Crazy Trip Crazy

Due to my unable to go home from Boston on Monday as hoped, I chose to stay in Montreal on Monday and Tuesday. ('Course, during that time I was feeling pathetic because I was supposed to go home to tutor, but that didn't happen.) Wednesday, Jorghnassen and I hopped on the train and headed southwest toward his dreaded destination, Anglo-land aka Ontario. It was a long ride, starting at 5 pm, switching at Toronto to the London train, and we arrived at around 11 pm. I missed seeing my cousins' house along the train tracks in Toronto because it was pitch black and thus I was not able to determine if their balcony was completed. Yay balcony.

Waterloo-Kitchener was peculiarly quiet. It is known as a student town, with student population estimates at approximately 30% (from what I heard they say anyway), and every house had a "FOR RENT STUDENT COME HERE LET US GOUGE YOU" sign in front of it. Yet, it was too quiet... I think it was attributed to the fact that exams were about to begin and people were theoretically studying for them. Maybe.

What was particularly cute at first then disgusting was the Canada Geese. We spotted a group of them hanging out on campus, eating the food and drinking a pond. The chair said that they stayed year-round now, feeding off whatever, which I thought was (unnaturally?) charming considering Montreal only has year-round stupid pigeons.

Then we came across the green sidewalk sausages. Lots of them. Everywhere. Then I didn't think the geese were so charming.

I felt kind of stupid when Jorgh had to drag me everywhere to talk to various professors in the Statistics and Actuarial Sciences Labyrinth Department. One: because they were more or less interviewing him and I was making him look bad by having nowhere else to go; and two: because I had no bloody clue what anyone was saying. Then I felt doubly bad because they took us out to lunch and paid for me as well. :( :) :(

Still, they responded pretty favourably to his presentation that I was sooo instrumental in setting up. And I still had no idea what was going on. Perhaps I'll make an S5 version of the thing so he can show it online and then I can link to it. Then maybe you might have no idea of what I have no idea of what Jorgh is talking about.

My favourite part of the trip was coming back home and finding my mouse crapped up probably because my mum doesn't know how to use a mouse.

Emergency PowerPoint?

Probably one of the few things I got out of education courses at McGill was the importance of making a decent PowerPoint presentation. Really, if I wanted to spend 5K a year for five years to learn to use PP, I would have just had to buy the fricking thing and sit here reading a layout manual.

Anyway, I don't have a lot of fantastic ideas on how to make a good presentation. I'm far, far, faaaar from being any professional in layout or graphic design. I have only a few pointers for some of you who might be kind of lost...

• Pick a clean font. Not Comic Sans. (This gets a bit more complicated because you have to package uncommon True Type fonts with your presentation...)


• Keywords, not entire paragraphs.


• Put in as many large, high quality relevant images and/or graphs as possible. Not on the same slide.


• You're presenting the slides, not the other way around... unless you're trying to be clever.

Jorghnassen had been here since Monday to have me help him put together his PP presentation for a talk. Yes, a 3 hour trip here just so I personally would do it for him. :) But it is a very important talk - scheduled just for him at UWaterloo next week. And, since I am certain that he'll get completely befuddled in Ontario due to the mass crowds of Ontarians, I'll be going along with him for the three days.

I don't really like PP. It does the most ridiculous and idiotic things, like changing its mind every few seconds and either allowing you to use different symbols and fonts in a text box... or not. It also doesn't like it when you want to make a minor change in its organizational chart wizard, since a mere human doesn't know what he or she really wants.

On the other hand, some people like PP for its preset elements you can choose from, like templates and colour schemes. There are some mighty ugly ones in there (COMIC SANS), but the choice is still there. And since Jorgh has a really hard time choosing things, the numerous but limited choices gives him (at least) the illusion that he can come to a decision.

Now there's just a few slight problems with using PP... not everyone has it, and not everyone uses Windows (no, really???). Fortunately, for the hapless Windows users, there is the PP viewer so you can knock yourselves out on that one. Also, fortunately for the "everyone else" user, there is Open Office that has a compatible tool, Impress.

Jorgh has a different problem though. He tends to be clueless about the computator and all its inner and outer workings, though he's smart as a whip and cute as a button and all sorts of other nice idioms. Thus, he came all this way to have me make his presentation.

That's okay, since I don't have anything else to do. :(