Charles on… anything that comes along

Over at The Register I’ve written about what Microsoft’s announcements on RSS mean for everyone else. Does the inclusion of extensions to RSS 2.0 mean it’s trying to embrace, extend, extinguish? Or does the fact that said extensions are published under a Creative Commons licence mean that there’s nothing to worry about?

And that’s before we get into the behemoth effect on newsreader companies on Windows, and security issues.. you didn’t think there were security issues with RSS? It’s going to be baked into Longhorn, so you’d better hope they’re ironed out…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The real purpose of Dashboard in Tiger: block Longhorn (8 July 2004; score: 52.03%)
• Longhorn will have RSS! Welcome to 2003! (26 June 2005; score: 47.26%)
• On being a Slashdottee (9 September 2004; score: 33.97%)

Went along to the nice folks at Hotwire PR to give a talk on what journalists want from PR people, and the changes coming down the track for both sets of people. (Title: “What makes a good new story - or, what’s Max Clifford got that you haven’t?”)

So: presentation, written in Keynote. Lot of thought gone into the content, and then into doing the twiddles, such as the self-typing bullet points, and the cube flips between slides.

Arrived there in plenty of time. Get out computer. (”Oh, I’ve got one of those,” said Narelle, to my astonishment. I didn’t know PR people were allowed to own Apple gear. And she’s got a Powerbook and a G4 - both at home, of course.)

Opened computer; presentation was ready, projector was there, plugged VGA plug into adaptor cable, plugged adaptor cable into Powe…. hang on, this plug doesn’t match. Um, where’s the projector cable plug go? WHERE’S IT GO?

Gah! I’d brought the old adaptor cable, which connects an iBook video output to a VGA input, instead of the new one which does a Powerbook DVI output to VGA input. Exactly how stupid is that? Else I could have just plugged it in and we’d have been underway. Thus is £1,500 computer rendered useless by absence of £ cable.

Instead I had to export to Keynote, then transfer it via USB memory stick to a Toshiba Portege. Which was amazingly thin, and remarkably slow, despite being just a year old. The nice thing: the exported file worked fine, though Powerpoint on Windows doesn’t have the cubic flip transition that Powerpoint 2004 on OSX does. Tch.

And to get the Portege to display through the project only required two IT people, and one or two restarts. Apparently this is standard.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Origami is dead, it just hasn't realised it yet. (6 May 2006; score: 28.37%)
• What we won't pay for is ad-free TV; but we'd like it to be like that (13 January 2005; score: 26.67%)
• Getting text spam? It might be to your "data" number (11 November 2004; score: 22.35%)