Archive for Work
April 27, 2008 at 10:39 pm · Filed under I am feeling..., Work
The end of life as a student is drawing near. There was that end back then but this is the real end. I start my new job as a Usability Analyst this Thursday. I’m a little scared. I guess it makes sense given that I’ve had student status for the past 23 years. I’m scared but I really really need to move on. I need that dental plan.
Hmm…I’ve been thinking about here. This site, this box. The past few months have been weird. Things are changing but they have not changed yet. I think my life has been holding its breath and when I think about writing part of me is wide-eyed shaking my head “no we have to keep on holding out breath!!” I’ve thought about shutting down, hiding away, closing the box. But I can’t completely because there might be that one day a month I have a picture to share.
I don’t know. I’m confused now? I am and I will leave it at that.
Though PS I’ve taken away commenting on posts. There was so much spam and it was tiring. If you have a comment, you probably know or can find my email address.
PPS I am reading the best book ever thanks to Andrew and then Eric.
September 14, 2007 at 12:04 am · Filed under I am feeling..., Work
明日は本当に最後だ．lawsonsで納豆をみて、箱に09.18.07が書いてある．この日にカナダへかえる．その後生活はどうか考えてる．日本人や日本料理や日本語がなくてさみしい．「さよなら」言いたくないよ．そのまま出て、それからいつかもう一回戻ってもいいと思う．でも明日仕事で何と言えばいい？どの表現をすればいい？
September 11, 2007 at 5:10 pm · Filed under Reflection, Work
In research frameworks can be created to help understand the way things. The frameworks can direct production that comes out of the research. They can lead to new frameworks and they can alter themselves. They are ways to organize our thoughts and make sense of things. Categorization, labeling, sorting, reference.
The problem is getting trapped by a framework. Enjoying its organization but in reality, the framework’s existence provides no benefit. In fact, it may be and likely is blinding you to other ways of thinking.
Then the scary thing is when you do realize that the framework is just a perception, one way to look at the picture. Unfortunately the first thought is usually not “oh yeah! this is a SHAM let’s move on!!” but the face winces and wonders - “oh how much did this sham eat? how many months has it been?”
I am writing a final report and feeling the above. The second part…I almost got to moving on but was stopped by the “how?” It is a little bit worsened by considering that this is not only applicable to research but to all areas of life.
But the thing that I must remember right now is that the small every-15-minute-what-was-I-thinking winces shouldn’t be giving me large I-should-stop-doing-stuff winces. No…they are all part of some learning / growing process that is life I guess. I have to consider that these winces make my life richer.
Y’all understanding the wince I’m talking about? I bite my lower lip and suck air in. What do you do?
August 30, 2007 at 4:25 pm · Filed under Work
I just had the realization that in my work I never focus on the product and improving the product but on the method to use to improve the product. If that makes sense. Won’t elaborate much now but I think this is a big realization that might shape the next…x-some-years. Hmm….
August 25, 2007 at 11:05 am · Filed under Work
I was on a roll and now it has been a while. But it is Saturday moning, I am sitting here at my computer avoiding all the work I have to do this weekend. Just for a bit more…then I will get going.
This Wednesday is the start of an event at Miraikan, a science museum in Tokyo. Everyday from Wednesday to Sunday there will be two large screen presentations of artwork from Kazuo Oga, an art director and background artist for Studio Ghibli films (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.). The theme of the event is “human and nature” and they hope that by showing nature scenes, people can reflect on beauty outside of the concrete fortress and strive to preserve the nature we still have.
After these presentations the museum likes to receive questionnaire responses so that they can judge the effectiveness of the presentation, both enjoyment-wise and for the visitors’ learning and reflection.
Way back in November one of the organizers saw a system I developed during my internship and was interested in using it as a novel way for people to reply to a questionnaire (this is how I managed an internship extension). So, we’ve redesigned the application and this is what will happen:
After the presentation people will be asked to come answer questions about their experience. In the “questionnaire space” there will be leaf shaped cards scattered around. Each leaf is printed with one question and QRcodes for replying to the question, and reading other responses. In Japan most people can capture QRcodes with their mobile phone cameras and the codes can be decoded into text: in this case an email address (to send an email response to a question) or URL (to go see other responses). Some questions have multiple choices for response and a visitor can choose by capturing the code next to their choice and sending an email to the address inside.
Doing this we can present the responses back in real time. We will project a tree/leaf-themed visualization of responses being returned. Sure - this might create bias but my view is that questionnaires are super biased anyway and we are hoping that given a novel way to answer them, people will be curious, have fun, be engaged and generally be more interested in the feedback they provide.
This weekend I have to work on that visualization. I have made several versions already and most of the back-end is in place and good but we’ve been going over redesigns for the interface and I have not yet had the chance to implement them (or have not yet taken then chance…yikes!) I am a little scared about not being prepared but it is weird, another part of me is pretty calm and confident that everything will come into place. I think that I have possibly finally lost the tendency to panic and feel really anxious before big events / demos / presentations. I will try my hardest and even if something goes wrong people generally understand.
