Christian is scheduled to fly to Boston tomorrow to give a talk on his research. He has all the technical material well in hand and a well organized presentation. Not so amazingly, one of his biggest challenges is to create professional and compelling PowerPoint slides that convey his ideas. It seems like none of the tools commonly used to create graphics for the slides have improved very much or gotten any easier to use in the last twenty years.
Christ has been creating these kinds of presentations for a long, long time. I bought the kids a desktop publishing program called Microsoft Publisher when Kelly was twelve and Christian was ten. You can see some thumbnails of the magazine they published below. Christian is fluent in the use of LaTeX, Inkscape, GIMP, GnuPlot and other graphical tools, but it seems like the tools of choice are MatLab, Excel and PowerPoint. It makes a whole lot of sense to use better tools than MatLab and Excel to create graphs (R is great), but every institution has their favorite PowerPoint template so he is probably stuck with that.
Betty Blonde #376 – 12/24/2009
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