Chan's Personal Blog

I'm a bit behind in posting stories about my time in California because work is getting crazy busy. In either case, here's a set of pictures at Parcel 104 which is a fancy restaurant at the Marriott. Our team went there for my official welcome lunch, as well as a farewell lunch for some of our international team members which were heading home to their respective Yahoo offices worldwide.

This restaurant was pretty swanky. Even though I was wearing jeans that day, I didn't feel under-dressed. I guess one of the nice things about working in Silicon Valley is a lot of us programmers insist on dressing comfortably, and it'd be unwise for businesses to look down upon us because of it.

We started off with appetizers, and we went with the seafood calamari. It was an assortment of squid, scallops, and shrimp. The batter was a bit too light for my liking. I prefer true Greek calamari. (Eugene's restaurant back in Victoria has spoiled me with their amazing calamari.)

I came across this interesting article in Wired Magazine about Pecha Kucha. It's a particular style of giving Powerpoint presentations that I find extremely refreshing. How many times have you sat through boring lectures or meetings where the presenter has a billion Powerpoint slides to go through, and each slide is packed with too many bullet points of information? In my opinion, this abuse of Powerpoint usually leads to a more uninformed audience because of the information overload and boredom.

Anyway, here's the format of Pecha Kucha:


The writer of the article put together his own Pecha Kucha presentation to demonstrate the effectiveness of this format.