Dear Bob: I really enjoyed your piece (and your articles in general) on Analog PowerPoint.* It gave me a chuckle and reminded me of my own experience. I was invited to speak at the TAPR conference about CIRCAD (a CAD program). Before I could speak, I was forced to sit through several "endless" PowerPoint presentations. I found myself falling asleep and had to excuse myself to go sack out for an hour to build myself up for my own talk. The funny thing is that I found myself wishing to not do the same thing to others that had been done to me.
So when I stepped up to talk to the room full of people, the hosts asked me where my laptop was. I said I was going to try it without using PowerPoint. One of the fellows blocked my way and put his hand out. "No, really, where is your computer?" he asked. I repeated my statement and he stared at me as I walked up to the podium with a drink coaster. I asked how many of the designers there remembered when schematics were mostly started on napkins and drink coasters. Lots of hands went up (GREAT!!! /rap), and I gave a short talk on what I felt was the history of CAD design and so forth. I explained the steps needed to do a proper design, etc.
But the real kicker is that I was called later and told that my talk was the most popular one at the conference! I think that "reading" what is on a PowerPoint slide is the reason people veg out. I can read a lot faster than anyone can talk, and turning down the lights is the perfect mix for putting me to sleep. If the slides show things that can't be said, I think it's positive. (CHECK! /rap)
By the way, at a raffle after the program, my drink-coaster schematic was offered as a prize. The winner, very excited, ran back to his table and yelled out, "Hey this thing has TUBES in it! 6V6s, I think."
Jay Craswell (via e-mail)
Pease: Keep up the good work! You should have that drink coaster FRAMED!
Dear Bob: Your chronicle about "Mnemonic Stuff" (electronic design, March 1, p. 14) reminded me about how I learned the color code while attending technical school. In the workshop, all the resistors were in a huge drawer. They were well organized by value in rows and columns, starting at 10 Ω and ending at 22 MΩ. The first time I pulled that drawer open, I did not realize there was no stop, so all the resistors fell out. There were maybe close to a hundred of each value, mixed on the floor like a kid's toy. By the time I had put them all back in the correct order (the color code should read from left to right), I knew the color code! I never had to learn it again!
Philippe Trolliet (via e-mail)
Pease: Uh, yeah, Philippe. I guess that was a good learning experience! Fortunately, the resistors would have fallen into little clumps, not perfectly randomized!
Comments invited! rap@galaxy.nsc.com —or:
Mail Stop D2597A, National Semiconductor
P.O. Box 58090, Santa Clara, CA 95052-8090
Cruise Control Revisited: I got the "Cruise Control" beeper circuit working and used it for a couple of weeks on the open road. It sorta worked. It really did. I could tell if I was above the set speed, and I could hold the speed I wanted a little better than I could do without it. Then I parked it. Put it away. It wasn't doing me any good in terms of safe driving. I would cruise along at 68 mph and discover that I would get into a minor 63-mph traffic jam. When I tried to go around it, I realized I had waited too long, so I had to wait at 62 mph for all the faster guys to pass me.
When I just drove at a normal rate, I would see the jam up ahead, and I'd speed up to maneuver around it. MUCH safer. Even the ordinary "Cruise Control" of a store-bought car has the same problem. So holding a constant cruise speed is not a great idea, unless you are just trying to avoid speeding tickets. My good, old Beetle can go over 85, but I can't go fast enough to get a ticket out here. I'll just keep on rolling at 68 ±2 mph—without my beeping "Cruise Control." /rap
Hey Bob, I have to tell you about the "analog PowerPoint" that my high school math and science teachers used to use which worked great. Twenty years later I still think it is superior in many ways to today's methods. I went to high school in the early 1980s and we were still using 1960s vintage overhead projectors (imagine still using Windows 98 on a Pentium II machine 20 years from now) with the long, continuous piece of clear transparency film which traveled over the viewing surface of the projector from one roll to a second roll on the opposite side. Each day our teacher would write out the notes and equations as he or she taught, scrolling down the film by manually cranking the take-up roll. If a question came up on the lesson from the previous day, the teacher simply rolled the film back a few cranks and voila! There were yesterday's notes. The only downside (no free lunch, of course) was the constant possibility of a sudden bulb failure (partially remedied in later years by overheads which had a spare bulb built-in, but I say partially because there was no similar mechanism to make anybody replace the spare bulb after it was used).
An overhead projector today (if you can even find one) still costs hundreds of dollars less than a laptop computer and LCD projector, is completely immune to viruses, has built-in theft deterrence (why would anybody want one?), and doesn't require a support staff of IS people to keep operational (okay, to be fair, it won't show DVDs).
Wow, have we made progress or what?
JP Panesko -July 27, 2004
I had a real laugh about the PowerPoint conference. A few years ago, we were having a training session on new equipment and the laptop/PowerPoint must have just become available. It was a warm room in the afternoon sun and there was not enough seating. Out of 18 people present, all but one nodded off at least once and several were asleep for almost an hour of a 2-hour session, some laying on the floor. I was sitting on the floor but did not fall over backwards. The presenter was well known as a poor communicator almost unable to get anything across to anyone, even though he was fairly good at his speciality. (Yes, he was an electronic engineer.) If anyone recognizes my name, he or she will probably remember the episode too.
William Watson -June 02, 2004
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