not wait.
I got a very nice letter from Bob Gaskins yesterday. If you don’t recognize the name, here’s a clue: He’s the guy who “invented PowerPoint”. Quotes are there because 1) there were a couple of other guys involved in the birthing process and 2) I think the product gets reinvented with every new release. However it was Bob who built the vision for the product and made it happen.
Bob’s written a new book, called Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint. He wrote it specifically to celebrate the 25th anniversary of PowerPoint. And I’m reading it right now (along with preparing for two separate conventions and five panels I’m on this weekend, I did mention running about crazily, right?). So I’ll do more of a review later, but wanted to get this out to you, dear reader, because you’re special to me.
I’m really excited about this. Bob left just before I joined the team, and notes that fact on page 14, saying
Ric Bretschneider (Wizard #77) joined just after I left, stayed with the group for 17
years (twice as long as I stayed)…
It’s kinda like looking at cave drawings….
What else does it say? What’s all that Wizard 77 stuff? Well, you’ve got a chance to find out for yourself because it’s available on Amazon right now, right here: Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint
I can’t wait to see how it ends…
Ok, I’ll apologize for that title first. Sounded better in my head.
Wanted to get this out fast because according to a quick poll of friends a lot of people may have missed the news.
Hope you already had a Skydrive, because if you did you just got upgraded to 25 gigabytes of storage!
All you have to do is log in to Hotmail/MSN/live and click the link to Skydrive. If you’ve ever stored a file up there you should get an option to upgrade your account to 25 Gigabytes of storage for free!
It's like some weird intelligence test. "Um, 20gb for $10, or 25gb for free? I'm so confused."
Among cloud services that’s gotta be the best deal available. There are iPad, iPhone, and Win7 phone apps available and you can always access your files via login with browser. Also PC and Mac desktop apps.
It’s noted this is for a limited time, so head right over! And, reader from the dark and mysterious future where this is already past, wipe your tears as the new base storage is an industry leading 7 gigabytes anyway!
Way to make the Google Drive announcement sound limp Microsoft!
Microsoft SkyDrive – Skydrive.live.com
There are some things that are such a pleasure to do, to pass along, to endorse… it kind of feels like cheating, like “duh” this doesn’t even have to be said.
Yeah, this is one of those.
I love the Duarte group. Their talent, their staff, their ethic, their genuine passion, all so refreshing and inspiring. And when they produce something you, Joe and Jane Everyone, can hold in your hand for a couple of bucks, well that’s really cool.
Today Nancy Duarte announced on the Duarte blog the publication of the iPad version of their book Resonate.
And I’m going to stop right there. No further loving hyperbole. No more glowing endorsement. Just one instruction that will cost you absolutely nothing.
If you have an iPad, click here to get to the iTunes page. There it’s easy to download the free sample of a section of Resonate. Watch that. Read it. You’ll be captivated from the first match strike, from the inspired visualization of how an idea travels between people, the power of a speaker and audience connecting, and then you’ll start to learn to do it yourself.
Yeah, that was really easy.
I signed up for Intuit’s new GoPayment card system yesterday. Thought I’d share a few thoughts.
GoPayment is a way for regular folks to take credit card payments from other regular folks using your cell phone or tablet. It’s advertised pretty much like the Square system, the first credit card device and service for regular folks. The major benefit is that it’s cheap, no monthly payment, and it has a cute device that plugs into the phono jack on you device that you use to swipe the card. Both GoPayment and Square charge a very low percentage per transaction (Are you listening PayPal?) lower than commercial rates, and no monthly fee. GoPayment is so much like Square… well I haven’t seen any written description of it that hasn’t included a reference to Square. I’ve liked the Square system, but was curious about Intuit’s entry. Given it was free, I figured what the heck, give it a try.
Intuit GoPayment System
Haven’t got the reader yet, but already it’s coming across as a whole lot more in my face than Square.
I got a big follow-up annotated bill in e-mail this morning with a lot of line items and $0 due notations. Like that’s supposed to make me feel good? My first reaction was “WTF? A bill?” OK, maybe that’s just the three cups of morning coffee talking.
