Spent the weekend in Midtown Manhattan and Coney Island, with a bunch of rugby buddies seeing my favorite team play. Early in the season there was some sort of scheduling snafu, and the game got moved to Saturday - which was beautiful, warm, and sunny - and Sunday was rainy, windy, and a great day to explore the interior spaces in Manhattan. (I didn't want to leave Eataly ever.)

Yesterday I got to finally take Edward Tufte's day-long course on The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I've owned and fawned over his books for over 25 years, so I was pretty excited to finally see him speak in person.

It was.... not what I expected.

I had hoped for a lot of practical I took this terrible graph, and made it beautiful by doing X, Y, and Z type of information. But his talk was very little of that, and more of the philosophy of where good data and beautiful visualizations come from.

Which is really the truth. If you are adding borders and fonts and images and colors and other bullshit, you clearly have either bad data or a bad story. Design will not cover for poor data or communication skills. So the more diligent you are about your data, and the better the story it tells, then the visualization really has no way to BE bad.

It was not what I expected. But it was probably - in the long run - what I actually needed.

Oh. And he despises PowerPoint. (But then, who doesn't?) His reasoning is that it makes it very hard to present good data, simply. There are always geegaws and widgets and spinny shit trying to distract the viewer from the shit sandwich that is PowerPoint's built-in limitations.

Turns out that Tufte and Bezos worked together on Bezos' interesting and highly effective meeting culture.

Now I am back at work and SLAMMED with work. Everything absolutely exploded while I am gone, and I have been responding to emails from 7:AM to 12:45 (now) without a break, and can just see the light.

I was supposed to be getting ACTUAL WORK done today. Not emails. So now I have been back for exactly 5:45, and am more than a day behind schedule. Sheesh.