I often have to make reports using unformed/gathered data, and more often than not it's for something web-based So I often have to think about presentation as well as the actual stuff I want to show someone.

As you might have guessed by looking at this aging website, I *hate* web design. It's really annoying, and I'm not at all good at it. I recently came across this Top 10 CSS Table Designs page, and I think it'll make my life easier.

A prof in college once told me that "presentation is key". He was giving me an 89% on a huge school project that took a few months to complete. I spent hours and hours on it, and tried to be as meticulous as possible. But I did it by hand, since it was far too large for anything I had at my disposal. This was 1993, after all, and my only computing resource were crappy lab machines or the slightly more crappy Amstrad 8088 I had in my apartment. I didn't think ASCII art on green/white tractor paper would have been an improvement over my hand drawing and writing -- but it likely would have been. I took drafting in high school, and know how to make lines and measurements and things to scale and all that. But I always got dinged on my arrowheads. I'm no artist. Shit, I can barely write my name legibly.

Anyway, after handing me my grade he said that he wished he could have given me a 100%, as my work was -- technically -- the best he'd seen in a long time. I had two TAs come by to congratulate me on it before I went in to get my grade. I thought it was good work and a shoo-in for an A. Since it was worth 40% of my overall grade, it was important to do well. Why was I saddled with an 89%?

"In business, when you go out and spend months doing research, you have to make sure that your results are presentable in order to do that work justice. You have to make it visually appealing, free of errors, easy to read, so that you can secure funding or make your argument or get your proposal approved. Look professional, and you're taken seriously. Presentation is key."

So he reckoned my less-than-perfect presentation (I did it on vellum with technical pencils, but my bad artwork and the occasional smudges made it look a little shoddy, I admit) was worth "barely missing an A-class presentation".

I guess it's no great revelation that dodgy data which looks good is better received than very accurate data which looks crappy. But ever since that prof's grade (man, was pissed) I've been conscious of making sure than everything looks at least passable. So I'm always on the lookout for stuff that can make things look a little better. That's doubly important when the numbers themselves are a little ugly...

Griefer
Take The EvE Personality Test today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

I think that about sums it up. Case in point was this retard we ran into last night. Dude flies an indy into a bunch of nuts waiting to kill him (or whoever else comes by) and then goes on a tear about us all owing him money because we blew up his ship. I tried to get him to pay for the stuff that we couldn't salvage from his wreck, but he was having none of it. What a maroon.

A day without emo-rage is like a day without sunshine...