What really bugged me was GoPayment had this “hidden” credit card they issue you as a way to get your money. That wasn’t at all obvious until I got the confirmation that I’d ge getting the card in the mail. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t need or want another credit card. Not for SkyMiles, not for Dinner Credits, not for an additional 5% off on my purchases. It’s already hard enough to track my intentional spending, and if I was the victim of identity theft I want to make as few calls as possible if it becomes necessary to shut things down. So I try not to have a lot of credit cards, especially specialty cards.
Both systems work across all major smartphone devices, but Square hires a better photographer for their ads.
Of course, after a call to their customer service, it turns out I don’t have to use or keep the card. I kept saying things like “So when I get the card in the mail, I can destroy it immediately and not have that affect my GoPayment account?” The guy was a bit unnerved about that, suggesting I activate the card first, then call in to terminate it. Um. Yeah. That makes sense.
You can still get the money transferred to one of your accounts, just like Square does, but they default to using the rechargeable credit card. But how many people are really going to rebel like me? So many just accept that “well this is the package, guess I’ve got a new card to monitor.” And we all know that terms on cards can change when the bank thinks it’s not getting enough profit on your business. Right? It’s just another thing to monitor, reading all the bland, poisonous notes in the monthly statements. And I hate that.
If I was going to devil’s advocate their design decision here I’d guess they found that most people were unable to complete their process if it required the banking codes necessary to do the direct deposit dance. Issuing a credit card was much easier, just requiring an address, social security number, and a couple of additional personal data chunks. Probably, but that’s a big part of what’s wrong with the credit industry in general. I’m not going to dig in on that speculation, it’s not the real devil that I think is in play here.
I’ll probably give it a whirl when it arrives, but I expect I’ll be dumping this. Square stays silent until I use it. So far it hasn’t tried to sign me up or send my info along to other companies. I’m not feeling the same warm fuzzy about Intuit.
Update! We replaced with the same model, this time in purple. They were out of red.
Frankly, the toaster market is insane with technological innovations. There are models that slowly lower your toast into the chamber, any number of digital displays, warming buttons, angled slots (which if they don’t actually launch onto the plate… well that’s just a missed opportunity!) and any number of additional innovations to the act of browning bread that trying to satirize the product is ultimately futile.
Most expensive model we “considered?” $140. And when I say considered I mean Deb continued to talk to the salesperson while I faked an aneurism.
Final cost of the same model. $29.
There, story is complete. You can sleep at night again without worrying.
Our pretty red toaster died this week.
Sunbeam Oster. It wasn’t even three years old. I know, I know, they don’t make things like they used to. But it’s just a toaster, it’s supposed to be pretty fundamentally simple. Remember the toaster in Red Dwarf? The joke was they had put all the crazy AI and voice tech in the toaster such that it drove the user crazy suggesting that “now was a great time for a piece of toast.” Well, this one just has a bunch of buttons for various preset bread types, and a dial for darkness. Nothing terribly cutting edge. (Wait a minute… bread type settings?)
Reading up on this brand I see comments about failures and people opening it up to find “scorch marks on the circuit board” and how they really didn’t think they had the components to fix the board themselves. Which lends to three questions:
1. There are people who consider trying to fix the circuit board in a $40 toaster?
2. How did we get along for decades with toasters before we had integrated circuits?
3. And why doesn’t this thing connect to our WiFi so it could have downloaded an update that might have prevented the scorching, or at least a security patch?
Feeling a little weird about disposing of the toaster too. I guess it goes on the pile of outdated or broken tech junk waiting for a tech recycling day at the local middle school. Given it has circuits it’s likely there are components that shouldn’t go into landfill. And it’s still so shiny and pretty, it feels wrong to dispose of it just yet. Maybe we can rip the guts out and make it into a planter. Isn’t that the solution for so many of these problems?
Here’s a trivia question for you. PowerPoint has been around forever. Bob Gaskins, the father of PPT puts the start date for the team as 1984. Lots of great folks have come and gone, and a few have even come back. But who is the one person who has been on the team, without leaving and returning, the longest?
That would be Judea Eden.
Judea Eden Back Then - Photo by Bob Gaskins
Judea Eden was the 17th person to join the ranks of The Wizards of Menlo Park, the core group of folks from the earliest days of PowerPoint – those who pretty much set the pace for the application.
If you’re curious, I joined that team in 1993, and am 77th on the list. To put a point on this, there are only two people still at Microsoft who predated me, and Judea was the winner for having been there the longest, still on the core PowerPoint team.
