It was a standard situation.

The heavy thumping noise was coming from the park, obviously kids had started to play football there. It was 05:00, shortly after sunrise. That is quite an unpleasant start into a Saturday morning.

In this summer I mentioned the idea of bringing the despairment posters onto classy glass trophies. That is one of the things we will add to the glass trophy line we constantly expand.

Here is the first alpha version how this could look like:

It is not a bad attempt, but there are many things which are not perfect: The yellow does not harmonize with the glass color (light green), the text is a bit fuzzy.

Recently I had to create a PDF version of a DocBook document.

For the addicts from your despairful drug lord.

Category Environment

The young Turk was sitting beside me on the park bench:

Man, you are not ok.

It was 2:30 in the night and the 17 year old together with his 7 companions were loitering in the park right under our bedroom window.

(continued from Part I)

The last time we looked at a map which only contained two topics and where the documents attached to the two topics are completely disjunct:

Infinity

One additional observation we can make is that the landscape has a rather peculiar structure: If you follow the JJJ mountain southwards towards the HHH ridge, you will see that that continues at the top.

The same holds for the east-west horizon: If you follow the EEE

One of the things we at Bond University struggled with was to keep the kids entertained and in the class rooms.

For that, a colleague of mine (aka Dr. Evil) had devised a cunning approach: While the lecture notes were electronically available (as Word documents), before any lecture you could only download a version where half of the content was blanked out. For the students to fill out during class. After every lecture the full document was made available.

While you are all sunbathing (probably in your mini tangas, sheesh), it is left to me to bring wisdom into this world.

Category Society

Bond University has recently celebrated its 20th birthday. According to the vice chancellor, Robert Stable, Bond is well on its way to join the Ivy League, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. This, so I read amused, is driven by Bond's epic struggle towards academic excellence. It has definitely nothing to do with any Porsches or Maseratis in the student parking lot.

As I happened to accompany Bond on its Golden Path to enlightenment and have seen the business model from the inside, I have skimmed their tricks of trade in the process. Tricks I'm ready to share with you.

Before we can look at the impact the topology of a topic map makes on the visualisation, we first consider only the text content itself. And to have a better control over it we will stick to purely synthetic maps, i.e. those where the text follows certain patterns we control.