The cartoons of N.C. Winters about freelancers are hilarious!
happens to me all the time.
More available here
Archive for the 'Management & business' Category
5 days ago in a post named the meaning of life I set a goal to learn something new every week.
Yesterday I read a well written blogpost about a programmer who moved into management, and back. He comes up with a thought provoking theory about why some people are better managers and others better programmers:
Managers must work shallow and wide, while programmers must work narrow and deep. People who are naturally tuned to one particular method of work will not only enjoy their jobs a lot more, but be better at them. I didn’t say it was a particularly insightful theory.
Read the complete post even if you’re not interested in management. He makes some good points.
Here’s my dilemma: I hope I can be both deep and wide. It would be a pity to have studied 5 year of management just to realize that I’m not that kind of guy… 
The last 2 weeks I have been working really hard on my Product Innovation project. So naturally I’ve had little time to write a post.
I haven’t really told you about the project I am working on with my Portuguese colleague João. We are working on modernizing the distributing of medical x-ray photo’s. More specific, we are developing a software front-end for doctors to view x-ray pictures over the internet. If you think that this sounds complicated, you are right, that’s why it’s been taking a lot of time and effort 
But we were able to convince the professor and most classmates with our presentation this monday. The presentation itself was rather boring and not well prepared (I spend way too much time programming the prototype) - but the demonstration of this prototype was more successful.
Only one big presentation left for this course, and it’s the most important one. On december 12th, each group has 5 minutes to give their pitch talk. This presentation is supposed to convince potential investors and venture capitalists to fund our great innovation idea. I found some great tips from Garr Reynolds on how to prepare and deliver a great presentation. On Guy Kawasaki’s blog (a director of a VC firm with an amazing career) i read about The Art of Innovation, The Top 10 lies of Entrepreneurs and his 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint.
Besides all the work, I also had some fun Nathalie was here thursday till monday and we went to a goa party on friday. Good sound system, great dj’s and live’s, too much people and thus extremely hot and sweaty. Saturday we had a mustache party in our apartment as a homage to Carlos, our mustached landlord.
My parents were here to visit me from sunday till today. 3 diners with delicious food! Thanks l’homme père & la mama We also had lunch with a super friendly Portuguese colleague of my dad, Cpt. Carlos Mirpuri. Quite an experience. Too bad my parents had to leave so soon. The weather wasn’t good, and I feel that they didn’t get a proper view of my life here in Lisbon. Sorry guys that I was so busy with university projects..
I hope I catched up on old news now Time to start working on the new website for What’s Cookin’?
I was doing some research about how to give a good presentation when I found one by Hans Rosling about how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.
In the video below from TED 2007, the master of statistics makes a simple point in a very visual and memorable way: “The seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world.” Hans showed with statistics what is possible in the world, then he closes with a big, unexpected, and memorable finish.
Really amazing how he can make statistics entertaining, yet powerful in supporting his message. You can find more presentations like this one on his blog.
(Bumped into this one on Presentation Zen, a blog about presentations)
