Meriblog: Meri Williams' Weblog

Well, my dissertation is finally handed in, so I have resurfaced briefly — until exams set in at least. I am now faced with roughly 2000 blog entries to read, hundreds of emails to catch up on and all sorts of interesting things going on all around! I’m trying to decide whether to just unbold everything and carry on, assuming that I’ve missed the boat on any of the last month’s developments and that anything important will crop up again. This doesn’t feel quite right, but it may well be the only way!

In other news, the final year project, which resulted in the above-mentioned dissertation, brought a lot of interesting concepts to light. The research carried out into planning and the flexible planning methodology developed are both very interesting. I’m currently trying to work out how best to disseminate the work and ideas, so if you have any suggestions, please comment

Also, on the personal front, Elly & I have found a house up north and had an offer accepted. Thus, extended periods of silence here might be due to exam stress, relocation hassle, the new assignment, graduating or alien invasion. Amuse yourselves making up excuses for me whilst I’m gone

This is an interesting use of PledgeBank. The current UK government (that was voted in with only 36% of the vote…) is trying to introduce biometric ID cards. Currently in the UK it is perfectly legal to have no form of ID at all and so there is a great deal of opposition from other political parties and the public. The pledge I’m talking about is one that someone called Stef has started:

“I will refuse to register for an ID card but only if 3,000,000 people will sign up”

I think it’s interesting to see how this kind of thing will play out — it’s like petitions, but not showing mere support but also vowing to take similar action if enough of your peers do. Kind of a technological tool for peer pressure.

I’ll be watching this pledge to see how it does. Oh and if you agree, please go pledge yourself!

UPDATE: The original pledge has been replaced with this new one

Molly passed me a musical baton, so of course I cannot resist this meme any longer!

Total volume of music files on my computer:
Well, on this exact computer, nothing at all! It’s an old IBM Thinkpad and the speakers are probably shot, so I haven’t got sound working. On various computers dotted around the house, there’s probably around 10Gb of my music, especially if you include what’s on Elly’s oldschool Jukebox (which I got her before iPods really happened…).

The last CD I bought was:
The Best of Johnny Clegg & Savuka :: In My African Dream

Song playing right now:
“I Still Do” — The Cranberries

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Like Molly, I find this question difficult. There are so many songs that mean a lot to me! Specific artists and albums and songs form most of my memory mechanism for periods of my life. So the list you get now is at least indicative of what matters to me right now.

1. “Desert Rose” — Sting
2. “When I Grow Up” — Garbage (or, in the same slot, “I’m Only Happy When It Rains”)
3. “Scatterlings of Africa” — Johnny Clegg & Savuka
4. “Paint It Black” — The Rolling Stones
5. “Yellow” — Coldplay

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

1. Elly
2. Simon
3. Andy
4. Ping
5. Scott

Ping has written a rip-roaring statistical demolition of the claims that gay foster parents are more likely to abuse children in their care than straight parents. Make sure you read all the way to the bottom for his subsequent relevations as well.

Every day, I am so grateful for people like Ping who will stick up for those whose situation they do not share, but nevertheless understand. Thank you to Ping and everyone else who does the same.

• This little animation about a guy in Canada and his bank that wouldn’t clear a US cheque is very slick & funny — pity it doesn’t display in Firefox properly… via Rich…!
• Cute little CAT5 powered computer — I think we’re going to see more and more like this in future. Low or no external power required in the form of old-school power cables at least
• AdMoolah lets you query people’s earnings from Adsense
• Yvonne bemoans the IQ points lost when browsing with tabs — some good suggestions in the comments here
• On this fairly run-of-the-mill political post on Nick Barlow’s weblog, there’s a complete gem in the comments:
  

  “There is something weird about Blair. He doesn’t have presence like a real person. It’s like talking to a hologram.”

  I love it!

• Ping’s Qwiki experiment is very interesting and looks like a great way to organise a great deal of work before trying to write a final dissertation. Bit late for me, but perhaps for the PhD!
• Stuart writes up the design & implementation of the Tory poster generator — glad he took the time, since it was so used during the election campaign it would have been crap if it had just died every 5 mins!
• Manager Cented Design — a new gem in acronym form from the lads at OK-Cancel
• The fridge magnets game is another of those little flash apps that will completely steal your life. I have warned you. Don’t make me bring out the Bubble Game again!
• Following on from Molly’s recent post about good ads, this Muller ad is one of my favourites at the moment
• I need to look into Feedburning once this academic year is over

Strangely, there’s nothing quite like the smell of laser toner at 5.30 in the morning.

Yes, this dissertation-writing malarkey is starting to take its toll. We’ll try get back to normal around here sometime soon, I promise.

Since I’m primarily a web user rather than a designer, my reaction to the Adobe-Macromedia acquisition is not “Oh no ! What will happen to my tools?”, but more along the lines of a recent UserFriendly: Does the web really need more Flash & PDF??

Happiness is…

… a bag full of slice biltong
… 2 bars of Cadburys Top Deck
… Myprodol, Cruciale & resultant pain-relief

… feeling moderately less homesick.

