New laptop computer; upgrading OpenBSD

My current Asus laptop computer is now a good many years old. The replacement (cheap Chinese) keyboard is dodgy, the power connector needs soldering again and, perhaps through having lost some screws, the case is starting to come apart. While we are not so wealthy these days, a less powerful laptop is okay because I don't demand much of it anyway. Some tests with putting my current 17.1"-screen laptop some distance from me and still trying to read from it reassure me that a 13.3" screen will be sufficiently comfortable: I will try going down from my 3.2kg behemoth to a 1.2kg Asus Zenbook that is more easily carried around and whose battery lasts for longer. It is reported to need Linux 4.5 for the touchpad to work and I note that Void Linux runs both LibreSSL and runit and is a rolling distribution so I may give that a try.

Incidentally, yesterday I finally got around to upgrading our non-laptops to OpenBSD 5.9, though I embarrassingly omitted a sysmerge on one of them and puzzled why the audio server wasn't starting. The improvement in inteldrm and in Broadwell USB mass storage support is welcome. (My new Zenbook will have Skylake, mind.)

Presentations in Britain

Apart from my GCSE English oral in which I spoke for five minutes on UFOs, without slides, I didn't have to give a presentation until it was actually warranted in my full-time work in Ohio after graduation. Indeed, it was less than a year ago that I finally had to use PowerPoint: previously I had used LaTeX's Beamer class. (Currently for things like workshops for users I use reveal.js.) In applying for jobs in Boston I didn't have to give any presentations: I largely took written and oral tests and people bought me lunches. Benjamin made it partway through middle school there without having had to give a presentation.

However, presentations seem ubiquitous in Britain. I had to give one as part of the interview process for most jobs I applied for; for my present job, they forgot to tell me to, and I hadn't even brought a laptop computer; they mentioned the night before that they expected a presentation in the morning, but that seemed to go okay: they got an extemporaneous talk on the selection of spare parts to include when the US Air Force deploys a set of aircraft to a different base. Another British employer got one on multi-sensor fusion for reconstructing situations in 3D: fortunately I had written code to output the actual data structures as PostScript so the sensor views and projections of the target situation were easily translated into PDF diagrams for the slides. I think it's mostly just about that one can speak intelligently and coherently.

It's not just British employers: recently Miranda has been working on yet another set of slides, even in primary school, this time on her achievements outside school. Her previous one was on salmon's contribution to Scotland's economy. Since moving to Scotland both our children have had to prepare many PowerPoint presentations. I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with employers apparently now expecting such. Why and when this love of PowerPoint occurred here I've little idea but it has been an unexpected facet of our return to this country.