Well, whilst they may help, I think Edward Tufte has identified some of the key issues in his paper on the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. I’m a great fan of Tufte and devoured his books on long commutes: the only time a fellow commuter has ever taken an interest in what I have been reading was after they had been admiring his rich pagination over my shoulder – I was too engrossed to notice.

Having bought the books through Amazon, their alogrithm suggested that, based on my spending patterns, I might enjoy certain other of their offerings. Two spring to mind as having been pushed relentlessly through “Amazon’s recommendations for you” pages: Information Dashboard Design and Presentation Zen. Neither was in the same league, nor did they aim to be. IDD was interesting, had some neat ideas and a cunning new graphical scheme for displaying a lot of information densely; coming from Tufte’s work, I found Presentation Zen attractive but very shallow. This disappointing performance has turned me off Amazon’s recommendations.

But is this fair?

I suppose I imagine reading as a journey, with each step taking me ever upwards. The problem is that if great books are distributed on a power law basis and you read one of the very best, then there is likely to be a lot of (relative) dross in the foothills, and I wonder whether this exposes a problem with Amazon’s analytics: whether they take into account the sequencing of purchases (a reading vector), or just correlations between purchases. (Of course, I’m assuming that my estimation of the relative merit of these books is absolute, which may be very far from the case!)

I took a route to Tufte via Jon Moon’s books; perhaps other people have travelled via Presentation Zen, and Amazon is simpy showing me the footsteps around Mount Tufte. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about how Amazon works: do they have someone interested in BI and Performance Improvement?

… talk of which, brings me neatly to Tammi Kay George: I was inspired to write this after reading her recent blog post in which she mentions Presentation Zen. I couldn’t help wondering if she had been bludgenoned into buying it by Amazon, too: I suspect there may be an overlap between her library shelves and mine, and if there is, my decision to buy Presentation Zen undoubtedly will have increased the likelihood of Amazon recommending it to her! It’s all my fault!

Technorati Tags: amazon, analytics, bi, powerpoint, presentation zen, recommendations, SAS, statistics, tufte

All of this happened over a weekend. If it happened in a soap opera I’d question the veracity. And all of this with a storming hangover after a great 34th birthday party on the Friday!

Thankfully we have great local tradesmen who are prepared to turn up on a Sunday morning at the drop of a hat and pump out cellars or who will collect-repair-return a car within six hours of the initial phone call; online retailers who have delivered new pumps and printers by Tuesday lunchtime; great IS guys at work, and alka-seltzer, …, which just leaves the humans.

One better, two on the mend, I think, …, anyway, back to the hardware…

The new printer, an HP CP1515n, is installed – I’ve updated the firmware and drivers – and is ready to go. It feels very exciting to have my first (colour) laser printer, after a series of inkjets from Epson and Lexmark: is this my first proper printer? The pump is fitted in the sump in the cellar, ready to pump, and has already cleared the last inch of standing water that we had. The car took me to work and brought me home today.

And the hotfix seems to have worked like a charm – we were running at around 9 crashes per working day, and have got through today with none.

Hooray, things are looking up!

Technorati Tags: birthday, bug, cellar, CP1515n, flood, flu, great locals, hangover, printer, pump

Setting up WordPress, the platform for this blog, has been a piece of cake. Now we just need to add water and watch it grow!

I hope to share some of my experiences in blogging, SAS and other IT related matters, and would really like to hear your views.

After being deluged with spam comments I’m now using akismet, this has found spam. Hopefully this will mean that I can concentrate on responding to real comments.

Technorati Tags: new, reflections, setup, WordPress