Stayin' alive

Decided to take fridays off this month. I've been taking Secundus in on the train to childcare each day is hard work. Uncy Joe's nom de crimefighting for him, The Angriest Toddler, is quite apt. He doesn't like people lookin' at him funny, or smiling at him when he's cute (and when he gets cross he's still being cute, which can become a bit of a vicious circle).

Been working on a secret software development project at home, which is lots o' fun. It's gotten to the point when it looks like it might just be useful.

Also, 30 Rock is very funny. I've been watching a lot of it lately.

Talent2 was designed by amateurs

Where I work they've recently rolled out a new HR system called Talent2. It has some great features, the chief one being that a lot of the dodgy old paper forms are now online, and when my staff fill in leave forms I get an email pointing me at the web site saying I've got an approval to do.

The thing is, the web interface was designed by amateurs, and seemingly not tested on actual people. It's the simple, easy-to-implement features that are broken. Like the email. It could link directly to the thing it wants me to look at. But no, it links me to the front page of the site and expects me to drill down to the right page. And the staff management system - it lets you "change context" so you're viewing the record of your staff. But it doesn't really show that on the interface (it does mention it in the details of the reports you get; it's just not obvious), so you can easily get lost and try to do stuff on someone else's behalf. When you need to approve leave for a staff member, and they've listed that they have a medical certificate, your can't approve it. The approve button is greyed out (you can deny the request or escalate it still). And the page gives no hint as to why you can't approve it. I hassled the HR folks and they told me that I had to click on the very non-obvious link that looked like this:

456728*

And choose approve from the dropdown menu there. I'll clarify this: there are two controls for the same bit of data, on different pages, and one will work but the other is disabled, and neither of them tell me why or what I am supposed to do in this case.

This is a system thousands of staff have to use, and is used in many major corporations around the world, and they haven't bothered to fix the small and easy-to-fix usability issues that may only cost a minute or two to the user, but that minute or two is multiplied by the many times a year each user uses it, multiplied by the thousands of staff around here, and you end up with quite a bit of unnecessary productivity loss.

Idiots.

Oh well, it's an improvement over the previous system, so I won't kick up a stink. Just send in polite and regular suggestions as to how they might improve the thing.

* Random number changed to protect the innocent

The little girl talks!

So, over the last week or two, the little girl has started with some words. And she's only ten months old. She started with Cat (pronounced Ca't), and is working on More, and has recently started calling me Da. She's also waving and high fiving! We're all quite impressed.

Foot Cat

I love cats, but am tragically allergic to them, so I have to enjoy their company from a distance. Which is why it's delightful that Squishy and I have come to the Foot Cat Compromise. After the kids have gone to bed and she feels it's safe to come out, she strolls up to the couch where I'm sitting, so I can pat her with my foot. And if I don't rub quickly enough, she'll start rubbing up against my foot herself.

Spelling antics

There's a certain period of time with children when you can T-A-L-K in F-R-O-N-T of the children by S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G thing O-U-T. Primus cut that short when he learned to read quite early, so we didn't get much time, and now he's also doing it to say secret things in front of his little brother. But not always with 100% success. At the end of dinner the other night;

"Mama, Daddy, I'm F-O-O-L."
"You're what?"
"I'm F-O-O-L. I don't want any more dinner".

and then later, after the bath, when he wanted to go upstairs and read his book:

"Daddy, I want to go upstairs to read H-A-R-R-Y P-O-T-T-Y".

Well, it's a start, I guess. He's usually a bit more accurate than the above would indicate.

Foreign Narratives

The boys were in the bath the other day - Primus playing a complicated game, and Secundus watching and learning avidly. I was dressing Tertia, who was finished in the bath, but was listening into Primus' play narrative as he explained it to me in a rapid-fire train of thought:

"...and Mr. Blucky [the blue plastic hippo] jumps on this [a foam toy with a face cloth draped over it floating in the bath, like a boat or island] and then he has to jump off to get to the wormhole [the foam/cloth platform is being moved back and forth across the bathtub] but the baddy is there and he has to get the gun and fight the baddy to get to the next level when he goes through the wormhole and if he jumps off here or here or here [he indicates various spots on the foam/cloth's path] then he falls in the lava and dies and when he gets to the next level he loses his weapons but he can get the bow and arrow and fight the next baddy [he rearranges the baddy, which is a toy boat with some plastic tubing next to it] but the baddy on the next level is more dangerous but then he can go through the next wormhole and get to the next level and..."

The kid is in a bath, playing with plastic bath toys, but he's playing a platform game! Like flippin' Prince of flippin' Persia! I've noticed it a bit before - a lot of their games seem to be computer games transliterated in to real life. It's standard terminology among his peer group and other kids his age to "Pause" and "Unpause" a game. All the games they play seem to be strongly influenced by playstation and computer games.

I know I'm going to sound like a crotchety old man, but I find it weird. They're into the same aliens and robots and monsters and swashbuckling derring-do that I was into as a kid - even Star Wars, the formative mythology of my own childhood, has come back. But they've got a different narrative structure to anything I remember from my childhood, and a different language for controlling their games. I suppose that we did this to our parents as well, and Primus's kids will also bewilder him with the way they play.

Conferencalicious

Most of the details of my life are in another blog, so I'm not visiting this one much. I'd originally thought this one might be a sort of quick blurt of the day type blog, but that's all elsewhere, so this one is for random thought and stuff that requires more detailed blather.

My conference poster went well. It's the first one I've ever done - I never went far enough as a student to get to make a poster for a conference, so it was all a bit weird, and since I'm not a student I didn't have a supervisor to tell me how to do it properly, but it turned out OK. And I've got new software for diagrams, and discovered I already had good page layout software, so all was good. Actually, seriously, Pages is really good page layout software for the uninitiated. I was surprised. I was very happy with how well the poster turned out.

The bad bit was that I had to give a presentation to go with it. I didn't expect that when I signed up for the deal, and am generally terrified of public speaking. Nearly had a meltdown when I discovered I was presenting in the big auditorium that would happily seat a few hundred. I was enormously relieved when only thirty or so people actually turned up. And the presentation went OK, though I think I confused the audience a little (my presentation was a little too techy for the conference). My colleague presented the other poster I worked on (I did most of the poster-making on both of them), and his went down well, and because the subject matter was appropriate for the conference (educational conference, and his was on the exam item bank we're working on) we were asked lots of questions afterwards and there was a lot of interest in what we're making.

On another note, this was posted on metafilter, and is nice and creepy: