I Did It! (Warning Rant Alert)

I think a minor congratulations should be in order for me today as I successfully managed a whole days (virtually uninterrupted) work. In response to falling very quickly behind in my Machine Learning lectures, partly due to the fact that they are so very boring that it is difficult to listen to him drone on for any substantial period of time, the content is quite wordy and the appalling use of the projector.

So far I haven't had many complaints about the teaching style of any lectures bar one who has gained a somewhat infamous reputation for distributing frankly incomprehensible notes (even he admits that many student struggle to understand them) however, this latest set of lectures has brought about this new candidate. I don't usually have a problem with using powerpoint style lectures and sometimes that can be very useful but several lecturers are disadvantaged in this field because they use a Mac. Being Mac users, it would be unheard of for them to taint their wonderful contraptions with anything made by Microsoft and therefore they cannot use powerpoint. Most have got over this and are using PDFs as slides and one has even managed (don't ask me how) to add animation to his and his notes are some of the clearest around. This lecturer however, does not know how to add animation and has therefore gone down the slippery slope of using three or four slides each with varying quantities of text on to animate a single slide. This means that when it come to printing the notes, a nine slide lecture can take up thirty or more slides. That is not the worst of it though.

Somehow he has completely missed the introduction to presentations 101 class where they very clearly explain that when making a presentation, text should be clear and readable, using a large clear font and not crowding the page with text is one of the most fundamental basics in any presentation and yet he has decided to ignore this advice. Size 10 font should be fine and whilst I'm at it lets use a few different colours to highlight key words, including a wonderful shade of bright green that isn't visible when projected. On top of all of this he hasn't worked out how to change his screen resolution when connecting his MacBook to the projector which means the text is even smaller because the image is only taking up 2/3 of the available projection.

Phew, that felt good, I've been meaning to get that off my chest for while. So I managed to get caught up with all of the notes and type them up onto the computer, complicated equations and all. One thing I am very glad of is the new Office 2007 equation editor. So much easier to use than the old incarnations and the auto correct feature that allows you to type in commands to produce Greek letters and other symbols. Without that, it would have taken me several days to type up and there is no point leaving it on paper, I have enough trouble trying to read what I've written twenty minutes after I've written it, let alone several days.

On a final note, I am very disappointed that Merlin has been shoved from the TV schedules this week to make room for the Grand Prix. I guess I'll just have to wait until next week for my magic fix. At least Harry Hill's TV Burp is back - thats always good for half an hour of laughs.