This weekend is our annual teambuilding “Debrief” session. All the SIE interns are gathering in Stirling to reminisce about our year and to say goodbye to those who are leaving. To celebrate, my boss asked us all to put together some sort of presentation about our favourite thing to happen this year.
It was the perfect opportunity to use a new tool: Prezi, an amazing new PowerPoint alternative. It’s easy to use, free, and makes cool presentations. (PowerPoint is so ’90s. At least, it is now that I know I can use something else.)
Here’s the presentation I made for the weekend:
http://prezi.com/82606/
I’m afraid you’ll have to provide your own narrative, but if you just click the arrows, Prezi will take you straight through the images.
Prezi. Consider it recommended.
I received Victoria Moore’s book “How to Drink” for my birthday (thanks Ann and Brian!). I thought it was intended to help me become better acclimated to Scottish beverage culture (i.e. binge drinking). If that’s the goal, however, the book approaches it much more subtly than I anticipated.
“How to Drink” is a collection of mini-rants, recipes, tips and anecdotes about all things drink-worthy. Moore makes the very reasonable point that while many of us have an understanding of gourmet food, we have little appreciation of what makes a good drink good. continue reading »
Social Innovation Camp is even nearer now and I’m still thinking about ideas.
One of the themes this year is “distance”. I spend 90 percent of the year communicating with my family via email, Skype and phone, so I can relate to distance as a social problem. On the family level, distance is a tangible barrier to overcome. Some technologies help shrink this distance, but there is a lot of room for development.
I have already mentioned one distance-shrinking technology: Skype. The service is a revolution. Previously, the main alternative was expensive long distance calls. Skype cuts the cost of communicating with my family to almost nothing (I still occasionally have to make calls on my cell phone). It is much easier to stay in touch. continue reading »
Photos are up!
I recently went to South Africa for work, and tagged an extra 10 days on for travel. The country was beautiful and full of wildlife. We identified at least 60 birds in our pocket bird guide, visited four national parks, ate lots of good food and pursued adventure as best we could.
One result was some beautiful photos. Phil took most of them, which is why they came out so well. I’m responsible for any iffy ones (and a couple of good ones—I won’t tell you which). I’ll add more photos as I can. I hope you enjoy them.
South Africa photos
Image credit: Philip Roberts
Social Innovation Camp is nigh, and I have yet to come up with a single suitable idea to submit. The trouble with most of my ideas is that they don’t require the internet. In fact, I’m having trouble thinking of anything that would benefit from a virtual implementation.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of socially innovative things to be done.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is a “Clean-Up Day.” It’s something I used to do in Anchorage. When the snow melts each spring, heaps of litter suddenly surfaces and the city looks like a dump. So every spring, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of volunteers scour the streets and parks, packing bright orange garbage bags full of rogue cigarette butts, plastic bottles and occasionally other, more novel rubbish (I once found a 2L bottle of K-Y Jelly in a marsh). continue reading »
