Rebel Prince

I’m a little sad. The Amazing Race is over. Watching the season finale last night, I was a nervous wreck. But in a good way, of course. When Reichen and Chip reached the finish line and broke down into tears when told they had won, I couldn’t help but get a little emotional. Over the course of the race, the final teams had stopped in a total of 24 cities on four continents and logged 44,000 miles circumnavigating the globe—a mentally and physically grueling, but, I can only assume, rewarding experience. This ain’t no sleepy vacation. Good for them. I even got a little verklempt all over again watching the interview and finale clips on The Early Show this morning. Seriously, for a travel geek like me, The Amazing Race is one of the most compelling (and vicariously exciting) shows on television. (Just please don’t call it “reality,” and lump it with all the other dreck out there.)

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The Friday Five, which I bring you a week late, once again:

1. How much time do you spend online each day?
I don’t know, three hours. Okay, five. Six? It’s just that in addition to the time I spend online in the evenings at home, my job involves working at a computer most of the day, so I usually sneak in some web time there.

2. What is your browser homepage set to?
My Yahoo. I’ve customized it to display news headlines, stock market quotes, weather, TV listings, movie showtimes, and airfares for a long list of cities. Very convenient.

3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? If so, which one(s)?
Yeah, AIM. My screen name is dcboy1492. Feel free to chat me up if you see me logged in.

4. Where was your first webpage located?
While a freshman at Stanford (1995-96), I taught myself HTML, and using nothing more than Emacs, put up my first webpage, with its annoying backgrounds, frames, and all.

5. How long have you had your current website?
Rebel Prince has been up and running since Sept. 2001, and I started blogging per se in Jan. 2002.

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Information design guru Edward Tufte articulates what we’ve all come to know is true: “PowerPoint Is Evil: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” An excerpt:

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

Indeed. Now I’m picturing Linus using a PowerPoint presentation to explain to Charlie Brown the meaning of Christmas. Ha. (Link via Arts & Letters Daily.)

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