A couple good looking themes from Biz It.  They like their stacked texts.

Pros:  simple look and I dig the fonts and texture (added in back by using a photograph of natural papers).

Cons: The “prev” and “next” buttons at the bottom feel  like an assumption that this ppt. is to be viewed without a presenter. Guess it’s easy enough to scrape off after buying?   There’s no dynamic use of a logo or image here, nothing becomes a water mark or makes it into the theme in any big way: that’s up to the buyer to build in.

Below, Our Services theme with teal high fiber paper background, and The Future theme with black tar paper background. And last but not least, the Corporate theme: light gray, logo goes here, content goes here, title thrown at far right.

Free code for adding comments to website:

This links explains how Echo works and looks.

Free code for adding forums to website:

This site explains Tal.ki I like it because it lets users create comments without going to the hassle of creating a profile.

I guess there’s no way I can write about something like aging in a very personal way.  I don’t want to name names or describe persons on whom that wrinkly process has occurred so instead I have a series of experiences which bring things into perspective…

…my grandmother getting older. Realizing that I have always thought of her as an old woman, but that she stayed that way all my life and has now passed into a point where I think of her as not an old woman, but an “older woman” . It’s such a subtle distinction but right now it means everything.

…playing with my niece and playing all the games I used to play: yelling in the coat closet and shining flashlights down the bedroom  a/c vents to try and see the center of the earth. Whoa, I used to be the one  getting coached on how to do this!

…talking with my brother and his wife and making up things his daughter should learn to say. One of those things being “I want some cousins!”   Yikes, I say.

… My mom asking me if she is “too old” to wear this or that. While my grandmother has always felt like an old woman to me my mom has always felt like a young woman. I could never imagine her being to old for anything.

…walking around the neighborhood wearing my moms coat and going out to look at a field. Aware that I must look like my mom out for a walk in this coat. Looking out at a pond with frogs in it and listening to those frogs. Being happy where they are and okay with them being out of sight, rather than wanting to catch one and see it in a jar. Well, maybe I do kinda still want to do that…

…wishing I had a house here. Yes, a house in Tennessee .

cheers,

Ally Reeves

The best of what I’ve discovered so far? That Indian business is booming with companies that are holding their own in terms of design, advertising, and interaction.

Very cool stuff!

Check out the companies below who are doing their part to stir the masses:

Ideaz Inc.

Mouthshut.com

Ogilvy

Digital Vidya

It’s a little out of character for this site, but a friend recently forwarded an article to me about the dangerous  Huashan trail in China, and the description and nature of the trail were so nuts I wanted to post something about it.   As someone who loves hiking in new landscapes and who’s trekked through many a trail in National parks of the US and a few in India too, I was amazed to hear about the risky nature of this trail. As a note, The SSQQ website , which this story springs from, is an odd one to be sure.  The site actually seems to be a hobby websites for a couple who organize Caribbean Dance Cruises ??! but it has a bit of everything on it.   Among the many random things in it’s archives are several stories of dangerous places and it seems to be a hobby of the site’s host to seek out some of the best stories of leisurely travel turned TV action movie.

A few pictures from the Huashan Trail taken from the SSQQ travel site are below. I recommend checking out the website and reading an account by a couple who hiked up the trail and had to come down during a winter storm. There are more treacherous pictures of the trail featured on the site, my favorite of which are a set of stairs which the traveling couple noted “go vertical.”

I recently took on the task of refining a power point presentation of an organization I am helping out.

The amount of time it took to complete the task really surprised me and I thought I’d create a bit of a timeline for the work for myself, to understand the real-time commitment of things like this when I need to present under a deadline, and for others, because I know I’m not the first person who’s felt themselves running against a deadline.

To begin with, I was unfamiliar with the content of the power point.  The Powerpoint was a visual and textual account of a historic district in Mumbai. It was important to retain a majority of the information as the presentation was meant to serve as proof of precise elements of the area that needed work: traffic crossings, railings and street furniture, and signage.

The power point began at about 140 slides: I know, it’s huge!

In the end I worked it down to 95 slides, some of which were sequential presentations of material which was meant to be flipped through quickly int he presentation of layered data visualizations.

First Day: I spent about 3 hours making minor changes and speaking with the person who created the original to make sure I understood the material. I made little tweaks here and there, correcting typos and in some cases rearranging slides so that the data flowed more easily between one subject and another.

Second Day: I spent 5 1/2 hours making images in slides the same size and formatting text. I picked regular scalings for title and body text and changed  font to Helvetica (font historically associated with signage and wayfinding plus it was clean and clear). I went through and removed random features of italics and bold. I aligned text boxes within the slide. I created new charts for data visualization where needed and added a few original images were copyrighted images had been placed as an example of the graphic needed.

I really thought I’d be finished with this by now… but no! At this point I’d put in about 8 1/2 hours.

I realized :

A good graphic takes at least 30 min. often 45min. at least.

Formatting is very timely, though there may be shortcuts out there I don’t know! Formatting took at least 4 hours. I went through and did tasks in waves.

Day 3: I took 4 more hours to go through and pare unnecessary slides. This was slow because as I said I was trying to keep all the info but fit it in more efficiently.

I realized:

Thinking of scaling it was worth while to remember that multiple images can be fit into a page small because the projector will blow them up 200-300%.

Dark text on dark background was walking on thin ice: the projector bulbs are often not as bright as the computer screen and one of my graphics ended up being hard to read.

