Business: December 2003 Archive Page

The Return of the King (but only after 25 minutes of infernal movie trailers)Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

My parents came to visit for a few days, so Leigh and I skipped out to see The Return of the King at a matinee. (We saw The Two Towers separately last year.) (*Spoilers*)

Of course any cuts are painful; and I was particularly sad not to see Christopher Lee and Brad Dourif in this one (they play Saruman and Wormtongue; I knew their scene had been filmed but cut). For TTT, I was a little annoyed that Faramir (the "good" brother of Boromir) was made to take the hobbits away from their mission, but I didn't notice any similar damage in this movie.

The aerial shot showing the singal fires leading from Minas Tirith to where Aragorn sits gloomily on Theoden's front porch was stunning. During the battle at Minas Tirith, when Legolas is swinging around one of the huge elephant creatures, I couldn't help but think of Luke Skywalker and the Imperial Walker, but the comic value of Legolas dismounting from the trunk and landing right in front of Gimli was well done. (I thought some of the Gimli humor in The Two Towers was excessive.)

I don't get out to see movies much... we bought a ticket for the 11:45 showing, but it was 12:10 when the movie actually started. Twenty-five minutes of trailers? For a movie that was already three hours long? I found it infuriating.

But what can I do? I'm not exactly a regular movie-goer... other than a family outing to Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, the only movies I've seen in the past few years have been Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that, as of Nov. 30, women represent 50.6 percent of the 48 million employees in management, professional and related occupations. --More U.S. Women Crack Glass Ceiling (Washington Times/UPI)

Women are much more likely to go to college than men; they tend to study harder, get higher grades, have fewer drug problems, are more likely to seek help from their professors, etc.

I'm blogging this in part so I can find it again the next time I get a freshman paper with a thesis that goes something like, "This one literary work, in which a female character faces oppression, proves that all women are oppressed in every possible way, and because that sucks, sexual discrimination should therefore be stopped immediately."

Some people may say "It's about time men got a taste of what it's like," but that's hardly fair to the generation of boys who are growing up in a very different world from the one their grandfathers and great-grandfathers ruled -- a new world which many of their fathers helped bring about.

My parents had a fairly traditional division of labor until my early teens, when my father's neck injury forced him to retire on disability and my mother went back to work.

My wife stays home with the children full-time, and she is home-schooling Peter in kindergarten this year. Because she breast-fed she did the vast majority of the late-night baby-walking; she also does the the children's laundry (which includes deciding what they are going to wear each day, apparently because I have no sense of style, which I won't deny). So that's all fairly traditional in terms of gender roles, but I do all the dishes (we tell the baby not to play with the dishwasher because it is "daddy's") and give all the baths, and when I am not at work I make about half the meals and do nearly all the diapers. Leigh does do all the bills, but she generally does that sort of paperwork in the evenings while I'm getting the children ready for bed. It also means she controls the finances, which is fine with me; it's a bit embarassing having to ask her for cash so I can buy my $1.80 plate of salad in the cafeteria a few times a week -- at least Nora Helmer and Lucy Ricardo got allowances. (But if I'd been interested in money I'd have never been an English major in the first place.)

Anyway, I've blogged on boys in school before.

I love the 10 minute presentation. You have enough time to get your points across to the audience without boring them. There is enough time, but it concentrates your mind on cutting out the waffle and making it snappy. Remember nobody ever complained about a presentation being too short. --Jonty Pearce --Ten Minute Presentations (Presentation Helper)

Site suggested via an e-mail from Jonty Pearce. Some great tips on Jonty's site, though I notice with its references to testosterone and advice about bringing a spare tie, the advice isn't exactly gender-netural. The site is focused on business speeches and has some tips on social speeches (particularly those at weddings), but none of the resources seem focused on academic presentations, in which the presenter is being forced, as part of an educational experience, to present on a topic that may be brand new to the presenter, to a mixed audience of mostly peers (who need to be entertained and, one hopes, at least somewhat enlightened) and one expert (the instructor, who already knows the subject matter, and who must needs to be convinced you did your homework).