We think about the brains and wills behind the development of the PowerPoint application. But if you were looking for the heart of the team, I’d say Judea is a great candidate for that recognition. You see, Judea kept the PowerPoint team flush in supplies, equipment, and more that a little late-night food during crunch time. She organized all our off-site and team building activities, coordinated resources for moves between sites and buildings.
And she added more than a little humanity to the group. She’s a sweetheart, through and through. She cares about everyone on the team, even those who might not really deserve that care. Because, dear reader, she’s just sweetly guileless and truly wants to make people happy.
Onward to a bright future...
When I joined the team, we worked in an office on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA. I’d really resisted the idea of going to work for Microsoft, even on the PowerPoint product, an application I really liked. But it was Microsoft, the company that had always beaten the companies I’d worked for before. I really felt like I’d stepped into enemy territory, and I doubted that I’d make any friends or actually be there very long.
At noon on my first day this girl appeared in the doorway to my office, I’ll always recall she had a shiny black plastic lunchbox-styled purse, and said “Hi, I’m Judea, wannna go grab some lunch?” Because that’s what Judea does, she makes you feel welcome.
My first friend at Microsoft, and we’ve been friends ever since.
Judea is an amazing amalgam of interests and talents. A few years back she started a serious study of nutrition and health. In fact that’s part of the next phase of her life, working for a company in the health and wellness.
But there’s a crazy-fun side to Judea too. She’s the lead singer for The Judea Eden Band, and if you’re lucky enough to be able to catch one of their shows in San Francisco or around the Bay Area, I highly encourage you to do so. You can thank me later.
So, after a quarter century (and the years don’t show at all kiddo!) Judea is moving on and up to a position in another company, leaving Microsoft diminished for her leaving. Her last day is Friday the 13th, 2012. I hope that’s not a bad omen for those she leaves behind.
I can only say thanks for being my friend. The PowerPoint world would have been a much lesser place but for you.
Really, I’m not doing much here. Just trying to draw your attention to someone else’s work on how Facebook’s recent bout of ill-conceived changes continue to mess with your privacy, your communications, and your ability to actually use the system without getting screwed-up.
It’s essentially the same problem. The code monkeys at Facebook have decided that they know better than you how you want to get your information, or more importantly, they’re deciding what information is important. They’re trying to prove how smart they are by writing algorithms that watch what you do, analyze words in messages, and essentially hide a shit-ton of stuff you probably would prioritize higher than they do. Any time you have someone who has doubtable social skills managing your social interaction, you are doomed.
And Facebook is no better at predicting what you want to see than any other company. Do you recall that old chestnut “My Tivo Thinks I’m Gay“? Well here we are a decade later and Facebook thinks you don’t want information from someone you just met, haven’t actually met but who really needs to get in touch with you, or haven’t spoken with for a while because they only recently decided to forgive you… the list goes on with the potential ways Facebook will or may have already f#@ked you up.
This time, it’s messages. Did you know there’s a whole bunch that Facebook pushes off into a separate area without EVER giving you a surface level indication that they’ve arrived? Yup, we can thank Slate Magazine’s Elizabeth Weingarten for sharing her experiences today in Furious at Facebook Again!
Seriously, when are these guys going to be sued for abusing their customer’s information? This is an area where we set serious and definitive precedence.
Last Friday I installed a new thermostat in the house, the first one since we moved in.
Now the prior thermostat was programmable, hourly and daily you could configure it to heat and cool as you like. It made a lot of sense at the time, but so did parachute pants. Yeah, it’s been a while. Unfortunately programmable thermostats don’t take into account when you’re gone, you have to remember to override the programming (time-consuming and bothersome) or turn the thing off (and come back to a frozen cat.) But it was better than the manual option of course.
Now a company called Nest has come out with a Learning Thermostat. One that tracks your use, and presence, and uses that information to anticipate the best settings for you at any given time. It’s also a green device, and will help you try to use less energy while staying comfortable.
The new thermostat. The green leaf means we're saving electricity. And that we're cold.
I’m not going to rewrite their web page (which you can view here) but wanted to show you a little walk-through video I made to answer all my geeky friends questions. Click here to enjoy the video on YouTube.
Chris Garcia did an amazing thing.
He invited, then managed contributions from, over 300 people for the 300th issue of his Hugo Award Winning fanzine The Drink Tank. James Bacon helped, and gets his share of the credits, but Chris is the one I want to focus on for a moment.
