We’re doing a road trip to America in August, and would like some advice of the internets. Where should we go? What should we do? Check out Michael’s post for details.
Meanwhile, I’ll be back with new blog posts shortly – I have interesting things to talk about.
FACT is really awesome you know. In addition to a bunch of my family working there, they have the best cinema venue in Liverpool, and regular art & digital media exhibitions, of which the quality is steadily improving.
Last weekend I went to Dream Director, which our Michael has already written a nice long piece on. To paraphrase, we slept over at FACT, with a couple of presentations in the evening, and breakfast in the morning. When we were asleep, we got incidental sounds pumped into our sleeping booths based on when sensors detected us to be dreaming. My own thoughts are much the same as my little bro’s, but I’d like to add that the quality of the talks was really high. Luke Jerram is a very lucky man to have had the opportunities to produce some stunning creations and have people view and interact with them outside of traditional gallery / exhibition venues. The ‘Sleep Science’ talk from Chris Alford was even better – I had such a poor grasp of the subject beforehand and learnt a lot about how and why we sleep. An account of sleep paralysis, something I occasionally suffer from, was particularly good – did you know that many cultures think a little demon is sitting on your chest?!?!?
As part of the piece, we had to record our dreams from before (the night before in my case) and the morning after the FACT sleepover. I won’t go into detail about the one before (was a nightmare involving an ex) but the one that I had after being played sounds of open spaces all night was kind of humourous! I was up in the admin section of FACT (where we’d had the presentations) and the artist and I had a row about Dream Director! I kept saying it wasn’t working, and he became incredulous and full of disbelief. Eventually he stormed out. I later discovered that in reality, I had been played more sounds than anyone else that night, but I don’t remember them. How odd.
My presentation from Barcamp Liverpool is up on Slideshare. It was really designed just to open the discussion, so you won’t get the full story of the session from these notes. Thanks to everyone who attended for all your contributions!Hoping to blog a little more soon. Working on a presentation for Barcamp Liverpool this weekend, so fingers crossed that goes well. Other than that, got a lot of stuff on during the lead up to Christmas so if anything big crops up, I’ll write it down here. Otherwise, check out the new Lifestream page which basically links to all my social networking sites. It’s pretty cool actually, and since I update Facebook and Twitter far more than this blog, will keep you up to date with all my goings on.
Ok I’ve had some time to continue development of our intranet site at work, and I have to say the results have been really excellent. WordPress United was finally released last wekend, and it’s every bit as good as it promised to be. I appreciate that it might be getting hard to track what I’m using and not using now so I’ll break it down:
Anyway, that’s an overview of the technologies I’ve been using. The front page of the intranet is the WP blog. Our Newsperson will blog to that and keep the masses informed. The rogues’ gallery and a bunch of other static pages exist as links from the front page. Other than that I’ve kept things very similar to how they were. The intranet content is still using ‘activemedia’ and the bulletin board is still accessed via the front page and probably will be completely ignored. However, I feel quite positive about the whole thing – the implementation has gone so well that surely there’ll now be an uptake for it….
I’ve been working for about a month now on a project to improve communication in the organisation. It came about because I was pretty badly offended at a new ‘idea’ that had been thrust upon us during some messy politics that were going on. I won’t go into that just now but the idea was to have an IT Newsletter distributed around the organisation to tell staff what’s going on. It was to be pure propaganda, with a complete absence of useful information, and I hated it.
Instead I did some very quick thinking and came up with a plan. I used some of the theories about Organisational Learning (OL) I’ve been reading about in my OU work this semester. These told me I should try to consider how best to a) facilitate the ability to impart explicit knowledge to other staff members, and b) create an environment where free discourse is understood and encouraged. High minded ideals indeed!
Initially I got interested in WordPress Mu. Once set up, it’s pretty much as good as regular WP (although a few versions behind) and highly scalable. Unfortunately I had serious issues with implementing it on a Windows server, and of course WordPress’s MySQL heritage makes things awkward.
Then all of a sudden phpbb3 RC1 was released. Regardless of the WordPress situation, the forums have been in desperate need of upgrades for years now. What’s more, phpbb3 has built in LDAP support, so users can log in with their Windows passwords. So the final project has grown out of that more than anything.
The current situation is very rosy. I’ve got the new forums mirroring the functionality and content of the old ones, but by adding an RSS mod I’ve opened the way up for much freer flow of information. phpbbportal is installed as a front page Portal, which uses RSS feeds from departmental forums to publish news in a tabbed layout. Next on my list I need a photo wall type thing. I might just use the standard member list for this, and upload each user’s photo as their avatar (and limit maximum display size).
Finally wp-united gets released this month, a plugin which integrates WordPress and phpbb completely, allowing multiple blogs. I intend to trial this out with an IT Services blog, and depending on how it goes, there could be justification for using it more widely.
I feel that although I’ve done a lot of work here, I’ve become more conservative with the project as it’s gone on. There’s a lot of sense in this – the users can barely grasp the concept of a forum, never mind a blog, so the more I can allow them to do within their current means the better.
I’ll come back to this with some updates and more general comments later, I just wanted to get this written down for now.
I’ve finally succumbed to pressure and updated my photo gallery with around 350 new photos. There should be something for everyone, and I’ll hopefully continue to add even more photos over the next few weeks.
The main site is right here.
Ok guys, if you’ve arrived here, thanks for following the link from MySpace. Whilst MySpace is kinda nice for bands etc, it’s asolute shite for blogging. Facebook ain’t much better for that to be honest, although it does excel at the whole ‘social networking’ thing so you’ll certainly find me prety active there.
For proper blogging I’ll be using WordPress, on this, my personal website. I’ve set up a Cross Posting plugin for WordPress so it notifies MySpace when I write new articles, and there’ll be more features added to the site as and when.
See you soon!
Jus got back from my hols to some good news – I’ve passed my latest Open University module, M883 – Software Requirements for Business Systems. As you might be able to guess from the title of the blog entry, that technically gives me a Post Graduate Certificate!
Which sadly I won’t be accepting. OU rules state you can only count courses towards a maximum of 2 qualifications, which rules out this halfway house award if I want to go for the Masters. I’ve actually still got some choice about both the Diploma and Masters:
This choice occurs because so far I’ve taken courses common to both degree paths. The CCI course is considered more generalist (amongst the academic community, at least) and if you choose a non Project Management based disertation you end up with a MSc in CCI anyway.
Ok, so, next step. In November or next May I’ll probably take Information Systems Legacy & Evolution. Sounds a bit boring but it’s a compulsory course for the specialist degree. After that, I have to choose: either kill myself doing a double module to finish off the Management degree, or do 2 more singles for CCI. At the moment I’m tempted to specialise. I’ve really been enjoying the non-technical aspects of the work I’ve done over the past 8 months – the skills I’ve learnt are interesting and useful in ways that don’t even relate to work at all. And I wonder what my general science degree has really done for me – wouldn’t evidence of my ability to study a subject in depth be more useful to an employer?
I’m sure King Widgets are really good and all, but I just can’t get them working on the WordPress 2.2+ SVN (they refer to functions that no longer seem to exist) so here’s a quick hack of FPLogin which does just enough. The author was a bit OTT with line breaks etc so I’ve got rid of a bit of the junk to make it more minimalist. It’s not perfect, but if you don’t want to use the Meta widget it works as a good replacement.
You can get it here:
You must be logged in to post a comment.