Year: 2009

The biggest problem I get when looking to buy stuff is finding the answer to the question : “Which One ?”

It’s actually another one of the contrasts that are built into my personality. On the one hand, I have the most boring inertia, going for chicken fried rice from the Chinese, sausage & chips from the Chippie or meat feast pizzas from Pizza Hut. What can I say, I like ’em 🙂 The contrast comes from where a place does stuff where it’s not an obvious choice, I’ll try and avoid having the same thing twice.

One remark I came out with over the weekend (was up seeing mum & dad) was that all the morons who gave BMW drivers a bad name seem to have bought Audi’s … The Audi drivers seem intent on earning their reputation. I’ve got nothing against the cars, Audi make a fine automobile. However, their drivers seem to trade in their good sense with their last car.

So where does “illusion of choice” come in then ?

On Sunday, we got rocketed past by a Passat driver … On the kind of tight single carriageway road that links the A roads in Lincolnshire up. Cue remark of “Ahh – that’s a poor man’s Audi”.

What’s the difference between a lot of what we buy anyway ? There’s not actually that much. The “poor man’s Audi” has a lot more truth in it than the motor people would like us to think. A Puma is a modified Fiesta and the Vectra chassis is also the basis for the Croma, 159, Signum and a Saab. Peugeot diesel engines made their way into quite a few cars in their time. The core of this HP laptop is shared by most of the other laptops out there made at the same time. Is that phone a Nokia or a rebadge ? Is that monitor made by Dell or is it actually a Samsung ?

Sometimes we think we’re buying one thing when we’re actually buying another. Or there’s 3 supposedly different products on the shelf but they’re the same thing under the skin. So how do we negotiate that “illusion of choice” ? I reckon it’s a matter of keeping an eye on things like price, extras and possibly even build quality. So for those Vectras, Cromas, 159s, Signums and Saabs, it’s which manufacturer has gotten the most out of the basic shell.

My advice ? If you’re buying something, attempt to make the best of the information available, to try and see through the various illusions out there. Things like investigating the less obvious, the features that don’t make it to the spec sheet. Like which side of the laptop is the power connector and whether you need iPodFM to listen to your music or will it be easier to plug it in somewhere.

There’s always a choice, although the answer could well be “I ain’t buying” 🙂

PS Had an excellent morning today. If I get a hello from one pretty lady, that’s enough to bring out the grin. I had hello’s from 3 pretty ladies today !

Ahh – we kinda came in before TRLs got off the ground … They came along a little late for us to sew them into statements that would be contractually binding.

That’s not to say we weren’t able to focus effort on segments that weren’t based around mature technology 🙂 You could say we were looking at maturity without measuring it with the distinct levels of the theory.

However, my heretical nature kicks in with initiatives like technology management because while it gets everyone looking at the developmental items, the Off-The-Shelf “it worked before, it’ll work again” item ends up being the proverbial Rusty Nail …

A good initiative to determine whether we have the tools to make what we’re looking at but not one to be taken in isolation …

PS iPodFM ! The mini FM transmitter is proven technology but falls down on integration due to interference from the outside world 🙂 Or the cassette devices that let you hook up CDWalkmans to car stereos … Proven technology but it fails when the car stereo gets confused and keeps trying to turn the tape over 🙂

Bolt sounds great. It’s on my ‘to see’ list. I was going to go last night but had a migraine instead. I would have infinitely preferred the cinema.

I’ve been along to quite a bit of testing and it really is long and boring process most times. I trust you have your TRLs defined? 🙂

I think it depends an awful lot on what’s being tested … I’ve had contact with a few software QA people through Warcraft and one comment I received over MSN one day was “Kill … me … now … please …” after a particularly frustrating session with a game that I gather shouldn’t have gotten off the drawing board 🙂

It’s been interesting being involved in testing the system over the years as we’ve been able to watch it grow into something that should be Tough As Nailz while being able to do the job intended 🙂

The fun tests tend to revolve around the phrase “to destruction” and it’s much more fun when it takes imagination to cause something to break.

I haven’t seen Bolt yet, but I intend to.

Software testing sounds like it might be fun until I think about every little thing – and there are a lot of little things. I used to program way back in the stone-age and I know how elusive bugs can be – but today I am a happy, content and usually satisfied end-user.

Tanya sent me.

I’m settling down at the moment after a couple of days away …

Two part post here 🙂 First bit is about the latest wonderful Pixar film, Bolt. Second bit is what I’ve been up to for the past few days …

Testing finished a little earlier than it may have, so I was able to sneak back for Pizza & Film 🙂 The entertainment was Bolt, the story of a puppy with superpowers. Amazing film, will definitely be wearing out the dvd of this one 🙂 It’s not often a film brings out a tear or two and this one came extremely close several times. As a dog person, they do a fantastic job of getting the character Bolt on screen.

Lots of laughs here too amongst the story. Well worth watching.

Film also means pizza 🙂 Was wondering for a while as to whether our waitress used the pen that she had wedged into the hairband that was keeping her hair in a ponytail. Rather imaginative place to keep a pen, although I dread to think how many penmarks she has on the back of a very pretty head.

