I read the Survival guide with great pleasure and find it very useful and many times very amusing. A few comments/recommendations.

1. A useful addition to Presentation Guide 5.B.4 Sound. Although a speaker should face the audience as much as possible, we all know that for the majority of presentations, people are facing the screen at least 25% of the time. Please place the wireless microphone on your jacket/sweather/shirt on the same side as the screen is. This will avoid a complete dimming of your voice when you punt something out on the screen.

2. The majority of the Email Guide has an even page header showing ‘Presentation Guide’ (this even continues at the index, not very appealing). This mistake is very inconvenient during browsing when the Guide is used as a reference book .

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Scientists’s desk
What general office software is useful for scientists? I come to the following enumeration: an email client, a calendar manager, a browser, a document formatter (for non-scientific papers), a spreadsheet and presentation software. Microsoft sells software providing all these functionalities, and indeed many scientists use the Microsoft products Outlook, Internet Explorer, MS-Word, MS-Excel and MS-PowerPoint. However, with free – technically speaking – superior products Google is now challenging the leading position of Microsoft in this traditionally Microsoft territory

Tired of Microsoft
After having followed each and every update of the MS-DOS and Windows operating systems for the last thirty (30) years I have had it with Microsoft. I am not going to defend the Redmond boys any longer when my colleagues shame them. On the contrary: I will give my peers additional arguments.

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When people reply to an email message I sent them, they often append my (full) email message in the body of their email. When I look at the text of my echoed email I get frustrated. I see that my text has acquired a large number of awkward line breaks, at positions where I certainly did not put them. With these new breaks the text is much more difficult to read.
Can we prevent this mutilation of our email text?

In the internet protocol descriptions (RFC’s) servers and clients are allowed to add line breaks (“\CR\LF”) wherever they like. This convention has has been prescribed to ensure that text messages will survive any network, irrespective of platform, operating system.

One solution to the hard-return problem would be to attach your whole formatted text as a formatted text, like an MS-Word document. Such an attachment is not easily converted to plain text by the email program (client). But this solution is bad for a number of reasons. For instance because replying becomes more cumbersome.

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The arrival of email has opened up a new communication channel that can be extremely efficient. Actually sometimes too efficient. It can take 30 seconds to write an email that means hours of work on the receiving side. This, together with the sheer volume of work-related emails that scientists tend to receive, can provoke a lot of stress.

Scientists (like myself) often struggle to organize themselves properly. It is then very tempting to use your inbox as a to-do list. The messages in your inbox are often connected to tasks, and you can simply leave them in the inbox until you have dealt with them. Most of my colleagues work this way.

THIS IS THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY OF ORGANIZING YOURSELF! It means namely that your daily work becomes dictated by the messages that you receive. This means that, in the end, others run your daily schedule instead of yourself! What you should do, instead, is make a proper (electronic or paper) personal organizer. This can be extremely simple and contain a task list including priorities and deadlines. You decide then yourself which part of the incoming email ends up one your task list and in which form.

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