I showed my freshman comp class a video and then asked them to speak for four minutes about the video, as a dry run for a later six-minute presentation. A few students over-prepared and read from papers (zzzzzz), but most students were underprepared, tried to "wing it", and ended up finishing a minute or two early. They all did much better for their six-minute presentation, but even then, my main goal was to just to expose them to the amount of preparation a speech requires. Next term we'll spend a lot more time on the genre of oral presentations.

Hmm... I really ought to add a "Rhetoric" category to my blog.

Same color palette: greens, blues, and reds on a synthetic base of white. Same kinds of curves and contours, same balance and proportions. Whereas once upon a time toothbrushes were made from a single plastic cast, contemporary models, like contemporary athletic shoes, are built up out of inscrutable deposits of layers and sediment that speak to some elsuive yet exquisitely refined ergonomic principle. --Matt Kirschenbaum --Of Sneakers and Toothbrushes (MGK)

This one made me smile. Does the target audience for Nike ads actually call them "sneakers" these days? Just curious.

You could dismiss this as nostalgia, GenX-ers pining for the simpler pleasures of their Cold War youth. But that doesn't really explain it, because half the people buying these games are teenagers at Urban Outfitters.

No, these Jurassic games are popular for a more powerful reason: They're the canon of video games, and they prove that keeping it simple still works. Chunky, low-fi games like Pac-Man show us why so many of today's more advanced games can be so paradoxically dull. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past (Microsoft/Slate)

A good application of a few basic elements of game theory to current consumer trends. (His earlier article on videogames as editorals was more trend-spottingly illuminating.)

Don't miss the final line: "Video games turn out to be just like sonnets and pop songs. Often it's restrictions, not freedoms, that inspire creativity."

If there's a problem with PowerPoint, it's not that it makes you dumb, it's that Microsoft has never taken the time to show us how it can make you smart. --Mike Gunderloy --PowerPoint Doesn't Make You Dumb (ADT Mag)

Enough people responded ethusiastically to the NY Times article dissing PowerPoint that I thought it worthwhile to link to an opposing viewpoint.

What's that on the home page of ADT Magazine -- is that an ad for Microsoft? And what's that on the main menu bar -- a link to a whole section devoted to Microsoft's .NET?

While Gunderloy is critical of Microsoft, his claim that people simply haven't been trained to unlock the power of a piece of software is consistent with a marketing policy to sell training sessions (or books, or magazines) so that people will be better able to use Microsoft products.

Of course, the subject of the NYT article, Edward Tufte, is also selling his anti-PowerPoint brochure, so what's my point?

I'm not sure... I must've missed that slide.

Back to my grading.

On another note... I realized that I just used the word "dissing" without quotation marks or self-conscious irony, which probably means that what coolness it once had is now officially over.

Two North Carolina men were indicted for violating the state's junk e-mail law by sending thousands of e-mail pitches for investments, software and other products, in what prosecutors said was the nation's first felony charges for unsolicited e-mail. --Virginia Nabs Two Big Spammers (Wired/AP)

I'd like to think this will make a difference... maybe it will, maybe it won't.

No matter how digital the electronics got, the companies that made the gadgets were still stovepiped; suites of devices worked in perfect harmony - as long as they all wore the same corporate logo. If you managed to force a Sony receiver to work with a Panasonic TV, you lived in a rat's nest of cables with a coffee table covered in remotes and a spouse who couldn't turn on the television without a briefing. | Why didn't consumer electronics firms compromise on standards for interoperability? Because they're jerks.... This is where the PC industry comes in and the golden age begins. --Sonia Zjawinski --The Golden Age of Gadgets (Wired)

Mmmm... gadgets.

It's been an interesting and very rewarding nine months bringing a bit of entertainment to bloggers (and blog lovers). I'd like to thank especially all those people who donated money or their valuable time, those who became premium subscribers, those who worked on cool toys which made use of the fledgling API and all those who could be found on the forums and IRC channel. You turned a silly fun idea of a mad monkey coder in London into something worthy of the attention by thousands of bloggers and the press. --Seyed Razavi --Blogshares -- Closed Down (Blogshares.com)

That's too bad. Blogshares was a fantasy stock market that used incoming links as its form of currency. I also found it a good tool for tracking people who had linked to me, and (even better) a simple way to gauge the relative importance of blogs. But obviously the site required too much maintenance and brought in too little reveune. Thanks for the fun, Seyed!