I'm working on my pyblosxom presentation for PyCon, and I'm experimenting with writing my paper in ReStructured Text (ReST). The proliferation of "humane" text formats like ReST, Textile, Markdown, and the various Wiki syntaxes is enough to make me insane. I'm constantly getting confused between different Wikis and other programs. Also, all these formats creates fragmentation in tools. There's the nice HumaneText service on OS X for Markdown. Alas, no such tool for ReST. At least there's Bill Bumgarner's ReSTedit.

On the picture side, I started playing with GraphViz, which is something I've wanted to play with for quite some time. Most of the presentations that I give involve lots of graph style diagrams and/or code. PowerPoint doesn't really have good support for these kinds of presentations. GraphViz looks like a great solution for the diagram part. It's easy to make good looking diagrams (I still need to learn a little more about layout), and is less painstaking than playing with Visio or some other graphic tool. It does take me back to my grad school days of preparing papers with LaTeX. As for the code, I haven't really come upon a good (semi)automated solution for formatting code for slides, so I usually end up tweaking each slide by hand.

March is shaping up to be a hugely busy (and stressful month). Boing Boing made me laugh out loud today:

Boing Boing: Two Towers translated into leet gamerspeak:

Two Towers translated into leet gamerspeak
A reader writes, "The author of F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng has now written a follow up, also in l33t 'Teh Tw0 T0werz'"

[Somewhere, under the mountains]
Gandalf [Glamdring] Balrog
Gandalf [Glamdring] Balrog
Gandalf [Glamdring] Balrog
Gandalf [Glamdring] Balrog
Gandalf [Glamdring] Balrog
Gandalf [Glamdring] Balrog
Gandalf: "U. R. PWNED!"

[a leetspeek guide if you need one ]