Chris won the Hugo award for best Fanzine this year at the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention. He’s been nominated more than a dozen times, and all his friends hearts swelled as one when we heard the news. Some of us had the pleasure of being in the audience, and watching our favorite fanzine editor and computer historian dance about the stage like a crazed Quaker. You kind of had to be there to understand.
This issue is a bit of a download, but I hope you’ll give it a look. There isn’t a table of contents, per se, but instead a series of numbered bits. Mine are 72, 73, 132, and the two page picture comic that’s in the middle of the Bios section, about seven pages from the end of the issue. That last bit might go a ways towards explaining that whole crazed Mormon thing.
Just got notified that there’s a Silverlight update for the Mac. OK, I’ll update, what’s the…
Wow. The instructions are so dense with unnecessary text, and eventually tell you to first uninstall any previous version, which necessitates removing half-a-dozen files from the Macintosh library manually. Confused? Of course you are! You’re not supposed to have to go mucking around in the Macintosh Library unless you’re a developer or you’re trying to recover from a poorly written application that has screwed up your settings at a very base level.
Let's be clear. You should NEVER have to go to the Library for an uninstall.
Of course you can watch a video on how to do this. By the way, the video is a WMV, Windows Movie file – guess it would be too awful for MSFT to provide a system native Quicktime for the Macintosh-specific instructions. This is starting to feel like it was written by someone who wanted the user to break their Macintosh. And the video conflicts with the written instructions on the web page which show many more files to delete than the video does.
Huh.
Did I mention that telling people to go into the Macintosh library and manipulate files is like telling Grandma to wet solder a circuit board – just not supposed to happen.
Really? Really? Are you trying to be a self-parody of a clueless conglomerate with lazy developers?
I’m no longer defending Microsoft when people accuse them of not “getting the Macintosh.” I’ve done so for many years, saying how many people in the Mac business units really do know and enjoy the Mac. But this has made me so embarrassed to have been involved with developing multiple applications, both on the Microsoft Office team and at eBay, that were dependent on this tech*.
Embarrassing.
By the way. I stand by my prior statements that there are hundreds of Microsoft employees who appreciate, understand, and like the Mac. They live and die by the quality of work they do in making applications like PowerPoint really useful for those trying to co-exist with a predominately Windows business world. I have nothing but respect for those individuals.
Not so much for the Silverlight team.
— Notes —
* While developing the Web Companion for PowerPoint at Microsoft, I was the PM for the team that used Silverlight to render the slide show in a window that would scale the slide interactively when the window was resized. Without Silverlight installed the image would be a static fixed size. When I joined eBay I took over the Simple Lister project, a stand-alone Silverlight application that experimented with creating user product listings in under a minute.
Just finished the iOS 5 update on my iPad 2. Man, what a marathon. It basically needs to back up your data, reset the device, update the OS, then restore your data. So plan for a few hours to completion. I have no idea how people without a computer (wasn’t that the promise?) would do this.
There’s some nice stuff here, you can read about that on the Apple site easy enough, but I’m not rushing to update Debbie’s iPad any time soon. Not until I’ve made sure I’m aware of all the sharp corners here. To that effect…
Two Hiccups:
Biggest disappointment: Siri is not on the iPad. There’s really no good reason for this, other than to drive people to iPhone. And we’ll have to see how well that works. Android voice commands work very well, and is integrated in all the right places, but I rarely use them. Siri is not a game changer, it’s just a game.
Useless features:
May update as I learn more.
Well, everything old is new again.
Today the Microsoft PowerPoint Team Blog did me the honor of pointing out one of my posts from earlier this year, The Blur Trick, with an invitation to write more later.
I had the fun of writing a re-introduction for myself, for the blog I got started and which still contains entries I hope continue to help customers.
Hi, I’m Ric Bretschneider. You might remember me from…well, the very first entry in the PowerPoint team blog back in 2006 and a lot of tips and tricks articles after that. I left the PowerPoint team and Microsoft about a year ago, but I’m still very involved with helping people become better presenters, and make better presentations.
I’m very pleased that the PowerPoint Blog team invited me back to share an article, written earlier this year on my personal blog, calledThe PowerPoint Blur Trick. You can add texture or blur the background of a picture using the Artistic Effects feature in PowerPoint 2010, leaving the foreground crisp and clear.
