Sunday, January 19, 2003

Presentation Advice This is timely (via Doc Searls)! I'm working on a presentation right now (and need to have two more ready by February 11). I'm trying for funny, I'll settle for corny or just about anything but dreary. Derek also reminded me to go read this by Doc, which I'd read a couple times before, but not while actually working on a presentation. I'm interested in Keynote mostly just to see if it's templates are easier to do than those for PowerPoint. I've actually created a few PowerPoint templates and they are a bear. Why templates? Because I still do most of the work in MORE and then pull it into PowerPoint. It's also a bear to get graphics to line up from one slide to another in PowerPoint (it's actually probably easy, but I haven't a clue). If can do in templates what I'd otherwise need to do manually, this is good. If all else fails, I'll do it as Derek did using a localhost link. In many respects, it's more portable than PowerPoint. Comments () 11:09:09 PM

Ship, Captain and Crew Thanks to Rogers Cadenhead I now know that I was playing Ship, Captain and Crew this past Friday evening (on a tie, we threw more money in the pot and started again with the last winner rolling first). It's also known as Ship, Captain, Mate and Crew. Here is another set of rules (although it's called Destroyer). Finally, I'm really glad we weren't playing this variation! Comments () 9:33:37 PM

Jon's new piano We finally got around to taking some pictures of Jonathan's new piano on Friday (well after it should have been done). He's really taken to it and had no trouble adjusting to the 'weighted keyboard' from a variety of keyboards he's been using at home and in his classes. Adam and I, who like to dink around on the keyboard from time to time are struggling more, probably because we don't have any idea what we're doing and had gotten used to the lazy way you can play a typical keyboard. Sarah seems pretty comfortable (but she goes to all the lessons). The sound quality on the Casio PS-20 Celviano is very good and when using the piano settings, sounds very much like the real thing. I especially like the "Grand Piano 1" setting, it seems to get left there most of the time. The piano also has MIDI in/out ports. For years I had a MIDI box and at least one Mac which could use it, but no keyboard nor interest in buying one. Now that we have a MIDI keyboard, we've retired all the ADB based systems. It seems like its time to go looking at the USB and/or Firewire MIDI products out there and see what might work. The most surprising recent piano related event occurred last night when Jon sat down in the family room for about half an hour and wrote some music. This morning, he was upstairs playing something unfamiliar and Sarah said it was the music he's written last night. I'm still somewhat amazed, and just had him play it for me again. After dinner Adam was telling me that Jon is the one who showed him how to use his left hand properly. At least one of us will really learn how to play the piano, perhaps more. Comments () 8:53:57 PM

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