Text should be created in Powerpoint  (when possible) not added in as an image because it can become distorted and fuzzy when an image s scaled.

Day 4: Yes there was a day 4!  On the day I brought the powerpoint in I found myself needing to do one last cleanup and polish. It took 1 1/2 hours.

All Total: 14 hours!

Following the presentation I found a few things that need tweaking. In short… give yourself a decent amount of time as you create a formal, professional Powerpoint. As I mentioned this was a particularly complex case as I could not trim any of the data and the original document was 140 slides. The final 90 slides is still a excessive presentation, although I’m a firm believer that for each subject you present via Powerpoint you will need a different number of slides to get your message across!

Bombay was born established in roughly established in the 16^th century and named by Portugese settlers. The area was originally an archipeligo of 7 islands and was a key fishing village that became a crucial trade route because of it’s deep natural bay. The islands would later be joined into one larger island,and the city would come to consist  in contemporary times of two regions: the Mumbai city district, and the Mumbai suburban district.

To give you a sense of the massive development that took place, in 1936 the city celebrated a census report of 1million people living in Mumbai: it seemed like a sort of victory. By 1991 however, the census reported 10 million people living in the same space and the novelty of a growing population was long gone.

The  activist movement in urban planning in Mumbai started in the 1970’s and was lead by three groups:

• The Save Bombay Committee
• The Bombay Environmental Action Group
• Bombay Civic Trust

It was clear by the mid 70s that Bombay had increasingly serious urban planning issues. A disproportionate amount of commercial development in the South and a flush of residential development in the north meant long hours of communiting for workers in the city, a strain of public transportation, and health impacts all around as residents of Mumbai commuted long hours in heat and pollution from traffic. The surge in development in the south was also contributing to a deterioration in civic services and a visible deterioration of the architectural  unification of the city.

For these reasons, the concerned groups  focused not only on urban planning but began to develop a urban heritage plan.

The first progress towards a heritage plan began when petitions from the group Save Bombay were heard by a municipal  commissioner of Bombay named  Mr. B.G. Deshmukh.  Relying on a section of the Maharashtra Region and Town planning Act (1966), Deshmukh encouraged citizen groups to prepare a list of buildings worthy of preservation as heritage sites and made avalible a grant of 10lakh for the purpose. Dushmukh’s predicessor, Mr. Jamshed Kanga carried on intereste in creating a heritage plan and saw that a with the help of the Save Bombay organization a drafted plan prepared by Foy Nissena plan was approved that contained 75 buildings, most of which were renowned monumental buildings in the Fort Area.

By the late 70s a group called The Indian Heritage Society, chiefly concerned with heritage preservation and founded out of Delhi, was established in Mumbai. By the Mid 80s a group called INTACH ( Indian Naational Trust for Culture and Heritage) was formed and an even more detailed document profiling about 200 buildings for heritage was established.

In 1988 the gov’t of India created the national Commision on Urbanisation (NCU) under the chairmanship of Charles Correa. This group stated that while the city’s structure must continue to grow attention must be given to heritage buildings.

The NCU stated that while preservation of particular monuments and buildings could be preserved by protecting the immedtiate area form development a regional and town development plan would be necessary to preserve districts which were historical.

By 1991 a list was published with help from numerous government and citizen groups groups that listed 624 buildings and pricincts as areas worthy of preservation.

Another document was published by the governement of Maharashtra in 1991 that set out guideleines for development  permissions that classified the city into three different grades of historic buildings. These listings distinguished the buildings and set out material guidelines for persons or organisations planning any alterations to their buildings.

By 1992 the “Kanga Committee” under  Municipal Commisioner of Bombay Jamshed Kanga, published a final report that forms the basis of the government policy on heritage and conservation as executed by the government of Maharashtra and Bombay Municipal Corporation today.

This writing draws heavily from the book

The Fort Precinct in Bombay: Conserving and Image Center

Edited by Rahul Mehrotra and Gunter Nest, ISBN 81-900511-0-5 1994. Max Mueller Bhavan Bombay. Prince of Wales Museum Annexe. Bombay 400001, India

As a foreigner, you have to stay on your toes here to get what you want, get a fair price, and get what you want in a timely fashion. I haven’t yet figured out how to negotiate a day where I don’t use a “don’t mess with me” tone of voice and for this I feel at a loss.

Someone recently suggested to me that these personel actually want to solve the problem and the best response I can have is one in which I negotiate for a solution. In this role, I focus on helping them to think of a solution to the scenario, rather than demanding this or that where I will meet the undesirable, “No Mad’am”.   Smart advice I say…something to be ingested with a spoon full of sugar.

I hope I get some sort of merit badge in the end.

Apparently, avoiding the negativity-goggles is a life long endeavor; one that you just have to accept as daily labor. You have to wash your socks and you have to feed your brain positive ideas too—did anybody else think it was easier too? I did think adulthood was supposed to be a breeze when I was younger. I’m not sure where I got this idea but I’m going to blame sitcoms.

Without further delay… here’s the latest image of the House Rules. I added some things in blue ink without asking Robin, but Robin: I think these are good!  And I need to read them regularly!!! Hopefully all the fans of the house rules get a chance to see this post!

As a note the rule that says: “Progress Can be an Illusion” is followed by: “Consider horizontal movement!”  there’s even a 5th proclamation I added today because I got excited:  ”Be in charge of your own approval.”

The House Rules were composed in 2007 by Robin Hewlett and Ally Reeves