If you missed it before, hope you enjoy it today. And we’ll see what I can come up with later.
-Ric
Every now and then I start off a blog entry with “I really don’t write often enough…”
But that’s not really true. I write a ton of stuff, it just doesn’t always end up here. The articles I write very rarely have to do with things I’ve written elsewhere. (Irony, on reflection I see that the post just prior to this touts a review I wrote elsewhere. I’m simply not paying attention. But I’ll write on as if I hadn’t noticed that.)
What I need to do is rechannel efforts, make blog entries about or completely repeating writing I’ve done for other sources – that is when it’s not against some standing prior agreement. This does seem to be a factor in blogging success – let’s see if I can remember it.
Boring yet? Let’s move on.
So with that in mind, I invite you to view a series of articles composed of my pictures from Comic Con 2011. Some of you may know of my association with the website Fanboy Planet. I produce a weekly podcast and occasionally have prose pieces that appear there. And every now and then, there’s a fun set of photos.
So without further ado, some links for you to peruse. 
Comic-Con 2011: Celebrities, Creators and More!
There are likely a few more to come.
If you’re interested, you can follow me or Fanboy Planet on Facebook, or check back here to see when I update.
Now some of you may note that there are far more women in far less clothing in these pictures than there are men.
There are two reasons for that:
1. There simply are more women in costume at comic con, and they do it so much better. It’s a sewing thing I expect.
2. I’m a guy.
Enjoy.
Ric Bretschneider
August 12, 2011
Sometimes you just do things for fun.
For the last four years I’ve produced a weekly podcast and occasionally written articles for a web site called Fanboy Planet. There’s no money in this, but usually it gets you into conventions, occasionally it gets you into great parties, and quite often it delivers great swag. The cost of most swag is that you must review it, and this week my review of the first season of the 70’s science fiction show Space:1999 is up for your reading pleasure. I’d repeat it here, but I’d much rather send you off to Fanboy Planet where you might read and listen to a great many other fun things.
-Ric
It’s been a while between posts, so I wanted to give you something special. It’s a little longer than most, but I think you may find it worth your while. -Ric
Sometimes the right collection of commands and techniques in a software package is like a good magic trick. You don’t see the result coming until it’s right there in front of you, and it surprises you how easy it was and how good it looks.
Today I’d like to share a magical photo technique I stumbled upon in PowerPoint. It’s a version of something that pro photographers have been doing in Photoshop for years, but I think you’ll agree that this is simpler, and hey – you don’t need Photoshop!
You need to have Office 2010 (or 2011 for the Mac) to do this, because it requires a couple of features that don’t appear in earlier versions. Sorry about that, but you really should upgrade – 2010 is the best.
To start with, you need a photograph. I’m going to show this off using two different photos, both of which have “compelling” subjects, but have backgrounds that might distract or otherwise detract from the photo.
There are three features we’re going to concentrate on:
Start by inserting a photo into PowerPoint. Resize as necessary and if you want it’s a great time to crop the photograph before you start enhancing it.
The key to this technique is that while it looks like one image, we’re actually dealing with two, a foreground and a background. So start by using the Duplicate command (CTRL-D) to create a second copy. Then open the selection pane (it’s in the Home tab’s Arrange menu). Things should look something like this.
With the selection pane open it’s easy to see that Picture 1 is on top of Picture 2. Your results may vary, don’t worry about the numbers – they’re going away soon. Click on that name and rename it to Foreground, then rename Picture 2 to Background. That will make it easy to keep track of things later.
Now we need to align the two shapes. Press Ctrl-A to select everything, then use the Arrange menu’s Align Center and Align Middle to put them exactly on top of each other.
We’ll start using the Background removal command now, but before that we need to hide the photo labeled Background (if that doesn’t make sense yet, hang on, it will in just a little bit.) In the Selection pane, click the Eyeball icon to the right of the label “Background”. Don’t worry, you shouldn’t see any difference because the hidden Background photo is behind the Foreground photo.
Now click on the label Foreground in the selection pane, and click on the Picture Tools Format tab. All the way to the left is the Remove Background command. This is a pretty cool tool that might take a little getting used to at first, but is a whole lot of fun once you do. Basically use the tools to get your background removed so just the foreground image is visible. If you’re having difficulty with the command, you might want to check out a blog Chris Maloney wrote on using Remove Background.
