You’re Missing the New Stuff
Just a second… ah, there! The new site is ready for you!
First, you’re still looking at the old site.
All this content has been moved to a new site that is getting the new updates!
There’s a new update today! Design vs. Fashion vs. User.
I’d hate for you to miss it.
Go there: http://blog.ricbret.com
Subscribe there so you see all the new stuff.
Just wanted to let you know.
Cheers,
-Ric
Had I mentioned…
Just a second… ah, there! The new site is ready for you!
That this site has moved to blog.ricbret.com?
Yes, and even better, the new site has a lot of cool new features for you, better commenting, and subscriptions that actually work!
And many new articles since the last real one here.
Go there now, subscribe and enjoy!
I do so miss you!
Take the Blue Pill…
Just a reminder that this blog (at https://ricbret.wordpress.com) is no longer active and new content is appearing at http://blog.ricbret.com.
Please adjust your links and subscriptions as necessary to keep in touch.
You can subscribe to the active blog by going to http://blog.ricbret.com and using the subscribe control at the top of the page on the right.
And there’s a new entry there today! Kind of fun, maybe leading into something scary. I’m excited and hope you’ll check it out.
Oh, here’s a direct link! http://blog.ricbret.com/books/take-the-red-pill/
Well, You’re Kinda in the Right Place…
Just a second… ah, there! The new site is ready for you!
I finally set up a private WordPress site for my blog. The upshot there is that the URL changed from https://ricbret.wordpress.com to http://blog.ricbret.com, a subdomain of my main site http://ricbret.com.
OK, that may sound like gibberish, so if that doesn’t make sense here’s all you have to know.
While this content will stay live, there won’t be any new content here. All the new content, will appear on http://blog.ricbret.com.
And all the old posts are there. So you really don’t need this site any more, and if you want to subscribe to my posts you really should use the subscription button on http://blog.ricbret.com.
This old site will stick around so that if people had linked to it from their own sites those links will still work. I’ll probably take some time one day to update all the old posts with a notice similar to this.
Anyway, keep in touch! Go to http://blog.ricbret.com and see what happens next!
Open Letter to Michael Bay
Dear Michael Bay
I watched you get messed up by Samsung’s presentation support staff at CES yesterday. You’re probably aware that it’s all over the net now, likely a skit on SNL this weekend and maybe you’ll make The Daily Show. You’re a pretty easy target to begin with (*boom*) but add all the things that went wrong in the space of a couple of minutes to your already fiery personality and wham instant Internet meme.
It’s tough. It’s unfair. How many of the people having fun at your expense have themselves spoken live in front of an audience of 200 people? 500? The pressure of standing in front of thousands at CES and hundreds of thousands more virtually would make most of today’s detractors wet themselves on the spot. But the Internet is not big on walking a mile in anyone else’s shoes if they can feel schadenfreude or get a laugh instead.
But you could have done better.
No jokes here, just a couple of things to remember the next time you get in front of an audience.
Fight or Flight
One of the basic human reactions to pressure is fight or flight, especially when it’s a surprise. We civilized folk tend towards flight, because it’s more socially acceptable. And obviously that’s what happened yesterday. But maybe fight doesn’t have to always mean throwing a punch. Fight can just mean fighting yourself to stay on that stage and keeping your audience involved.
Expect the unexpected
Murphy is my traveling companion. He always makes something go wrong. Always. Because of his tenacity, I believe in multiple levels of redundancy in anything that matters to my performance in front of an audience. And you should too when you can.
Of course, much of it is out of your control, no amount of planning can cover everything.
So just go into it expecting something to go wrong. It’s not frightening, it’s just realizing that you need to remain flexible in all situations involving pressure and performance. If you’re expecting someone to fail to hit their cue, step on your line, the wrong slide to be showing, anything unexpected can be dealt with.
And most important here, you must keep your sense of humor about it. Taking yourself too seriously will lock you into a situation where you can’t think and have no alternative other than flight.
Accept the situation
When something goes wrong, accept it. It can’t be undone now. You now have choices as to how to proceed.
Grace
It is somewhat paradoxically important not to apologize too much, and not to find others to blame. Both may be your immediate urge, but you must suppress it. Your team may have let you down, but they probably feel worse about it than you do (and it’s likely going to be a topic for discussion with their own management!) Focus on getting back on track, not on how you got off track – your audience doesn’t really care.
Humor
Humor is a powerful ally when you can do it off the cuff. You don’t have to have the audience rolling in the aisles, just keep them on your side. “Ever have one of those days?” or “Pardon me while I burst into flame here.” will let them know you’re off-script and the personal aside will keep them in your corner. Resist the urge to be the butt of your own joke, that’s an easy way out, but like too much apologizing it undercuts your relevance and credibility. It’s important to remember that very few people in the audience really want you to fail. They’re basically on your side.
