Steve Workman

This has been a truly amazing week. I’ve travelled over 1000 miles and I’m not done travelling yet. I’ve had success, I’ve had failure, but I’ve also had so much fun that I’d do it all again in an instant.

Everything started on Tuesday really, with my trip to Fujitsu. An early start meant travelling to Bracknell for 1pm, where I met 4 other people who, honestly, only one of which I liked. The day was done by Fujitsu’s recruitment people, Alexmann. The presentation was boring and I was nervous when doing our individual presentations because I hadn’t really practised it. I really wasn’t bothered with the Fujitsu job. The pay they were offering was the lowest that I was applying for and the offices were horrid. The group exercise that we did didn’t go particularly well either as the girl who was with us was determined to compromise on everything. Anyway, After that I came home, saw Zoe, then slept.

The Wednesday was a big day for me as it was the Microsoft Imagine Cup Roadshow tour. I’d spent ages organising it, getting parking permits, lecture theatres, buffets, but I’d not spent enough time advertising it, meaning that only 30 people turned up. However, it all went well and I think those that came enjoyed it. Some good free stuff was given out too. Straight after, I had to get on a train to Bracknell again as it was the HP interview the next day. This assessment centre was far more important than Fujitsu as it was the final stage so I’d actually done some preparation for this one. I had also just gotten a phone call from PA Consulting telling me I’d made it to their next round in early March. That was great news as the money they’re offering is amazing.

This train journey was good, I finally got into Bracknell at about 10pm. I then proceeded to the Travellodge where I’d booked a room for the night. However, the bloke at the desk informed me that they were full! (It was valentines day but still, I’d booked!) He then called a hotel nearby called the Coppid Beech Hotel, a far more upmarket place and got me a room. He then put £45 on my card so that I could stay in the £115 room for the £70 I was meant to be paying! I finally got into my room just after 11pm. In general, it was very nice and breakfast was good the next morning, but still, it was a lot of hassle. I spent the rest of the evening practising my presentation for the next morning.

So, the big day came around and I walked the 10 mins down the road to HP HQ at Amen Corner. The offices were huge and nicely laid out (everyone had ID tags that let them into bits of the building). They first showed us a presentation about what HP was and what I’d be doing for the next two years. HP seems to have a good balance between taught training and on the job experience. There were 14 of us there (meant to be 15) and this was the third of seven sessions. We were also told there were 35 jobs. 7*15=105/15 = 5 people to get jobs that day. Not bad odds! There were 4 tasks that day. My first task was a case study (I won’t go into detail) where you had to make recommendations and priorities how to change the IT infrastructure at this business. It wasn’t too bad and I’m pretty sure I spotted the pitfalls and avoided them so all good there. I then had a competency interview which went well enough. Like at PA, they talked about Steel Software and Genesys a lot whilst asking a few questions about service and HP itself. Afterwards we all had lunch (very nice) and we talked to the managing consultants including one guy who’d been there 18 years (very interesting man).
After lunch we had a team exercise. Using the usual stationary items plus 2 coins, straws and some wine gums, we had to come up with a game idea that lasted 10 mins for 4 people and then sell it to company directors in a dragon’s den style presentation. What we came up with was a board game similar to mousetrap. Go round the board (coins to set distance) and collect straws and elastic bands, then landing on a sweet square you had to use the straw/elastic band to pick up a sweet and put it on your tower. It was a fantastic idea and on talking to other people definitely seemed like the best one of the day (then again, it was my idea *ego*).
The final task was to do a presentation to one of the senior consultants. I presented Steel Software which was to time and prompted some good questions and seemed interesting too. The other guy in the room, another candidate, presented on a project he did in his sandwich year at Intel. However, he was talking about a project he was still under NDA for so his talk was somewhat devoid of detail on how exactly he solved problems but the message got across, somewhat boringly though.
After that was a short Q+A session with one of last year’s graduates. Turns out we’re only the second graduate intake in 10 years! After this I went home. Finally got to Sheffield at half 8 and then went straight to see the Guillemots at the octagon. Fantastic gig, they’d been better but they’d not had more energy than that performance. After the gig I went for a curry with my godfather, ended up getting home at 1am. Such an immensely long, but incredibly enjoyable day, left me rather drained and just wanting to sleep.