How precise you want to make this is up to you, for the purpose of this technique you can actually be a little sloppy. Eventually you want things to look like this.
Click Keep Changes and note that you should have a nice cut-out of the foreground. Now click the Eyeball icon next to the Background label in the selection pane again. No surprise there, the background is back. But we’ve isolated it from the foreground because it’s actually behind the foreground image, and that’s where the magic can happen!
Click the Background label to select the Background image again. Now click the Picture Tools Format tab again, but this time we’re going to play with the commands in the Artistic Effects menu. There are a lot of these, but let’s use the Blur effect first.
As you can see, the ability to apply the effects exclusively to the background makes the foreground image “pop” more without making it look totally unnatural the way a simple cut-out would. Professional photographers commonly apply a similar blur effect to magazine and portrait work – so you can now get out there and start making the big bucks too.
By now you may have noticed that the Artistic Effects update as your pointer moves over them, and you may have stopped reading already just to play with the different effects. That’s cool, if you have then my mission is already accomplished. But there’s one more step you should know about, getting the picture out to use elsewhere!
Because this effect uses two pictures, you’ll have to combine them in PowerPoint before you can export the picture. Simply press Ctrl-A again to select everything, then CTRL-G to Group the images. Now you can right-click the group and use Save as Picture to export them as a single image you can use anywhere. Again, a before and after example.
But getting back to the other effects you noticed before, there’s a lot of fun to be had here. Again, with the Background image selected, try out the other effects just to see how things look. Here’s a small gallery of examples to enjoy.
Hope you have as much fun with this as I do, and let me know how well this works for you!
-Ric January 9th, 2011
Photos by Chuck Farnham (Bob) and Ric Bretschneider (ComicCon Slave Girls) not to be reused without permission.
For a short period of time I had a small blog on Microsoft Spaces. Unfortunately Spaces will be going away. But Microsoft and WordPress worked out a deal where the archive of the old Spaces posts can be moved to WordPress accounts.
So the history of this blog just got inflated, an influx of stuff written mostly for family and friends.
Enjoy, or ignore. But I figured I should explain how all those old entries got here…
To be honest, I’m having a little trouble getting to the point where I write every day. But I’m lucky, I have inspiring friends who help me get past this without even trying. Today is Garr Reynold’s turn.
It’s Wednesday night, and I return home to another package from Amazon on the doorstep. Monday night it was Nancy Duarte’s Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences
In Monday’s post, I joked about resisting the urge to do an “unboxing video.” Unboxing videos are common in electronics reviews. The reviewer simply records with video as he opens the package and examines the pieces as they come out. It’s just about anticipating use rather than talking about their experiences, because really there haven’t been any experiences yet. They’re kind of silly, and yet compelling, but you just don’t do them for books and DVDs. And certainly not for a…
Oh well, the urge tonight was too strong. The package was Garr Reynolds’s The Presentation Zen Way: Video Lessons on Simple Presentation Design and Delivery. I’m a soft touch for cool packaging and knew what to expect here, so I broke out the camera and took pictures along the way.
This is classic Presentation Zen. Just enough but not too much. A beautiful and sparse slip card over a textured cloth box.
Again, very clean with the slip removed. Embossed lettering on the cover. The spine has a silver foil text treatment. This is a hinged box that will look equally good on the shelf or desk.
And now open, we see pencils, a coupon for free photographs, some sticky notes for later storyboarding, and the DVD - video of Garr teaching the Presentation Zen lessons.
Removing the bento style tray exposes a high quality spiral bound notebook...
...full of potential. All lined up with storyboarding guides, ready to help turn your next presentation into an epic experience.
Events like this make it easy to get back into writing about design goodness and presentation technique. Thanks Garr!
Just in time for Halloween…
AMC just released a new bit of advertising for the October 31st release of their “The Walking Dead” series. That’s it over there on the left. The series is based on a comic by the brilliant Robert Kirkman. The stark black and white art style and Kirkman’s brilliant character development over 75 issues has made it an acclaimed comic epic for some time now. The quality and consistency of this book is amazing, so AMC has their work cut out for them to provide a similar television experience.
And it’s about zombies, did I mention that?
The trailer released this summer is quite graphic, not for the faint of heart. Still, if you like such things… awesome.
