Boardmad

Staff Surveys

Hmmph…secretly what everyone believes?!

Social disorders

Two of my favourite subjects borg’d into one. Social Media and Data Visualisation…and yes I appear to be firmly in the heart of this so I’m kind of a mess :0)

The office has now (in it’s dubious wisdom) decided to block xkcd.com….my epitaph for a site that keeps me laughing every single day

Given the recent conversations in the office and our amusingly exotic mix of technologies one comes across during a brief review of even a small part of the architecture I’m responsible for this post really does make me laff (inside I’m crying)….sob!

Apparently Scott Kurtz (author of PVP Online) didn’t think this was much of a strip and kind of just tossed it out there. It’s one of the mysteries of ‘what makes funny’ – I nearly laughed my morning latte down my nose.

Think it’s as much to do with the attachment I have to the characters in this strip I’ve followed for a long time now, Skull’s naivety, Cole’s cynicism and world-weary realism and of course…well it’s a gag on Star Wars. Why wouldn’t you love it?

Dilb’s new supervisor – love the ‘udder trousers’

One of my guilty pleasures has been a love of sci-fi for more years than I care to remember ( I still recall the painful tug when I finally binned my almost 1k collection of 2000AD’s !)

One story line that ran was a great little series called Zenith, detailing the trials and tribulations of the son of a pair of 60′s super-heroes who rebelled from their creators. This was a brilliant storyline mimicking and adding to the US comicbook XMen series in a curiously British style. Still it was always comic-book stuff…stories for kids or adults with maturity problem (a la comic book guy in the Simpsons !)

What’s changed then to let this genre become mainstream and produce
something of the quality and depth of Heroes. A friend in London has a buddy in the states who’s encoded the entire first series and been dropping them on his server for viewing – I got them off his Vaio after a recent visit and have been devouring them ever since.

The UK now has them on BBC2 each week and the 6mths worth of episodes I’ve had the pleasure of viewing will take too long on terrestrial to come in I think. If you haven’t tried it yet give one of the programmes a watch, see what you think….I love it.

I had a bit of a snort at this morning’s PVP when I checked in after my customary breakfast. I kind of understood the ‘throwing the goat’ reference, loved the urbane, diffidence from Butler but had to go look it up properly to check I was getting the connotation right…turns out I was ! Very funny !

How to “Throw the Goat
How NOT to “Throw the Goat”

Well it was funny to me at the time…and bizarrely while looking it all up I’ve come across a reference to Wil Wheaton of Star Trek TNG fame which I’m running down and reading up now.

As ever Dilbert nicely fleshes out the ongoing disparity between what business people say and do and what they actually mean !

This is always an interesting subject for me…in almost every meeting I attend where you’re actioned you end up clarifying the actual ‘meaning’ of the requirements or action point. Now this isn’t always just down to slap-dash, hurried or unclear specification or req’t gathering…more often than not it’s down to ‘meaning’ or context or even what the specifier actually had going on in their head at the time they specified the work and did they adequately convey this meaning into consistent, unabiguous statements that are free from interpretation ?

Then of course in a dynamic and evolving business env’t how does one keep the specification ahead of the requirement ? ;D That’s for another time !!