I found this first on Chris Messina’s blog, FactoryJoe (his partner Tara Hunt is also a speaker at BBS and a cool chick from Calgary!) and Chris linked to Marjolein Hoekstra’s blog CleverClogs (a Dutch remark, I believe).  What is it?  A Skype bot (IM bots are generally automatic agents that do things for you via IM, in this cause using Skype) that delivers RSS feeds to you via IM.  Clearly this is not in tended to be your feed reader of choice.  That would be insane.  But you can follow one or two blogs with it or even a …read more

Inspired by a science blogs post on  travel tips for physicists and this quote:

They’re absolutely right when they say "if you must check a bag, it should never contain work-related items," by the way. Unless you’re on your way home from a conference, the absolute most important thing you have with you is whatever you need for your presentation. You have to treat that material as if it contained nuclear secrets. Actually, given the track record of the people who actually have nuclear secrets, that’s probably not secure enough– treat it the way you wish they would treat nuclear secrets.

I …read more

For the past few months I’ve been in a private (almost secret) beta test for a very cool add-on for MindManager called GyroQ.  What does it do?  Okay I hope I can describe the coolness of this well enough for you to get it.  GyroQ is really a couple parts, the GyroQ application and a MindManager map.  What GyroQ lets you do is to hit a command key (the default is control-q) enter in something like a to do, action item, reminder, etc click add (or hit enter) and these items are stored in a queue.  Then when you Send …read more

Earlier in the week, I wrote about Five Ways to Pimp Your Creativity here on PYW. I thought I’d take a closer look at the five ways so that it is a bit more real in your work.
The first way to Pimp Your Creativity was a note that Innovation is Small.
Few of us have the ability to make a big-bang change in the world. Or the country. Or our company. You start looking at the big picture and will find that most of us, including us Pimps, can really only control or influence so much and nothing more.
We’re not going …read more

LifeHacker pointed to a nice little tips page from Microsoft with 12 ways to make better PowerPoint presentations.  While the tips are good (adding colour, using charts, being consistent with layouts …), there are some important pieces of advice missing.
First thing is … people tend to put way, way, way too much onto a single slide.  Really when you’re in a room listening to a presentation, you can either a) read the slide or b) listen.  If the slides are for web or e-mail only distro, eh, little more leeway, but if you’re doing a presentation … keep to four …read more