Improv
One of the greatest exercises a speaker can do is improvisational speaking. Develop some level of familiarity with improvisational tactics. Lots of forward-thinking organizations bring in formal improv training for team building and management seminars. You can approach this in many ways, but once you do you’ll find it’s value surprisingly useful.
For example, at our Pecha Kucha events, we warm up with a form of presentation called PowerPoint Karaoke. Here presenters must string together a presentation based on slides they have never seen before. And we do this for fun! Of course presenters are expecting the situation, developing their ability to expect the unexpected, and again the audience is on their side. And it’s damn funny. But it’s a terrific exercise for any presenter wanting to develop their list of public speaking calisthenics.
While you’re in the moment, look around. Quickly appraise the situation and prepare to deal with it. Look for inspiration, allies, audience reactions… these are all fodder for your response to bridge back to the topic at hand.
Continue the Dialogue
Now that things are composed, and assuming you’ve done your homework, you can probably wing your presentation for a short bit. Hopefully the support staff is working frantically to correct things. And hopefully the well-managed disturbance takes on no more significance than an interrupting sneeze.
But if it goes longer, nothing changes in the advice. Remain graceful and move to transition out of the confusion. Lots of alternatives here. Consider:
- Engage other speakers already on stage or invite other participants onto the stage. This is what you really should have tried with Joe Stinziano, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics yesterday. He’s probably conversant enough to answer an off the cuff question or give you a clue as to what you want to move onto next. A conversation is a lifesaving improvisational step that can take the pressure off while keeping the audience’s attention. (Improv Hint: Read up on “Yes, and…” technique!)
- Backtrack and start over. Often the easiest thing to do. It doesn’t have to be a complete recreation, but a summary of what you’ve covered so far can also help the audience shake the confusion of that moment off themselves.
- If all else fails, moving on to another part of the agenda and returning to your message once the situation is corrected is the graceful way out of a presentation that has burst into flame. Inform the audience, and move gracefully to the side until recalled.
Always Prep
Yeah, good advice in hindsight. Easy, right?
I can see it right now. Someone asked you to get on the stage and get some promotional value for the next Transformers film while pushing some technology you actually liked. Your protests of I haven’t got time to prepare for a presentation! were met with assurances that all you have to do is read the teleprompter. Well, we see how well that worked out.
Even if you can’t take the time to memorize the speech, break what you have to talk about into one or two salient points that you can fall back on should the unexpected happen. Winging it still means you stay on topic, and you need the facts to do so.
Of course preparation is the activity that pays off in gold. It makes everything above that much easier. If you can’t take 10 times the amount of time you’re planning on being in front of an audience in preparation, you really should bow out.
And That’s About It
Hope this somehow gets to you Michael. While I’m not the biggest fan of your movies, my heart went out to you at CES. It wasn’t your fault, and the Internet is having a lot of fun at your expense today.
I know you already addressed the situation in your own blog with the self-deprecating comment I guess live shows aren’t my thing. I know it’s tough right now, but with just a little prep I think you could turn that impression right around.
She’s Giving It Away…
No secret to anyone about my love of this book.
So why is it news today?
This morning Nancy Duarte announced that “the multimedia version of Resonate is now available on HTML5 and iTunes for FREE! You can read, learn, and share on any platform or device.”
So stop reading this and go get it. Even if you already own the book, this is the multimedia enhanced version so you’ve got brand new levels of coolness to explore.
Leap Motion – First Impressions and Demo
Postman bought my new Leap Motion controller this week. Minutes after installing it (and figuring out I’d placed it on the desktop upside down!) it was up and working. This video is my first few impressions of the orientation application and the OSX integration application.
Video is in high resolution so click the zoom button to view full screen.
So, will this be a permanent and well-used addition to my physical desktop? Hard to say. Right now it’s a real cool demo, and it’s got some potential, but the fine tuning will the real test here. Even games require an exacting “touch” that will hard to match. And the reality here is that if you really want to replace my mouse this new method to exceed my current input devices.
Does it do that?
No, not really. But I hope it will soon.
How Screwed-Up is Apple Safari? I Think It Needs Therapy.
Some people think that because I worked for Microsoft for so many years that I’m an Apple hater. Well, that’s not actually true. Fact is, I’ve had a Macintosh on my desks, at work and home, pretty much constantly since their release in 1984, two of my family members have iPhones, and we have iPads, iPods, and Apple TVs scattered throughout the house. This is being written on a 27″ iMac, the one use for about 90% of my day.