The next day I just didn’t wanna get out of bed. I got a call from Ernst and Young inviting me to interview shortly (I couldn’t make the day the wanted to they said they’d call me back). Sounds good to me! My first proper day at uni all week was alright, but the evening was special. Zoe and I had put off valentines until the Friday so I took her out to a nice restaurant and then we went home and watched a film. It capped off a great week in style.

I’m writing this on a train down to London (again). Tonight and tomorrow is the MSP event, I’m staying at the Hilton Metropole in central London, then on Tuesday is my IBM half-day, with two group exercises, one of which I’ve done before. All sounds great and I get to stay in hotels for another two nights. It’s strange but I’m becoming rather used to it. As a consultant I’ll basically be living in a hotel all week then going home at the weekends. I’m sure I’ll get bored in the end but all this travelling is exciting, meeting new people is great and I’m excited to start work (but also excited to stop job hunting!) I’ll miss Sheffield when I’m gone, mostly for the people and hockey, but I’ll find another club near Reading.

I need some sleep

Steve

Currently Listening To: Joan as Police Woman - Real Life
Currently Reading: Marketing bumpf
Currently Eating: Tesco sandwiches
Currently Watching: Grey’s Anatomy (you can’t kill off primary characters!!!)
Miles travelled this week: unknown (will edit later)

Friday 2nd Feb 2007

Designertopia - Day 2

After yesterday’s revelations, my expectations were sky high and I was not to be disappointed. I tried to split my time equally between creative and technical sessions, so I hope I provide a good overview of everything that was on offer.

First up was “Technocraft”, presented by Marcus Fairs, the founder of Icon magazine. My notes say that he talked about art using technology, but he talked about some very good examples. There were three which stood out, mirrors created from silver balls and servos, a chandelier with LED-embedded crystals that could write messages sent over SMS (called Lolita), and a simple device called the armchair activist, a speaker that reads out text messages (it is currently in the designer’s office. It’s phone number is: +447790272804). Images and videos below.

So, with that rather light-hearted session out of the way, the creative track tackled “Creativity vs Technology”. We were warned that from this point onwards the speakers would start repeating each other from the day before, therefore, I’ll only tell you about the new stuff. Question: Is there creativity in the interactive space without technology? Answer: No. There are certain things that we are unable to do in that space without technology. The user’s expectation is now very high so they need to involve the user. To do this, you must focus your users on a mission, create a puzzle or building blocks and let the user solve it, giving them the proper incentive of course. Secondly, designers must collaborate with designers from the initial stages of conception, involving the end user/consumer in the process. This is similar to the way that extreme programming and agile development works. Whilst this talk didn’t really have much to do with creativity vs technology, the main theme was that they must be used together to create a complete experience.
The speaker left us with a web site joshuadavis.com. This man specialises in generative design, providing a set of rules for a program to follow that then creates the image.

The talk before lunch was more of a demonstration than anything. Carrie Langham from Microsoft took us through a number of real-world WPF applications including one for London fashion week, a golf tournament (which looked very good, with an enormous amount of detail) and finally an application designed for 2012, the final stage of the Building Schools for the Future project. I’ll admit, this was the first time that I was truly amazed at what a WPF application could do, but I was incredibly surprised at it. I’ll explain…

What was shown to us were four separate applications, a teacher’s workdesk, a student at home, a student on a UMPC, and an administration application. The student and teacher apps had Vista sidebar gadgets associated with them too which launched the apps themselves. The workflow goes like this: A teacher sets an assignment and posts this to his students. The teacher can drag and drop graphics into an assignment in his workbook from anywhere and can even add bits of video. The student then opens their application (every desktop is customisable) and reads their workbook. They see that they have been assigned a partner and they can then IM/audio/webcam chat to their partner about their work. They then set up a shared workspace and can add things to it. Provided is a search facility which brings up articles, picture and video from approved sources (i.e. MSN Encarta). They can then drop these into their shared workspace and construct an assignment. They are also able to delve deeper into pictures and diagrams, i.e. a model of the body, double clicking the heart displays a 3D model of a beating heart that they can rotate and go inside. If they need help at any point, apart from all the resources on the net, they can call up an expert (IM/audio/webcam) and get an answer straight away. They then submit the assignment to the teacher who will add the marks to his online mark book. All this functionality is contained within the one application. The admin application that we were shown tracked pupils through the school using RFID tags. This application would then flash up alerts and call parents whenever they had been truant for a number of days, and, if necessary, would call the police!

