Quotes for Presentations and Laptop hacks ...

Presentation Zen my favorite presentation critique/info site has a great post today on places to get some good quotations from. Ofcourse topping the list is the Tom Peters site.

Go on, steal some quotes .. and make your presentation snazzy.

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Gina Trapani, Queen of Lifehacker.com has a great post on laptop tips. Good set of must-do tips if one has a laptop.

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How to get great sleep ...Zzzzzz ...

Psychologytoday has an excellent (albeit pretty long) article on how to get good sleep. It gives some excellent detailed information on how and why insomnia happens. More interesting is some of the medical data given (which I did not know before) about how we get drowsy and feel sleepy (or other wise).

The following paragraph is amazing - most of us who have night-outs during college can relate to this. Looks like there is a medical reasoning behind this.

Circadian rhythm guides the body through cycles of sleep and alertness. Ironically, it issues its strongest alerting force in a burst lasting from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., perfect for dinner-party repartee (although you may not remember the bon mots -- short-term memory is sharpest around 7 in the morning). After 8 p.m., alertness begins to fade, permitting us to doze off. This same system makes us sleepiest in the early morning, from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Stay up all night studying for an exam and circadian forces will make you drowsy near dawn. Stick it out for two more hours, though, and you'll start picking up steam again. "You don't need sleep to actually get alert," Spielman points out.

Also, about the way our brain functions with respect to day and night (light and dark).

The circadian system is tied, albeit imperfectly, to cycles of light and dark. We have dedicated sensors on the retina that deliver the daytime/nighttime message directly to the pineal gland tucked deep inside the brain. In response to darkness, this tiny nodule of brain tissue produces the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, broadcasting the sandman's message to brain areas that govern everything from body temperature to protein synthesis to hormone production to alertness.

Wow, just the other day, I read in Keiths column (in todone.com ) that watching tv or working on the computer just before sleeping is a bad idea - because the bright light emanating from either of these can fool the brain into thinking that it is day time.

Read the full article here. [link]
(thanks lifehack.org)

To de-tech or not to de-tech

Doug from diyplanner.com has an excellent writeup on whether or not to de-tech. De-tech is by the way a nice cool term for moving away from technology. He explains in the post as to how, one should not think that we should move away from technology completely. We should open. De-teching is not a religion.

The best advice I can possibly give those people looking to the "Analog Revolution" for some sort of salvation or release from their shackles: don't take anything too seriously --it's not a religion, or even an idealogical movement-- and don't look at de-teching as an all-or-nothing affair. Keep your mind open, and don't automatically assume that technology must or must not be used to solve your issues and lead a creative and productive life.

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Proactively prevent procastrination

An excellent article in Lifehack.org which narrows down the 2 or 3 main causes of procrastination, and gives advise on how to tackle the root causes, so that procrastination does not occur at all in the first place.

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Tracking emails and Lifehacker pack ...

Ever gotten an email that you want to trace the sender. Check the following link out which gives you detailed instructions on how to do this (even with free email engines like gmail/yahoo/hotmail) with beautiful screenshots.

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Gina Trapani from Lifehacker is at it again. Close on the heals to the Google Pack, Lifehacker has released a lifehacker pack - an amazing set of must-have programs. Check it out.

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Information Week looks at Software companies in India

A wonderful article in Information week, where a reporter spends a week down in India, touring the software giants and seeing how much of opportunities abound and how much more of challenges and hurdles exist.

The closing paragraph:

Microland showed us a 14-page job description for a staff position, filled with details about the technical capabilities required. The attention to detail, technical and management skills, and professionalism demonstrated by these organizations--and their talk of 30% savings--had a calming effect on my IT colleagues listening to their pitches. There are still questions to be answered through reference checks and pilot programs, but I'd say India's outsourcers have a good chance of winning another customer.

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Standing ovations, best photos for your ppt, and financial planning ...

