I found today, while idly browsing my computer, that Trillian stores my MSN contacts’ avatars in a single easily-accessible directory (users/default/buddyicons/assets in the directory Trillian is installed in), which is quite nifty. Some of my contacts’ avatars are quite nice (and very apt for who they are), so I knocked up a montage of my favourites:

Gave my dissertation presentation today - it went OK. Could have done with not staying up till 3 to write it, though.

Whilst spaced out on caffeine, I came up with an experimental way of writing my notes for the speech. As I’ve noted before, I hate PowerPoint and the way it forces people into using bulletpoints as a system of organisation (I am not the only one who thinks this). I also dislike writing my speech out in full, as it ends up with me reading out a monologue.

Concise notes, therefore, are the way forward. But even these present a problem; what if I get lost, or dwell on insignificant points? And what if I start running short of time - how can I quickly decide what to drop and what to concentrate on?

The design solution I came up with is inspired by (or ripped off from) the design of folksonomy “most popular” displays like on Flickr or del.icio.us to show which are the most used tags etc. Firstly, I reduce the notes to stubby one or two-line sentences, and get rid of punctuation and capitalisation to discourage me from treating them like sentences to be read out monotnonously. Then (and this is the dinky part), I size the words and phrases according to how important they are; thus I make sure I include all the important bits quickly by checking along the big words. If I ever need to drop stuff because of time, I can ignore the sentences with mostly small letters.

A quick example:

It was not a total success (I was slightly unused to the style), also I didn’t provide much whitespace in the printed version so the conflicting sizes crowded each other out a bit; a 1.5 line spacing would have been a help. But, it did help me keep track of myself, when I felt confident to expound on a topic without the notes’ assistance I could do so, and then I could look down quickly to find my place again without having to concentrate on reading too much.

This is by no means a final design - I’m sure it can be tweaked. Comments welcome.

Ack. Dissertation. Not enough words written (7,500 so far, and a lot of that is quoting other people). I spent my weekend fiddling with code rather than words - a bit of Greasemonkey/XPath-type stuff (nothing any good, yet) and playing with RSS/RDF feeds (wrote something half-decent, nowhere near good enough to release yet). Ironic really, as my dissertation is on Open Source and why people code…

Must write more paragraphs and less programs. Bad me. Bad bad me. Workload is too high for any major bloggage for the next, ooh… week or so, but linklog ought to keep going though.

Update: Oh tits, I’ve got to present my findings on Wednesday. I thought I had till the end of the week. Arses. You may not see me for some time.