Raves from an I.T. veteran
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012, by adminNew favorite TV sitcom: “The IT Crowd“, a British show about the trials and sillies of a tech-support (“Information Technology”) crew in a small, quite-believably absurd London corporation. 
Nerds versus Suits. Brilliant acting, hilarious but painfully authentic scripts and characters. They had me from the first episode: “Have you tried turning it off and on?” Try to find episodes of this show on any on-demand service like Netflix or even Youtube. Note that much of my professional life has been spent in I.T. departments, explaining to beautifully-dressed, fragrant Marketing folk how their Caps Lock key works.
Eeew, PowerPoint. Legend says that Robert Gates, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, banned all PowerPoint from his office and from meetings he attended; logic was that the multimedia-ness did not add to the message or to the information, and he didn’t want staff constantly wasting time “trying to pump up a memo into a feature movie.” Ouch. I have run in parallel with PowerPoint software since Forethought developed and published it for the Mac, then Microsoft ate it and turned it into serious bloatware. My contribution to the PowerPoint shooting-gallery was when I suggested that all the PowerPoint monsters that all the VPs in our corporation laboriously crafted were: (A) hugely time-consuming for our CLIENTS to download (especially back then via modem); (B) could easily be replaced by several fast-loading, crisp, colorful, tightly-formatted Web (HTML) pages in our website; and (C) could quickly be updated as HTML in future on the web-server.