OK, part of that 90% is in Parallels running various versions of Windows and Windows Office.
Unfortunately this post won’t help my argument that I’m an open supporter of both leading operating systems. Partially because these days I’m finding Apple so caught up in their image, their products exclusively, that they’re impressing me as a bunch of pompous jerks. Doesn’t make me automatically hate the products, but I’m no cool-aid drinking fanboy. Apple is doing plenty of crappy stuff to their customers, turning them more into consumers than unlocking their potential as creators is the big one. However, I’m getting off the point. Which is a case in point of how douchy and inept they can be.
Earlier this month I wanted to watch the Apple WWDC Opening that was streaming from Apple.Com. However, if you weren’t using Safari as your browser, you were blocked. My default browser is Google Chrome. Yeah, if you weren’t going to wear their colors to the party, they shut you down at the door.
OK, I don’t like Safari myself. Apple claims it’s the #1 installed mobile browser, but they don’t tell you that you aren’t allowed to remove it from their mobile devices, and you can’t set a different browser as preferred on their mobile devices. How’s that for anti-trust? (Remember the US Justice Department vs Microsoft for “bundling” Internet Explorer with Windows?) I think Safari is way behind Chrome in so many ways, and Chrome’s cross-platform support is superb. So I don’t use Safari. I keep it around when I have to access some non-standard Apple site, like the one in question.
So I manually fired up Safari and started watching.
I may find time soon to comment on how sad the state of design has gotten at Apple, this Ives guy really isn’t impressing me as anything more than someone trying to create a new fashion, not as a real product designer, but I’m getting off track again.
So I watched the list of features borrowed from other OS’s that Apple was rolling out as Innovations. And at some point I decided to see if there was a way to pop-out the video window, so it would take less room on my screen and I could continue to work on things that actually mattered. No button on the video, so I started hunting…
This is what I saw when I right-clicked the Safari-embedded video.
The disabled PowerPC version of Internet Explorer, that apparently still works it’s mojo.
Yeah, it was like some amazing wormhole to an alternate reality had opened up on my screen. There was Safari suggesting that if I want to open this streaming QuickTime, I should use the Ten Year Old, PowerPC-only, Macintosh version of Internet Explorer.
Wow.
Granted, the old app is still on my machine. But even Finder recognizes it won’t run in the current OS. If you double-click it, you get the message “You can’t open the application “Internet Explorer.app” because PowerPC applications are no longer supported.
I’ve kept the old app, and a couple of others, around because I’ve considered creating a virtual machine running the old PPC supporting OS X, just thinking I might write about some history there and it would be an easy way to pose the screen shots I’d need.
But this was strange, and kind of pathetic Safari. I’d almost feel sorry for you. If you weren’t such a douche.
Rotten Bitter Apple
Update:
Word from comiXology now after many hand-wringing updates overnight is that Apple didn’t prevent comiXology from pushing to iOS apps, but comiXology made the call. In a letter on their blog page, comiXology CEO David Steinberger noted:
20130410:12:45PM PST
Ric’ Originally Wrote on April 9th:
Apple Computer’s been pretty absurd about trying to prevent mature individuals from enjoying mature content on their mobile devices.
What’s so special about mobile devices? Nothing, except that Apple has implemented a file system and application system that they can control, they can prevent the user from using for any content. There is only content Apple approves of, on apps Apple approves of. And they’ve been your nanny since day one.
But now they’ve gone a little nuts.
Tomorrow, one of the finest comics available, Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, will not be available in digital form on iOS devices. This is due to two “postage stamp sized gay sex scenes” that appear in the magazine. They’re kind of background images, literally like someone left a TV on in a scene, context is ambiguous and not flamboyant.
Still Apple takes umbrage, and is shutting down all iOS apps that might try to down the comic. No iPad, no iPhone, no. Because they’re trying to protect you from an image you can walk into any comic store tomorrow and buy without showing your driver’s license. And it’s not the first nudity or sexuality in the magazine. It’s undoubtedly because of the gay context that they get out their big censor stick.
This is a crime against art.
I’m not exaggerating, Saga is one of the best comic books available today. Smart, inventive, human, witty, lovely, and unique.
All things Apple used to be.
And now they’re just disappointing.
Savino Wine Preservation System Unboxing
Sometimes we have to put the tech, and the presenting and the other stuff geeky aside and just enjoy a glass of wine.
But maybe we can combine a few of these. The latest tech in wine storage. The geeky flavor of an impromptu unboxing and demo. All on a Friday afternoon.
Enjoy.
Ric Bretschneider 