So yes, it’s election day. Since our dissertations are due shortly, most of our student household had been up all night working. So, at 0645 this morning, we left the house, sleepily stumbling our way towards the polling booth in our pygamas.

After waiting in line for 7 minutes, possibly scaring the staff a little and impressing on everyone that THESE students weren’t apathetic, we successfully cast our votes and stumbled off home again. We were the first to vote at our polling station and I suppose possibly the first in Bath.

Democratic right exercised, I promptly fell asleep. Probably a good idea as tonight we’ll have another sleepless night waiting for the results to come in.

Jason Fried’s talk at SXSWi this year was a brilliant discussion of how to do a great deal with a small team. In fact I think he didn’t just mean a small project team, but a small overall organisation. Nevertheless, I think it’s interesting to think about how some of the techniques and thoughts could be useful for a small project team in a large organisation. Some of the most amazing, creative and new work done in many organisations is by a small “super team” that somehow delivers extraordinary results despite their small size.

Taking Jason’s view, however, you could instead look at it like this: the small team delivers amazingly because of their small size and despite the large organisation of which they are part. Much of the talk focused on reducing mass — the assumption being that the mass of larger organisations is one of the things that holds them back.

So what are the other aspects of being in a small team, as described by Jason, that are needed to get that spectacular performance? What could the bigger companies do to get the same ability, without having to split into a million small companies? I realise that this is against the original ethos of the talk and that Jason may be unamused, but I think this is a real issue. It’s no good to anyone if we can do the small startup thing, but then become absolutely useless as soon as growth means we have to get bigger. One of the (admittedly less prominent) issues of the DotCrash was that companies didn’t scale.

But back to the topic. Here are some things that I think are the real advantages to being in a small team:

• Lightweight communication — both in that there are fewer people and therefore fewer lines of communication, but also that you can develop a shorthand style, akin to the advantage Simon has described before
• Focus — this is linked to comm, but worth calling out on its own. The smaller the time, the more chance that you have a united, consistent vision for what you’re building
• History & Credibility — a small team is likely to work together for longer (or bond sooner) and so a lot of the barriers will lower sooner. You’ll learn to trust that Chuck’s gutfeel about the interface problems is right, that Joan really does understand the customer best and that Sheryl only speaks up when she’s really sure that she’s right, so you should listen when she does. This kind of nuance usually gets completely lost in big teams

I’m sure there are more — please help me come up with the rest. Comment and I’ll update into the main entry. And for those of you reading via RSS, this might be worth taking a look at in the browser, so you can see the discussion.

Dissertation Desk

Originally uploaded by meriwilliams.

As I mentioned, I have a final year project to finish and a dissertation to write. Progress wasn’t so good, so I decided to take photos of my workspaces! For your viewing pleasure, the entire set is now on Flickr.

Also, just to clarify, I don’t drink alcohol when I’m down the pub — I just find it a nice environment to work in. Think of it as the UK version of coffee shop office

Thanks to the increasingly successful campaign for people to design with web standards, many sites display well in all manner of browsers. I’ve been noticing recently, though, that people are really not testing on different hardware. This is most notable when the site has evidently been designed on a Mac, where the screens are bright and colour balanced.

Some examples that I’ve noticed recently include Simplebits, Stopdesign and Antenna. I was also reading an entry recently (which of course I now cannot find!) where someone had not realised until they used a Windows computer how terribly pink their image header for their blog looked.

I’m sure that many of you are reading this now on a Mac and have visited those sites and your response is “Huh? What’s the problem?” Well, you see all that text that is light against a dark background (like the whole of Antenna and the about bit of the Simplebits site) — it’s illegible. On my Linux laptop, my main desktop and my Windows laptop. Completely illegible. Even if I whack up the brightness completely, I still have to increase the font size for the text to be defined well enough to read.

I understand that one of the things that y’all love (and, if I’m being honest, I do too) about those machines is the crisp, anti-aliased prettiness that results from the screen and the rendering. But I’m sure that sometimes you are all pitching to people not on Macs, who perhaps won’t understand what the problem is. Who will think that you’re muppets, that you don’t understand colour, or that you couldn’t be bothered to test your site properly.

So please, everyone, go find a public library or an internet cafe or something and look at your site on a different machine. Try also to test with a CRT and a LCD. I’m sure you’ll be amazed and perhaps appalled at the difference it can make.

Equally, the opposite does apply and if I’m blinding anyone, please let me know

PS I know you are all really excited about Tiger, but doesn’t EVERYONE need to write multiple blogs posts about their experience?? I mean really? You’re polluting my blogosphere here

It was really warm here today (by UK standards anyway) and the sky’s just started rumbling and threatening. There’s thunder in the distance and it’s still warm and threatening to storm. I can almost hear the rain pouring down, like there’s an army of mischievous kids on the roof chucking buckets of water down on unsuspecting passersby, steaming off the hot tarmac and filling the air with that smell that can only be a Cape thunderstorm.

But then, I remember that I’m in Bath, England, not Stellenbosch, South Africa. That it doesn’t hardly ever rain properly here. That the gutters won’t overflow and the tarmac never gets hot enough to cause steam when it rains. And I’m so homesick I can barely breathe.