08 Dec 2006
I don’t usually even remember dreams. And, when I do, they’re generally just random narratives that don’t link in closely with real life. Last night was different… I dreamt that a box of computer stuff arrived unexpectedly (from a known sender, with known contents… it just wasn’t meant to be sent for free/at all), and then, in some bizarre shift that tends to happen in dreams, I was at church before something started (Carols service? evidently the holiday I’m meant to be away on then didn’t happen… but what happens next defies that chronology) just standing near the door, when all of a sudden a friend who is a long way away taps me on the shoulder & we go and sit down somewhere. Just for a day, just on a stopover at home, before heading elsewhere… but still… lovely. I miss more than I think. Then there were vision and sound problems, but I wasn’t going to get up in case my friend disappeared. And the problems fixed themselves/other people appeared (literally, it’s a dream okay?) to fix them.
But this morning is weird because the dream established a contrast of distance from reality that isn’t entirely pleasant. That’s why good (completely) irrational dreams must be better than good (tenuously) bound-to-reality dreams. And now I’m in that post-dream woke-up-too-early (I woke up normally) state of confusion & expecting something strange to happen & not knowing exactly what’s going on or if everything is alright (there were other dreams, too). By the time that feeling subsides, I will have forgotten the dreams completely and remember them only by this milestone. This boundary stone of dreams.
07 Dec 2006
I recognise this post is highly ironic in light of yesterday’s remarks about my not being able to use a spreadsheet in parody of Apple’s Mac/PC ads, but, please, let it slide.
So all I want is an enum field. Or a multiple choice box, easy to get in Excel.
Neither of these are available at time of writing. The term “enum” has only been mentioned on any OO.o mailing lists pertaining to Base nine times, ever. And it supposedly connects to a MySQL server. Yeah, right.
I guess it’s back to rapid prototyping of a web interface to deal with data entry, or using Excel/Access… sigh. This was meant to be the quick and easy (and open source) solution.
06 Dec 2006
Spent most of this afternoon absolutely raging at an iMac. They’re unstable, buggy, pieces of crap and any pretense at simplicity is entirely unfounded. Several behaviours (or lack thereof) are altogether ridiculous — even Windows manages to do photo thumbnailing & previews better, and, yes, it’s a PC. Take that and shove it up your “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials — I can’t use Excel, but I can sure as anything see what photos I have on a CD when I throw them in my drive. Sigh.
I was lead to believe that iMovie was a safer bet than Windows anything-free, but after this afternoon’s experience, perhaps not. Time to blow $800 on Adobe Production Studio already, methinks. This end of the year makes me feel like applying for a credit card (for practical reasons, not just “silly-season” consumerism), but I won’t, yet.
Also had fun this morning sending a hundred and fifty dollars (or thereabouts) worth of lamps up in flames. Well, not quite anything so spectacular, but they’re dead now. Even so, still vaguely ahead of the game. If anyone wants to buy a stack of 110V 1,000W GE Par 64 globes… heh. I have a feeling this investment may prove profitable sometime in the next decade when there is finally spare time enough! Meh! Either way, this morning was good times. And Katy & myself now feel rather more pleased with our ghetto grey-area-legality electrician skillz, knowing that it was the lamps, not our wiring, which sucked. Or, didn’t suck but were totally not designed for certain usage. Or something.
Mind you, I’m no particular stranger to blowing theatrical lights. At ANCON, out of a rig of perhaps twenty par 64′s, three broke on my watch (two on the last day). I’m adamant it’s because the venue’s power sucked, but the site manager reckoned they hadn’t needed replacement in over two years. Which makes me think that, given a 2000 hour rating on such things which gives <170 days @ 12 hours a day, they can’t have been using the space too much! Shrug.
I should probably just leave the lights alone for a couple of months so that I spend enough time working to afford video things — which would, recursively, cause the same problem as the lights, I spose! All good fun.
04 Dec 2006
So titled because, God willing, there will be more surveys to come.
Went down pretty well methinks. Praise God! I managed not to talk too long or garble words too much, as evidenced by the fact that people managed to write down what “CYIADA” stood for when I explained it was nothing to do with cryptosporidium or Sydney Water — some surveys had “Christian Youth in a Digital Age” neatly penned across the top next to my cryptic “CYIADA” acronym, which brought great joy! Obscure acronyms worked well because the previous spot had opened with “What does CMS mean?” (no, not the web developer’s idea of a CMS), so I was able to follow that up with something no-one would guess, and use that as an excuse to launch into a little rant about what it was. I’m pretty sure I took under three minutes.