Guy Kawasaki has a fantastic list of things that is a must if you want to do a really good speech. I have not heard him speak, but he is famed to be a very good speaker himself. He says that it took him 20 years to get to the point where he is. The post is titled "how to get a standing ovation" very aptly. All of us would want something like that. [link] Lifehacker, in its infinite wisdom, has a post giving us ideas on how to find the best free photos on flickr. Searching for a nice graphic for your ppt, or your desktop wallpaper, or maybe just the event that you had missed while you were out of town. Scroll down to the comments and check out the first link - the commenter searches for nature photos - and yes he does find some very good ones. [link] Ramit is at it again, with his second installment in his personal finance makeover for 2006. I have got to admit that he is good. Check out some of the stuff he says about how important saving at a young age is. Highly recommended read. And if you havnt read this first installment read that too. first article [link] second article [link] Remember Tew, the young college guy who was making money the enterprising way - yeah the milliondollar webpage guy. This was a guy who was selling small pixels of his webpage for $100. ANd his target was a million dollars. And oh yes, he did it - until yesterday, hackers cripped the website and asked for a ransom ! I think the site is back up now. Tew promptly informed the FBI, the smart guy he is. Good luck dude. I think it was a great way to have earned your money - you deserve to keep it. [link to story] [link to the milliondollar webpage]

Geeks, coffee warmers and the like ...

I am going to change the way I update this blog a it. Instead of updating it during various times during the day, I am going to collect all the links during the day, and then blog it once.

Are you a geek ? Are you proud of it ? zdnet has a nice article on how geekiness as a personality trait is becoming increasingly popular, with more and more gadgets such as Ipods and smart phones coming.

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Do you drink coffee ? Do you at times forget about the coffee that you just brought and get immersed in work ? Then you should check out this gadget - an USB coffee warmer !

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Ok. Lets assume that you are good at email. You are always to the point. You write in bullets. You change your subject lines at the right moment - to avoid long threads getting lost. But are you frustrated that people around you, are not that good at email. Lifehacker has some really cool and subtle ways to teach your co-workers, friends, emailers, how to use email efficiently.

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A white board which you can move around anywhere you want, and even stick it to the wall nearest to you. Hm. Stick it to the wall .. where have I heard this before. Oh yeah, the 3M folks are making this one too.

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WhiteBoard Photo Software

Just came across this software. Just amazing. Have you ever been in a situation (or situations) where you have just had an hour long discussion in front of a white board (and your company does not have one of those electronic white boards) - and you want the scribbles on the white board for later reference. Ok, if you are the geek that we all are, you would whip out your digital camera and take a snap. These do come out ok. But check out the following link. This is a software which will take in the digital snap, crop the white board, do color correction, keystone correction etc - and give you the output as if you were working on a white sheet of paper.

Check out the before-and-after link.

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Images for Presentations

My favourite presentation tips site - PresentationZen has a post up which gives some inexpensive and some free resources to get quality images for PPTs. These make your presentations look very professional.

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Getting sucked in by a new job

Fast Company has an amazing article titled "Thrown into the Deep end". This is about an Internet company guy, decides to leave and join his competitor as CEO, when his older company had been acquired by Google and shelved. The article is not about what he was before and after. The article is about how he got sucked into the new job, how he felt like having been thrown into the deep end of an olympic sized swimming pool in the middle of winter ! Good read.

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10 steps to planning for retirement

A new financial  blog I stumbled into today .. No BS Finance. Nice name too. Follow the 10 steps to planning for retirement series. Very nice and practical.

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Lack of Professionals blogging

NY Times technology division has a nice write up on how and why there is a dearth of blogs about business travellers. After reading it, I would say that the reasons given are exactly the same reasons, why a large number of professionals in other fields also do not blog. We are always paranoid about our anonymity getting lost somewhere in the middle. For instance, one business traveller says that,  sometimes just disclosing which city I am visiting can give my competition ideas. These are just some ideas that float through all our minds. We would not be writing as candidly, if we knew our bosses were reading it. Add to the fact that there were a slew of people who got chucked out of their jobs after their employers found references to them in their blogs.

