Umamiblog

2 and bit years ago I started my journey with Intergen. Today, this particular part of that journey comes to an end. Today is my last day at Intergen.

I’ve really enjoyed my time here at Intergen; the work I have done, the relationships I’ve made, and the opportunities I have been given to develop. I know and can recognise how much I’ve grown personally in my time here.

I’d like to give a big shout-out to all the people at Intergen, past and present, for making it the experience it was. I looking forward to see what you crazy cats get up to!

So where am I going?

About a month ago an opportunity came up to work with the crew at Ponoko that was too good to pass up. This means getting to work with one of my most favorite persons in the world again, Miss Sally Coe, as well as getting a chance to work with Dave ten Have (aka Dave5).

If you haven’t heard of Ponoko, do check out the website (or the blog). Next week I’ll post a bit of an intro on it.

Otherwise, changes are afoot.

Introducing ActionThis. Fun, exciting, stressful and interesting times. :o)

More to come soon.

Tomorrow (Wednesday May 2nd) we’re running a user experience and usability twilight session at work. Speakers include Trent Mankelow from Optimal Usability, Natasha Hall from Trademe, and our very own Eamon O’Rourke. The details:

When: 4.20pm, Wednesday 2nd, May
Where: Ground Floor Theatrette, 20 Customhouse Quay, Wellington
More info | Register me!

See you then!

The question of who cares is easy to answer: anyone who has complained about the general shortage of developers. If we want to increase the number of capable developers out there, not cutting out half the population is probably a good starting point.

Jo Chapman, Intergen developer, pondering on “developing girls” in IT

A couple of things have been happening lately I’ve wanted to blog about. I thought I’d combine the lot of them for good-measure.

My most important value in life?
We have a stock-standard normal old land phone line at home. The only reason we have one is the historical legacy of Telecom forcing you to have a landline if you wanted to get DSL/broadband. S and I both live from our cellphones so we almost never use it and only two people ever call us on it, S’s parents, and telemarketers.

I have a habit of saying “thanks for calling, I’m hanging up now” to any telemarketer but I’ve been putting up with a few calls lately to listen to the odd survey and how they’re conducted (there is an ulterior motive). Last week the New Zealand Chamber Music Society called and from what I gathered they’re trying to work out why no one cares about chamber music and consequently why no one (except themselves) ever goes to their concerts.

Now for whatever reason they thought relevant, they asked me a number of questions about my values. Such as:

• How important is world peace to you?
• How important is it for people to like you?
• How important is it to you that you reach your potential in life?

Uh, quite important… but it doesn’t mean I’m going to spend any of my over-taxed dollars to watch chamber music. I felt like saying “Go fish!” as they were asking the questions. Maybe they need to read Seth’s “I’d ignore him too” post.

Why don’t they advertise this?
Air New Zealand’s grabaseat promotion/feature is pretty cool. They update it daily with some very low fares to and from domestic and internation destinations – today I could have booked a ticket to Taupo for $39.

Their offers are always getting emailed around the office and it stuck out to me as a sitter for an RSS feed, it’s incrementally updating content! It is in Flash, I thought to myself, so it wouldn’t be that easy to scrape the page for that days offers to mash into an RSS feed. Hmmm, I wonder if the Flash app imports the offers as plain text or XML from somewhere. I pondered deeply.

I ‘Right click…View Source’ to see this staring back at me: <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”…blah blah>. Cool! Why didn’t I see the wee orange logo in the address bar? Why don’t they advertise they have an RSS feed for this!?

Direct link if this would be helpful for you and you didn’t know about it (like me).

Somehow this code feels more comfortable that the other one…
There has been lots of debate (and locally even) about the Blogging Code of Conduct brought on as a direct result of the attacks on Kathy Sierra. And yet the Blogging Anti-Code of Conduct seems more honest.

Resistance is futile!
I wanted to start a new Word document today. I almost got as far as opening up MS Word only to find myself closing it and going to Google Docs instead.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today a project manager said something to me that I didn’t think I hear (from a project manager) in a thousand years.

What do you think it was?

Win: A random prize to the person with the first correct answer (NZ only).

Update: Winner announced!

As much I wish it was Stu’s remuneration (I could do with the moolah) or follower’s “realisation” (too funny) or sal’s fries (now I’m hungry) the award goes to mase for his “don’t worry about the budget”.

Yep, it’s true. It took a moment to sink in when they said it, and then register what that actually meant in terms of the mouth it came out of… shocking!

Prizes?
I had a loose idea in my brain about what the prize could/would be. If you were Wellington based it was going to be my shout at some local establishment. If you were elsewhere in NZ it was going to be some random conference schwag I’d picked up, maybe a t-shirt, maybe a laptop bag, maybe even a thermos..

So Mase, you’ve won a drink with me at some stage bud! Cash it in when you want. To everyone else who left a comment; thank you! I laughed uncontrollably reading them as they came in.

I’ve decided to leave Intergen and move on over to Provoke. It wasn’t an easy decision to make but the offer to work on Provoke’s new “Lirpa Loof” project was too good to pass by…

Provoke’s “Lirpa Loof” project works over Google’s new TiSP service which in turn was built upon the work of early inventor George Washington.

Wish me luck!

Update: Ok, I’ve had my fun
Do have a look at the date this post was written. Thanks for playing.

I have no idea if I’ll ever post again. I suspect I will. But for now, I have a lot to rethink.

- Kathy Sierra

Tomorrow I’ll be giving my “Introducing Web 2.0 concepts” presentation here in Wellington. There are still a couple of spots left if anyone would like to come along and enjoy a drink and some nibbles:

When: 4.20pm, Wednesday 28th
Where: Intergen, Level 7, Plunket House, 126 Lambton
More info | Registration

See you then!

The absolute best “how to find us” directions I have seen on the web. Ever. Once you load the page, click on “Contact us”.

Seen any other good ones?

Yesterday something minorly momentous happened. The SSC released the new set of web guidelines they and many others had been working on. While the draft had become popularly known as Version 3 (the last set released were Version 2.1), we now have a new name and the version count has been reset, introducing: Government Web Standards v 1.0

One of improvements made is best summed up by a paragraph from the press release:

There has been an emphasis on categorising requirements into standards that are measurable and testable and classifying as recommendations those that are still important but subjective in their measure or deemed not quite as critical as a standard.

People love things that are measurable and testable but it’s important to point out what makes something truely usable and accessible is not so easily quantifiable. It’s creative thinking and problem solving at each level of your agency and website, and there ain’t no checklist for that…

For the last two days, we’ve [Intergen Interactive] been holed up in a secret bach location somewhere in Raumati. I think it’s really important to take some time out away from the office with your workmates. We had some really productive sessions discussing different issues and opportunities we’re facing at the moment. More importantly, we had a really good time. But how could you not with a sunset like this:

Yep, that is the South Island in the background. Magic.