That three minutes was basically: for people like you (youth leaders); early next year (2007); gives blog, podcast, email & SMS tools; lets you get resources you need online instantly; best used to link back to real world ministry/promoted in real world ministry; we want to know what you think about it/how you’d use it.
I had planned to read from a script but kinda got up and changed my mind, for whatever reason — we were running a couple of minutes behind, the audience seemed more intimate than I’d thought (hadn’t seen the venue before), and I didn’t really like what I’d already written, anyway. So yes. Punchy apparently worked well enough.
Enough people were excited about it to make me immensely happy, and I got more than 50 survey responses (from 130 printouts, probably 120 participants as predicted, but it let me cover empty seats when papering the room before the session) which is so so useful. A few seemed very disinterested or generally negative about it, which did hurt a bit but really, there’s no way I was going to get 100% positive feedback.
By positive I mean supportive rather than “yes, we would use something like this” — I got a lot of positive responses that even fall outside the product’s scope, which is frustrating in an entirely different way — I’d not even considered there might be people who only did kids ministry at the conference, but discovered two lovely responses from people that had added primary school years to my question, “Leading kids in school years…” and circled them, instead. They were interested in none of the contact functionality, but were keen on perhaps starting to use video to support what they were doing. Of course, that’s outside the scope of what CYIADA is trying to do, but there’s no where else for them to get that in the same way (there are DVD-based resources for this, but not any videos available online under a micropayment model).
Aggregate results might get published sometime. Not tonight, I think the last week has just set in (or maybe I drank a bottle of V this afternoon and it’s worn off? Shrug.) Either way, I’m sitting at work completely exhausted and need to go home and sleep muchly.
(Still need to setup cyiada.com domain name quickly, before anyone sees it! Sigh… I’m so organised…)
03 Dec 2006
I just printed 400 pages for a survey I get to do tomorrow afternoon. I was thinking about taking it to church and getting opinions from the same kinds of people there (it’s a survey for CYIADA for youth leaders), but then realised it was pretty much useless with them because I already knew everything they had to say. So it’s more of a survey for really basic aggregate number stuff, not in-depth things I couldn’t figure out on my own.
Which, I’ve decided, is fine, because I’ve got a web and email address on the piece of paper, and for the number of contacts this so-called “survey” seeds I’m praying it’ll be completely worth it, even if no-one bothers filling in the survey properly. Really, $40 (or however much actual cost per page is here) is pretty good if I only get 10 quality leads on people who are desparately keen to use something like this… and can wait a few months.
| I mention that as trouble appears to be brewing on the home front re: the waiting part… : |
People are enthusiastic but in a “let’s grab a generic CMS and mix it up with Blogger and Google Groups and it’ll rock” kind of way. Which is fine for all of about six months, then you’ve gotta do it all over again because 1 of 3 stops working for whatever reason. And scalability issues. Grr… anyway. I thought we’d been through all this already with our abortive Yahoo! Calendar attempts of 18 months ago. Apparently not. |
So… please be praying for wisdom and patience around that particular issue. And especially that I’d be loving, because right now I’m in a position where I could clobber people with technical ramblings until they agree with me (read: relent), or simply go and change it as I think it should be… but doing either of those things is obviously unproductive. Again, prayer for wisdom is very welcome!
Prayer is also sought for tomorrow — for the Youth for Christ programme running at St Andrews all day, and then for me at the Connecting in a world of change conference as I present in my little 2.20 to 2.30 timeslot. Which is plenty of time for a geek like me — I actually do enjoy public speaking, but that doesn’t mean I’m much good at it!
I’ve also got to get a site up for CYIADA, because I decided that if I stuck it on print materials and did 130 copies of it, then the potential for embarrasment should be sufficient motivator to make me move quickly! Hehe. Really must get one of the IT guys here to setup hosting first thing tomorrow… I figure it’s okay if it’s not working straight away, because I can say it’s just been put up and there’ll be something there in the next couple of days.
In other domain-related news I also picked up josh.st. So you should be able to get to this site via that funky URL in a few hours once DNS pushes through (the nameservers have switched, finally — .st’s NIC took forever with that — but obviously it’s still got to propagate). I know I’m always saying this but there’s a new design on its way. I’ve got three sites in the works at the minute, so if it doesn’t come in a hurry don’t be too surprised. I doubt anyone is anymore, though!