see a puffin eat a fish

Below are the left over slides for my twenty slide talk. I like them but they are trying to be too clever and they take way too long to read. Wanted to put them up anyway because I like them!

Smart Meter

Smart Appliances

Demand Response

Lord Kelvin Kool-Aid

Smart Meter

I’m doing a Pecha Kucha talk on GroundedPower for ITP’s 30th celebration (yay Red!). Pecha Kucha is a presentation format where you have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to show twenty slides. The slides auto advance every twenty seconds. If you fall behind, there’s no going back. For the presentation i’m doing next week, I found out that we’re going to be getting 15 seconds a slide, not 20! I’ve never put one of these together but it has been a really interesting learning experience.

I started out just putting a deck of slides together, keeping it to 20 and cramming as much information as I could in each slide. I did a run through and if a slide took too long, i’d shorten the amount of information on it until it took about the right amount of time. It was still a little frantic but I managed to say everything I wanted to say so I was happy.

Then yesterday, @faludi came by and I did a run through with an audience. From his feedback and suggestions I came to realize that although I was getting all the words I wanted into my deck, I was actually presenting a number of super complicated concepts without the time to provide them with the right context. So although I was finishing in time, I wasn’t being very effective and I was going to make people’s brains hurt.

There isn’t enough time with Pecha Kucha to tell a complicated story. We’re used to a slide having a lot of bullet points, but in fact with Pecha Kucha each slide should have one single, simple idea. The idea can be presented in a timed reveal to help you with pacing.

My new technique is to tell a very simply story with 10 slides instead of 20. Knowing myself and my tendency to cram as much as I can into a slide even when I consciously try not to, making only 10 slides gives me the wiggle room to expand upon each slide with 10 extra slides. Instead of feeling constrained by the format I found the 20 slide format liberating. I can concentrate on telling a simple story really well because there’s no room to do anything else. The power of limitations.

The past week i’ve been working with the Plodt team as part of the the Twitter Vote Report project. Lots of buzz words in the previous sentence. I’m pretty excited about it. On election day, people will be able to send in their voting experience via SMS, Twitter, iPhone, Android and voice. Good coverage. We in turn will localize and visualize the data showing polling place wait times, issues with voting machines as well as positive/negative experiences with the whole voting process.

Also this past Tuesday I was a guest critic in Family Feud Dennis’ Designing Around Place class at ITP. Lots of great projects and always nice to come back. Dovetailing with the Twitter Vote Report, check out one of the projects from that class, The New Vote with fancy custom mapping tiles.

Some cool stories. NYTimes build the Times Machine to convert and OCR all of their archives. This took 100 EC2 instances and about a half a day. The Washington post OCRed and indexed 17,000 pages of Hilary Clinton’s travel records in 11 hour for 142 bucks. Oh and S3 has 29 billion objects.

I’m west of Philadelphia, getting a feel for the current state of cloud computing. I’ve been using S3 for a while but after today I think I may try to move some systems over to EC2, see how it goes, especially now that Amazon has blocks (better coupling to persistent storage). AWS is also coming out out with Content Distribution Services to shorten the data hop.

Going to a talk in the afternoon entitled ‘be the cloud’. Not sure what to expect.

This weekend in Philly, I attended the broadcast side of Shawn’s show for a gallery in Jamaica Plain, MA. Shawn showed videos (one of which featured Anna) and broadcast awkardly from a basement. It wasn’t social or interactive, the content only flowed one way and the packed house on the other end couldn’t provide any feedback. No call ins, no clapping, no support from the remote audience.