Monday, July 05, 2010

Boot camp was disappointing

I was really disappointed in tonight's cardio bootcamp class. Our regular instructor is in Vegas, and I was told that this close friend of hers would be filling in. As in turned out though, another lady altogether led the class.

Some folks liked her. Personally, I thought she was mostly boring. She definitely didn't push me very hard.

The first half of the class was rather slow paced and low in intensity. She certainly didn't move as fast or as vigorously as our regular instructor. Some folks in the class probably preferred that, but personally, I didn't feel challenged.

Neither was the gal behind me, apparently. She's not a young woman, but she works out hard. The two of us agree that a boot camp class should be tough and demanding; otherwise, why call it "boot camp"? As she said, when it comes to the tough, physically demanding moves, we should say "Bring it!"

Judicious use of animation in PowerPoint

In an earlier post, I talked about how it's annoying to see someone simply re-read the text in their PowerPoint slides. I also said that trivial rephrasings aren't quite as annoying or insulting, but they do come awfully close. I also suggested that it helps if we keep the PowerPoint text brief, so that we can expand on their meaning as we speak.

It also helps if we use simple animation effects to make the text appear only as needed. It's trivial to learn, and anybody with even an average IQ can make it work.