Visualization alternatives

I subscribe to the RSS feed from Smashing Magazine, which is a great way to come across tips and tricks for your inner web designer. One of their posts today has the most interesting list of visualization techniques I’ve seen in a long time: Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics

Filed under: consulting, deano diagrams

Information ingestion

… not indigestion! In discussions with my coach/mentor he mentioned that he thought I read incredibly broadly and wondered aloud where I find the time. The answer is simple: I trained myself to read quickly and “shallowly”, and I use public transportation (DC Metro) so I often get about an hour a day to catch up on my reading! The power of not reading too deeply (i.e: not evaluating every argument/hypothesis/conjecture in detail) is that you can scan an entire subject area, then aggregate the best practices from it quickly. Here’s an example:

I am interested in database and there are free database magazines and several database aggregator/RSS web sites that I know of. I subscribe to all of those magazines: Oracle, Teradata, DB2, MYSQL, and add the aggregator sites to my RSS reader (Google homepage). I scan these publications quickly: I don’t care about obscure PL/SQL syntax, but I do care about an article title or neat trick to do with PL/SQL. I can then locate the detail if I need it, or pull out the common themes and best practices across all those technologies.

 This allows me to ingest (find, read, process, “index”) information very quickly.

Filed under: consulting, currently reading, deano diagrams, mentoring, personal improvement

Weekly Review – Checklist MindMap

I came across this post: Gary Slinger » Weekly Review – Checklist MindMap  which is a great overview mind map of the weekly review process. I wish I'd thought of that … I process many maps and notes etc … but never connected the dots. Thanks Gary!

Filed under: Getting Things Done, consulting, deano diagrams

White boarding basics

The first in a series of posts on Deano Diagrams(tm) is some white boarding basics. Nothing new here, just laying the foundation for a much bigger discussion about diagrams. Use alternating colors when capturing lists of text, it helps with readability and visually groups items together. Add a wee check box to the left, if its an action item you can check it off, if it needs to be captured electronically you can check it when it’s captured!

Filed under: deano diagrams

Microsoft Graphic Design Tools

Hmmm, so as I poke around looking for tools to crate “sketch-like” diagrams it occured to me to review/work with the new Microsoft Expression tools such as: Acrylic. There is currently a free Community Technology Preview of the Acrylic tool and I bet it has something like whiteboard marker/crayons to draw with. Illustrator is my tool of choice, but it’s costly and I don’t use it enough to make a living off of it. I’ll post some samples … the web site is bizarre in a typical “taking over the world” kind of way but if you look closely it’s the right kind of move. Microsoft needs solid tool support if they are going to retool the client side or web side presentation layer in Longhorn.

Filed under: deano diagrams, techno-junk

Deano Diagrams

So for the longest time I have been goign to write a short presentation, booklet, web site about how and why I draw the diagrams I draw. I get consistenly good feedback about my use of color, form, and layering. Really the concepts are pretty straight forward but most people to not consistenly apply them. Like any bad/good habit you need to be relentless about them at first, then they become second nature. I’m going to write a series of posts about effective diagramming for consultants. I don’t imagine it’ll be very long but I’m having trouble Getting Things Done and while this it one of my projects I think the incremental, low overhead appraoch using a blog might actually get it done! I’m going to write a series and catagorize them so it’s easy for you to track them.

Filed under: deano diagrams