I love old movies. Old black and white movies from the 30s and 40s. The ones I used to watch as old reruns on TV as I grew up. The ones my parents fondly remembered and made me sit through. 

I have a friend with whom I have been watching old movies for 30 years. We are close to having seen the entire catalog of Humphrey Bogart movies. This week we had our latest session of Bogie fandom and settled down to watch 2 from 1936 and 1937.

I wrote recently that the best camera in the world is the one in your pocket. I still believe that. However, I have just had a couple of needs for specialised photography. 

The challenge was to make some images that could be used as backgrounds for a slide presentation. I have always advocated that a slide presentation, 
Powerpoint seems to be the standard term for one though I naturally prefer to use Keynote on my Mac or iPad, 
should be more images and less words. Let the images tell as much of the story as possible or at least colour the discussion.

The Harvard Business Review has a good little story about presentations. “The Glance Test” Could be worth a look.

Aside: I once saw a presentation where the speaker had used a series of paintings by Bruegel (look him up) for his presentation. No words, just the pictures, then he used the sections of the images to mark his points. It was very clever. If you got bored with the content, the pictures were interesting.

I take pictures. I grab an image, snap a quick photo. I rarely take the time to make a picture. I don’t often setup images and spend the time to make it work best with attention to exposure etc. I quite like auto on my camera and since the best camera in the world is the one you have with you when you need it, many of my images come from my iPhone.

It is almost 100 years since an ad agency told us that a picture is worth a thousand words. It is true a picture can convey so much more than a descriptive passage, but is a picture still worth a thousand words. Perhaps inflation has changed the value we can today aport to a picture. 

Sometimes two stories are destined to intersect. For me two stories just did!
First story: Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the transaction tool of an underground economy. The users of this currency work for each other and pay in bit coin. One bitcoin is worth about $US5 according to wikipedia. If you want to know about bitcoin wikipedia is a great start.
I heard of a server being discovered working with bitcoin. I asked what someone would do with a server to generate bitcoin. Here I learned a second term rainbow table. The suggestion was that a technician had compromised a server and was using it to create rainbow tables and being paid in bit coin.

Digital Myth
A teacher once argued with me about digital natives and digital immigrants. He asserted, in a public class

• digital natives are a myth
• that “millenials think differently” is a ploy
• the multitasking brain is a scam. 

“The multitasking brain of our youth,” he claimed, “is a myth propagated by big business to get more work out of individuals for less money.”
He may be right but I believe I have observed an improvement in student outcomes when they are allowed to work with music playing and a chat client running alongside their work. 
His argument was that technology in the work place was a big business plot to drive greater productivity from workers purely for profit. 
I love my technology and discounted all he had to say - once I stopped being cross. 

Steve Jobs introduced the iPad as a device of the post PC era. He pointed to smart phones and iPods as post PC devices and welcomed the iPad as the next post PC device. It was viewed as marketing speak and few people paid it much attention. Business futurists are now embracing the idea of a post PC world and viewing its implications. 

Steve talked about PCs as the trucks and busses of our working world dedicated to the heavy lifting of computing and work but looked at the iPad as the family car of the post PC era. The device we choose for personal adventures along the technology highway. 

In the last quarter of 2011 Apple sold more iPads than any computing company sold of their entire range of computers. The world has embraced Steve's post PC device.  

I was in conversation with a teacher who was bothered that she had not used the iPads in her classrooms in 2012. She wanted to assure me that “as soon as the dust settles,” she will be back choosing apps and designing programs to use the iPad. I asked if girls had just stopped bringing iPads to lessons since she was not using them.