JO on The Office

I never thought Jan-Ove Waldner would get a mention in any mainstream US media. Today I found out Dwight and I share at least one hero.

insta-deck

Earlier this year at Startup School I noticed quite a few speakers using very simple slide shows, namely a piece of text and a big image of sorts. One speaker even admitted that he created his slides on a whim by searching Google Images. I told myself I'd create a quick-and-dirty utility to create this type of presentation.

This is where I was going to say that last I checked, Google Images doesn't have an API but it looks like they have an experimental one now (more info). Anyway, Flickr has an API, and you could argue that it has more "interesting" images. The other part of the equation is the slide show framework itself. There are probably plenty out there, but I went with S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System by Eric Meyer. Put the two together and you get insta-deck. It needs a better name, but it's quick-and-dirty, as promised. There's no edit functionality, because that would just slow you down. I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in there instead.

Here's an example of what it produces. Share your creations/problems in the comments.

For Arun and Ben

S4B

thresh

I go to my seminar today and find out that a guy called Lyle Fong is presenting. He's talking about his company, Lithium, as one of a series of speakers talking about Software as a Service. He begins by giving some history, mentioning the fact that he and his brother used to be professional gamers. Seeing the oldskool PGL logo gave me instant flashbacks of high school. Lyle went on to talk about his brother who even won a Ferrari. I immediately raise my hand and ask, "Was that Thresh?" "Yes," he says. "Oh My God" I said, out loud, accidentally. Everyone in the room must've been looking at me like I was some kind of freak, but this was the brother of the guy who won John Carmack's Ferarri in the Red Annihilation tournament! I must've spent hours watching Quake demos from that tournament. Thresh's real name was Dennis Fong so it started making sense. Lyle was in the clan Death Row with him which was impressive in itself. I used to go play laser tag and use "Thresh" as my alias. This was a big day in my life.

Oh yeah, they're both serial entrepreneurs running multi-million dollar companies. Whatever.

Update: For Alex... the final game of said tournament on YouTube. Watching the demo in the actual game is way more enjoyable though.