This all sounds amazing. All this functionality in one place is astonishing, and its already happening too. Some schools are implementing RFID tags for registration and school access. Marking of homework is being done online starting from this year. However, from all this I saw a number of challenges, even in 2012.
1. Bandwidth - some of this stuff was very high quality. Even on an 8Mb connection, if someone is saturating your upload bandwidth with P2P applications, webcam performance degrades significantly.
2. Approved sources for search - Homework will suddenly become the same as kids are unlikely to dig for additional information.
3. Copy and paste generation - Children will not learn as they may just copy the text and past it into their homework without reading it
4. Experts - People don’t want to be bothered at 10pm and will not care if it’s deadline day
5. Privacy - Do you want your child to be on a webcam with a so called “expert”???
6. Assumption of computing power - It’d be really nice to assume everyone will be on Vista, have a UMPC and a webcam, but that’ll never be the case. Will this application run on OS X? I doubt it
7. Assumption of quality of resources - Poor resources will break this system. If you look at the 3D model of a heart and want the lungs but they’ve not been written yet, then you’re in trouble. Low quality models won’t provide adequate data either. What if the student is studying a really abstract section of the curriculum? Are the trusted sources guaranteed to give back an answer?

There are a lot of problems that need to be ironed out, but as a proof of concept, it’s astonishing. I’m going to try and get the demo, or at least slides of it, then I’ll show you what’s going on.

Still with me? Good.

The first talk of the afternoon was by Lars Engman, design director of Ikea. This was more of an inspirational talk by a man who had been in design since 1968 and had been at Ikea since 1975. He explained Ikea’s design process, which is similar to any other design process in the world, except for the idea stage. Ikea look at trends, and go the opposite direction! Below are a few facts and quotes from Ikea’s methodology which I found interesting:
Ikea is the 6/7th largest restaurant chain in the world. Their Bejing branch is able to seat 800 people.
Good design contributes to positive emotions
Science and technology define functionality. Simplicity is a virtue
Identify the relevant customer benefits of a product
Design is not about trends, but new ways to meet a person’s needs
Dare to fail, you will learn even more
When you have good design, beauty will look after itself

I need some of those in big print on my wall

The final talk of the day was on Vista Media Centre and Live services mashup. It was presented by a guy who definitely knew it was Friday afternoon and most of the demos were poor (thanks to the hotel’s limited net connection and the non-functionality of his Xbox 360). He demonstrated the theory behind TVs with media centre extenders built in (think Apple’s iTV but for media player), and explained what you needed to write applications for this service. To be honest, I didn’t take much in and started writing this up.

After this talk, I was approached by Emile from AKQA, saying that they were looking for students interested in the web site side of this in their creative development and IT development areas and to drop them a C.V. when I graduate. Sounds good to me.

In summary, it’s been a great two days. I’ve learned a lot about what is expected of next-gen internet applications and what Vista and WPF can do for applications. Clearly, social sites like Digg and Flickr are here to stay. Users don’t just expect quality from big company sites and large networking sites, but from every site that they visit. It’s no longer just about the hook of the web site, it’s the way they carry it off. Impress, or fail.

Steve

Currently Listening to: The Shins - Wincing the Night Away
Currently Reading: AJAX for Rails
Currently Watching: The world go by
Currently Eating: nowt
Miles to Sheffield: Don’t know, however many it is from Watford Gap

If you didn’t know already, Microsoft officially released Windows Vista yesterday. I’ve been running Vista for 2 months now, and in that time it I’ve seen some major performance improvements, mostly thanks to new drivers.