Oh well, do read the article though. It is a good read. [Link]

Down with piles

Oh no, we are not talking about the medical problem piles .. we are talking about the piles of clutter on your workspace. Look around you now. Are you a piler ?

Keith (from to-done.com ), who now writes a regular monday column in lifehacker has a nice article on how/why to reduce clutter and piles around you. Good read. I am going to try this out sometime this week. (yeah yeah, he says do it NOW!).

Read the article here.

(Thanks lifehacker ).

Body Area Network

Ok. The name defenitely sounds cheezy. But that seems to be one of the 15 new tech concepts for 2006 according to Popular Mechanics Magazine. Lets see what that means:

Body Area Network (BAN)
Like everything else, implantable medical devices are going wireless. A new in-body antenna chip from Zarlink Semiconductor is in preproduction, and should appear in pacemakers and hearing implants this year. By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor's office or make a diagnosis from a bedside wireless monitor at home.

Wow. That defenitely sounds dangerous to me. What if the heart beat programmer gets into the wrong hands.

Possible bad scenario:

Hey .. I dont like you, let me lower your heart rate to ... heh heh zero.

Possible good scenario:

Romeo to his girlfriend: hey dear, let me make your heart go .... ooomph.  :)

There are some other interesting tech concepts too. Read the full article at the PM magazine website here. 

Dining room in a box

Yes. The title says it all. An entire dining table set for 6 - Japanese style which fits inside a box.
Check this out here .


(Thanks Cory, from BoingBoing)

I. Cringely from PBS predictions for 2006

Check out I, Cringely's predictions on technology for 2006. He does this every year, and he has been doing this for years now. Each year, he also evaluates his predictions from last year. Apparently he usually averages about 80+%, his truth percentage has dropped to 73% for 2005. Check it out anyway. Makes an interesting read.

Read the full article here.

The war is on ...

Ok. I am now officially on an apple roll :)

According to this money.cnn.com article, Steve Jobs is now on a war footing - not against Wintel (they just kissed and madeup), not against Microsoft (they still do the MS office for macs). But against a whole lot of companies like Adobe, Yahoo, Google etc. Their new iLife software suite makes things so much cooler and easier, that it is creating jitters around. The iLife suite has a webpage creator which can do blogs by drag-and-drop. The new iTunes can create podcasts. Hmm. Curiouser and Curiouser.

Read the full article here.

Zoho Writer

Very very cool online wordprocessing tool. You can import word and open office files in. But again, like the point I made in my OpenOffice post, the coolest clincher I see in this app is the export-to-pdf feature. I tested this out and it is brilliant. Amazing.

You need to see this for yourself. Click here.

Wow. Its all Apple news today ....

Check out a minute by minute commentary of the latest MacWorld talk by Steve Jobs. I have always been very impressed with this presentations. This one keeps up the standard. Check it out here at your friendly engadget site.

Interview with Woz

Forefront, a magazine from UC Berkeley has an interview with Steve Wozniak. Woz and Steve Jobs created the first Apple Computer.
The interview is a nice read.

Read the interview here.

Portable Open Office

If you have not used Open Office, you should try it out. It is a free open source MS-Office equivalent. It is compatible with Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Lotus etc etc. Pretty versatile I should say. You can open an office doc and save as an office doc.
By far the best feature, I have used/like in OpenOffice is its ability to export to pdf.

For those who have used/who use OpenOffice, there is a new portable open office executable available. This could be loaded onto a USB jump drive for an office software on-the-go.

Go to the OpenOffice site here.
Get Portable OpenOffice here.

(via lifehacker)

Wearable screen for the video IPOD

Wow. A wearable screen which looks like the spectacle frame, the optometrist uses. Well, this connects to your video IPOD. Having a screen so close to your eyes, make it feels like you are watching video on a 105 inch display.

Check it out here.