Part 2 !

My work occasionally involves witnessing requirements testing. We do that at our contractors’ sites, as it doesn’t make much sense to bring the equipment to the witnesses when the witnesses can go to the equipment. What it means is a trip up and down the M4 and a day or two in a hotel room. I’m fairly used to knowing what to expect now, so I arrange things to keep the boredom away. It’s a bit of a disconnected experience, as I’m not too interested in spending £10 on wifi access for a day or £20 for a week. Maybe if I was away for a week but not for a couple of days 🙂

What do these sessions usually involve ?

I like to keep the variables down to a minimum, which means not depending on the train (counter intuitive that isn’t it ?) and using my own car instead of hire cars. There’s a couple of problems with hire cars with work, one is the insurance conditions and the other comes through the whole hire thing … One colleague this week arrived late due to a problem with his hire car, the other had to find it … as it hadn’t been dropped off at his house. So taking my own car means cutting out a big variable. I’m not the best Morning Person, so I try to arrange things so I don’t have to think when going out the door. If I pack on the morning, I’ll forget something critical – guaranteed 🙂

Why do I dislike trains ? Cost for one, reliability is another … The trip there and back by car will cost my employer about £65, going by train would at least triple that, plus taxi fares for hotel<->office. Plus there’s usually about 3 changes needed with the associated chance of missing one and getting stranded. The train companies could do with looking at themselves and thinking why people ignore them. (However, I would use the Underground in London!) Oh – Car also means IpodFM 🙂

The testing itself involves sitting in a lab with lots of computer equipment, watching the testers run through a script that is intended to test the functionality of the software. It’s pretty painstaking stuff and the tests are pretty detailed. Things like a test that is scheduled to take 6 hours to check whether a system can display a map properly or seeing if all the options on your word processor work properly.

That’s kinda what we do in this testing, making sure the software “Works As Intended”. That’s an absolutely magic phrase I’ve nabbed from World of Warcraft, which gets used to describe all those little bugs where things don’t work quite like the user wanted but it is working as written in the system. Computers are very literal beasties, they have no self-determination, so every one of those bugs/features that crop up have been put in by a programmer.

It can get a bit boring though, so to stay focused we do a few things to keep the brain working. One I do is to check off all the requirement statements as we go, which is going beyond what I really need to do. These events aren’t really presenting the kit to my organisation, it’s a relationship of Customer -> Contractor -> Subcontractor. I’m representing the end customer but the real acceptance is Contractor accepting from Subcontractor, so I’m one step above that. Which means I only sign off a subset of the total requirements being tested.

That’s one of the methods … The other is :

Biscuits & Coffee !

Of the strong black variety. And chocolate on the biscuits if you get into the selection box early enough. (There’s a few notorious chocolate biscuit fiends involved 🙂

Evenings can be a little strange. I tend to avoid dinner in the hotel as I object to paying too much for food. Even though I’d get it back on expenses, I still get the objection to being ripped off. I’m chubby enough to be able to miss a dinner or two, plus the cookies I raided helped 🙂 But I was glad to have the pizza earlier. My evenings were chilled out with the cricket on the telly, plus about 250 pages of Matter by Iain M Banks. Bit of a struggle that one as there’s not as much of The Culture as in most of his Culture novels.

So now I’m back and it’s time for the detox … 3 days worth of strong coffee plus horribly unbalanced diet means dehydration and unbalanced metabolism, so I’m now trying to still the shaking hands (kidding!) and chilling out to iTunes music. Plus a bit of Blog too 🙂

Early night probably tonight – haven’t turned my main PC back on yet so I doubt whether I’ll be exploring any more of the story of Commander Shepherd in the game Mass Effect.

Yey 🙂 Me back. Not caught up yet but getting there 🙂

Yeah – there’s two major round the world races – the Vendee and the Volvo. The Volvo’s a little different – it’s run over a series of legs with boats that have full crews. I think there’s a bit of “stick together as a team” aspect in the Volvo which means you get a bit shielded from the personalities involved …

It’s good to know that with all the carnage at the start (big storm in the Bay of Biscay !) and the various broken bits of sailor and boat in this race, they’ve all come through ok. I think the fella with the broken leg was at the finish line to welcome Sam Davies back in.

Next one in 3 years 9 months time 🙂

Fascinating! I was not familiar with this race…I cannot imagine what it takes to actually do this Race! The strength and skill and fortitude….My My! I went to the link and saw that there are 30 people involved…or were. But their Bios don’t seem to be available.
Thanks for writing about this—I am going to tell my brother o take a look at the link. He is a Sailor. In fact he may know about it already.

Hey Pete – hope you’ve been enjoying your few days away and looking forward to seeing you and ck tomorrow night.

I’ve not been following the race, except what’s been on the news. But it is encouraging to know that the characters are still showing through the hardship.

cq

Visiting because NetChick sent me..

Dorothy from grammology
grammology.com