Yesterday, I knew it was launch day because windows update tagged 9 new downloads for me. 6 patches for Vista (including one that wasn’t optional), a texas hold’em poker game for Vista Ultimate users (which isn’t too bad once you get used to it, textures are a bit off though) and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for pro and express (I have express installed for XNA studio). Overall improvement to Vista: minimal. Most of the speed boosts will come from drivers, just have a look what a good video card driver can do in this ATI/nVidia test: link

In other news, I’ve started up Uni-Sport development again, this time on rails. Struggling with this new language reminds me of my first forray into PHP almost 2 and a half years ago. In two days I have created a small application that reads RSS feeds, sorts them by date and displays them. Two days, for that! It seems that this agile framework isn’t so agile really, or is it just that I spent most of my day assuming that rails wrote accessors and mutators for me.

Anyway, this small section is rather flexible and will become part of the portal site which will eventually reside at http://shef.uni-sport.org. This will aggregate news/events/results from around the network. It’ll do it all in a funky AJAX-enabled way too with flashy prototype effects. Depending upon how bored i get in the next few days I’ll be debuting it very soon.

Finally, I’m off to Designertopia today, courtesy of Microsoft, so I’ll give you an update of what I learned from that then. It should be good, I’m looking to pick up design tips from the best, and I’ll pass them on. It’s a service, I know. :-)

Steve

Currently Listening to: Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City (words cannot express how good this record is)
Currently Reading: Agile Web Dev with Rails 2nd Ed
Currently Watching: the world go by
Currently Eating: Lamb korma
Days until next interview: 5 (phone with Fujitsu services)

There’s a certain monotony about application forms. I’m currently on the fourth of the day (LogicaCMG) after completing 3 yesterday, bringing the final total to…. 15! You will not believe the number of times I’ve repeated myself, or how a very slight change in the question can lead to a completely different answer.

However, i’ve now got it down to a number of set answers and examples and I just want it out of the way. I’ve got a telephone interview tomorrow with HP so I need to prepare for that (and get up, gotta set the alarm and be awake).

Grumble grumble… rant over.

Steve

Currently Listening to: Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City (amazing record)
Currently Watching: Heroes - it’s back
Currently Eating: Cake
Currently Reading: Agile Web Dev with Rails 2nd Edition
Application Forms Rejected: 5

Ok, I’ll explain a bit first.

I have an xmas tradition. Usually, on xmas day, my family goes over to an old friend’s house for xmas day dinner and afterwards, games of trivial pursuits and monopoly follow. The kids (that’s me btw) are now 21, 21, 23 and 24 years old respectively so monopoly generally involves alcohol these days too. However, since my family had grandma over this xmas, we didn’t do the traditional lunch at theirs thing, instead, we did the monopoly tradition later on that evening.

This xmas, James had received a new version of monopoly, with electronic banking. Great idea you’d think. No. God no. Worst. Idea. Ever. FACT.

The problem is not the game, I like the updated pieces, the new hotels and flats, the updated chance and community chest cards (”you have been convicted of identity theft, move directly to jail”), i didn’t even mind the prices (10,000x the originals but in the same ratio), but the card reader just killed the game.

Everyone gets a card instead of paper money and there is only 1 card reader. Suddenly there’s no more looking at your money in front of you and at everyone else’s to see who to try and break next. To do that you have to put your card in a machine and ask it! It’d be ok if these were swipe cards but they’re not, stick them in this horrid fiddly slot and the machine is so slow you’d expect it to crash at any moment!. The card reader kills the flow of the game and slows it down so much that by the end we decided to call it a draw just to end the agony.

Next year we’re going back to paper. Monopoly: nice idea, bad implementation.

Steve
Currently Listening to: Zero 7
Currently Watching: one of the 4 films he got at the HMV sales. Fight Club (SE), King Kong (SE), School of Rock and Orange County. Total price: £15.30! Cha-ching!
Currently Eating: xmas chocolates. Feeling fat
Currently Reading: Papers on computational biology
Words still to write for the 4th…. 5000