I really don’t get why graduate students can’t give understandable presentations. I just sat through fifteen presentations and gave two. Most of the presentations were completely incomprehensible and I don’t understand why. Most of the students can speak reasonably coherently. The topics covered are no more difficult than the topics the professor discusses in class, especially since the presentations will generally just give an overview and not go into the minute details. Yet, most of the presentations I’ve experienced in last two weeks were an exercise in twiddling my thumbs and checking the time. I guess once you get to grad school, your speech circuits fuse.

I was picking my winter courses this week. My advisor started laughing when I said I want to take two courses. This should have been a hint, but me being stubborn and all we picked the two courses and off I went.

Then I looked at my schedule and realised that I would have to be away from work 9 hours a week during the prime meeting season (11 to 3, Mondays through Wednesdays). It was obvious that something had to go, but at this point I was still too stubborn to take full responsibility for the decision. I run this by my manager who was too nice to say anything but was obviously against it. He run it by my team leader who politely told me that he would prefer if I only took one course.

Though at this rate I will not graduate until the cows come home, I am relieved to only be taking one course. Two courses a semester are a lot of work and I end up being spread pretty thin. I am still annoyed at the fact that the courses are offered at such ridiculous times, though.

In any case, I am taking a CS course on Formal Software Development. My advisor said that the prof giving this course is good so I am looking forward to it. But first, I have to get my current courses done and over with. Ahoy!

It is the beginning of November and the point in the semester where light panic is starting to settle in at the bottom of my stomach. I have the following deadlines:

SYSC 5207
Nov 15th – Assignment #2
Nov 15th – Presentation (15 min)
Nov 22nd – Project part I
Dec 9th – Exam
Dec 17th – Project part II

SCI 5174
Nov 25th – Presentation (20 min)
Nov 25th – Assignment #3
Dec 6th – Exam

Oh yea, and I have to be able to run my software in production on November 13th for work. So I will be a bit nutty for the next 7 weeks. Then I will have a nice holiday and sign up for another two classes in Winter. I guess the nuttiness is more or less constant.

*”Straight to you”, NickCave and the Bad Seeds

I have been annoyed by PowerPoint for a while now which made me pretty interested in reading Edward R. Tufte’s self-publication “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”. This paper basically slams PP for oversimplifying and distorting information. There was a joke e-mail going around the Internet few months back about someone who took this paper and summarised it in a PP presentation.

If there ever was a collective of bad presenters then grad students take the cake. It is fair to say that I have sat through a multitude of incomprehensible presentations. In a sense PowerPoint helps you discern what people are talking about. However, I often don’t want to read the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time. This is especially true if the presenter is mumbling. My worst pet peeve about PP, however, is when I pull out slides from a presentation a month later (or even later the same day) and try to figure out what the presenter meant to say.

This paper was ‘preaching to converted’ as far as I go. There are a lot of very good points in this paper. Examination of NASA presentations on which the decision to not worry about Columbia shuttle was based is interesting. There is a funny mock PP presentation of the Gettysburg Address. However, for some points Tufte went a bit far. I don’t really follow the connection between PP style and authority in the Roman Empire, but whatever. To add to complaints I don’t like his solution to the problem of presenting the information in other ways. While handing out printed charts in a meeting at work is a good method, doing the same in class is not convenient or socially acceptable. Not to mention handouts that you will not be keeping for further reference are even more annoying than bad PP presentations.

Overall I enjoyed reading this paper and I might check out some of Tufte’s other work, however, it did not knock my socks off.

In order to stay in my Distributed Systems Engineering class I have to acquire knowledge one would gain from taking undergrad Operating Systems course as well as Networking course. I have to do this before Monday.

Rignt now I am about to start chapter 5 of “Operating System Concepts” by Silberschatz and Galvin. I will not have a flaky weekend that I have been hoping for.