JailhouseRock/FanClub

[Hail Mary, full of grace] ...

[Our Father, which art in heaven] ...

14 July

CraigAnslow: You should probably have a copy of the book [Interaction Design] attached to your hip then. I have seen a few copies for sale on TradeMe recently.

TimWright: I have a copy sitting beside my bed at home! Well, it's in the bookshelf that happens to be beside my bed. All my HCI books are there. Oddly, Jenny Preece contacted me a few months back to use images from a paper (that I wrote with a few other elvisoids) in the next edition of the book you recommend!

24 May

CraigAnslow: yeah my wiki is read-only at the moment. When it wasn't it was spammed to death. I now need to either allow users to edit it by creating accounts or as Alex suggested add the four digit patch that Donald created for editing wikis off campus. I will discuss with the WikiHackingGroup at the next ElvisMeeting on what the best option is.

18 May 2006

CraigAnslow: congratulations the new place looks interesting rather than the last place, hopefully the air conditioning is better in the new place ... . You will have to change the name of your ElvisBrain diary though :)

TW: you're right! I didn't even consider the name of the diary when changing jobs. Damn. Suggestions are most welcome ;)

JenniferFerreira: If it was me, I'd use HumanSyn. A devil of a name:)

16.5.6

AlEx: Wow! That was quick. 5 months only, aye? I am guessing the new job is not as a BusinessAnalyst?? ;-)

TW: The new job covers all areas from user requirements and talking to users to development and testing. It will be some BA work in the mix. The problem with the current place is not the BA work, it's the lack of BA work - I didn't leave uni to become a sudoku expert! The new place (assuming the paperwork all comes out ok) isn't an IT shop - they're an organisational development consultancy - the stuff they do is fasinating - and I'm allowed to do research 'in the interests of the company'.

8.5.6

MaetL: Haha, so you have been bitten too... Nice. My favorite feature in Rails is the ActiveRecord? migrations... Being able to develop projects in an SQL agnostic way saves a **huge** amount of pissing about, and being able to roll back changes to those database schemas is pretty handy. It gives you that feeling of a project being fluid and continuously evolving, an illusion that is probably not possible to be sustained in Java without a ridiculously heavyweight build process.

11.4.6

KiRk: Does that band website work? I get an "Invalid user", which either means the url is wrong, or I'm convalescing.

TW: I'll check later today - myspace.com is blocked from work so will have to wait until I get home. Unless James reads this and can tell me the URL that was in the email that I sent him...

TW: Update: I did a quick sanity check and realised that I had, in fact, mistyped the url.

23.6 degrees.

KiRk: Our office gets that hot in the summer (it pretty much follows the outside temperature, summer and winter, since we don't have A/C). It's amazing the difference that a small fan blowing towards your face makes. The Wearhorse sells them real cheap.

TW: Yeah. We've been told to turn them all off so they can try to fix the heating/aircon unit.

Man, Windows is easy to get admin access.

KiRk: Nah, that's lame. You need elevated privileges to even write into that directory. You could just as well replace all the start menu icons for the Administrator, if you had that access.

KiRk: What's with the date, btw?

TW: What? Nothing? I really didn't type the wrong date!

Moon Whispers

Cool! hope it goes really well. I won't say "wish I was there" - but perhaps, if I was there, I'd be there :-) - JamesKjx

110 EUCs'

So, does this mean you redid the other use cases into something sensible? good on you!

TimWright: no - it means that we were specing a different system. I'm approaching it like a brick wall - small amount of pressure over a long time rather than a whole lot of pressure and a broken shoulder. I should also mention that we had to go and create a requirements list from the 110 EUCS and came up with 450 (or so) requirements. It almost drove me and the other two BAs on the project insane. Well, it did drive us insane, but only temporarally.

--- The Bike

Pippin: So, obvious question, but... how do you get pedalling to start with? I guess I could Google it, but it seems more interesting to ask you instead. Does look amazing, they're crazy-looking objects... very cool. Is yours that nice red colour?

TimWright: with difficulity. You puch on the pedal and as the bike starts moving, you put your other foot on the other pedal and keep pedeling. Just like a normal bike really. The problem is that you balance differently on the bike so you have to relearn to balanance - and remember how hard that was! The difference is that on a normal bike, you steer and balance your bike mainly by moving your weight. On a recumbant, you're more set in place so you steer and balance by moving the steering wheel. Tricky. If you want a go, drop me a line - I'll have it back for the weekend.

AlexPotanin: Good to hear from you, Tim! I hope you are enjoying your time there. ;-)

TimWright: Well...lots of reading and little else. I've read about 50 use-cases (that's only the new development they're doing - it's a big system, remember each use case is 20-50 pages long) and 3 books (use cases: requirements in design, about face 2.0, and some other requirements book).

KiRk: Pity you're not doing software devt there. ArrestedDevelopment? would be a catchy diary name :)

TimWright: But ArrestedDevelopment? isn't an Elvis song! (or is it? I know that Jailhouse Rock is one of his:)