I am more nervous about the first day - the directory of our laboratory is friends with a director at Miraikan, Mamoru Mohri and he arranged a chance for us to meet him. Okay and guess what - this guy has been in space! I am meeting an astronaut! I had not thought about it much before but since this meeting was arranged the amazing-ness of space travel has started to dawn on me. It is an experience that few have and it is utterly (you can send your kicks by mail) out of this world.
Fun!
May 28, 2007 at 9:15 am · Filed under Work
that was supposed to be yikes but even on the second try is became wikes so now it is wikes. i have not been writing. i’ve been busy. a good kind of busy. still alive and doing well…but channeling all my energy into other projects not writing here. but dead space makes me sad so i should continue. even if short and sweet.
sid and i are currently trying to put a cultural probe (short article for those with no acm access) design exercise together for the folks in our lab group. neither of us has experience implementing cultural probes so it has been a learning process. how much should we stick to the original definition and recommendations for the probes and how much should we change to suit our goals (designers as subjects, resulting product to be in a specific activity space)? it is complicated and i should probably write about it afterwards so that i may remember the process.
bbiab.
May 17, 2007 at 2:20 pm · Filed under Social Technology, Things Found Online, Work
I was searching for a project done by a woman I am meeting on Monday called “kotonoha” and came across kotonoha.cc. Very interestingly because both are related to my work - object interface to information and (given the current direction of things) questions, surveys, and polling for personal expression and satisfying that desire to see what other people think.
Kotonoha.cc looks addictive and with my current Japanese and browser translator I am already enjoying the type of questions posted and the responses. Oh yeah - what is it? It is a site where people can indicate their opinion on various “things” (koto) by choosing “O” or “X” and add a little explanatory comment. The “O” “X” o tsukeru system is the common “yes” “no” system in Japan. Examples of things are:
- which are scarier, spiders or cockroaches
- can you remember numbers past 3.1415
Users have simple profiles (photo, nickname, URL) and you can subscribe to different users and receive feeds of their posts in an site-based inbox.
Browsing the questions so far has been really really interesting. I am not just learning about the people or “community” through their responses but also through the questions they are posing. Yes some (like my examples above) are about mundane, general things but others are about current events, issues, popular things (indicators of what the “current” in the country might be) and others about the kotonoha community itself.
モスバーガーはモスと略す O X
(”mos burger” abbreviate to “mos”?) from what I can tell, most people do. It is good that I know this.
The one thing that bugs me is that they don’t display (from what I can tell) a tally of “O” and “X”. I can see that 690 have responded to the mos burger question and a list of the most recent results and comments…but not those two numbers - how many “O” and how many “X”. But…is this intentional? To avoid bias?
What if it went a step further and I had to respond before seeing any responses/comments? While this might motivate people to respond and eliminate bias from seeing what the majority thinks, it might take away from the experience of being in the kotonoha social space which, now that I think of it, seems less to do with knowing what the majority thinks, what the winning side it, etc. and more to do with knowing that people have an opinion.
March 12, 2007 at 7:21 pm · Filed under Words, Work
How do I say that I want to create something that people become attached to without sounding like I’m from marketing or dealing in the streets?
February 22, 2007 at 2:27 pm · Filed under Computers, I'm a Nerd, Work
Today - I used a hex editor for the first time.
K so I’ve had to deal with hex before but this is like…I used a hex editor.
If you spend a lot of time on computers or programming this might be a fairly insignificant event for you but for me - there is some strangeness to it.
Luckily it is helping me find answers. I am battling with character encodings in Java. I have to convert text (possibly Japanese) encoded in iso-2022-jp to utf-8 and it is only half working. Some characters (mostly hiragana but a few kanji) are showing up as ???. I’ve been able to figure out that in my program, characters are been properly converted from iso-2022-jp to their Unicode values. So it is a problem when going from Unicode to utf-8.
I’m sure this was really interesting for you all…
Oh! Last night after work I missed a train by a few seconds and in my frustration I bought this strange hot sweet red bean beverage from the station vending machine. I can’t remember the name but I will try to post a picture tomorrow. It was nice at the time but on reflection I don’t know if it is necessarily good to consume habitually.
November 14, 2006 at 10:28 am · Filed under Japan, Work
Am I on strike? I was recently told that it is a National (or similar scope) Blogging Month but I have been too busy for words unless they are combined with {curly braces} and //comments and.operators++. Maybe I care too much about what you (who is reading this now) think so I am holding back because I have no time to correct and assess the neutrality of my writing.
So what is going on? I am preparing for the SFC Open Research Forum to be held on November 22nd and 23rd. Check out the site - it’s really cute except I have mixed feelings about the tossing of crumpled paper into the pond. If I navigate among the menus enough will that beautiful scene become polluted?
Two weeks ago I went to Nikko and I actually did write a few things about it but have not posted. Maybe in a bit.
Last week I was leafing through one of my Japanese lesson books and found the most informative diagram. (My lesson books are very informative on aspects other than the language but often I’m like, “okay yeah I know that already”, but this…this was very useful). So traditionally, women used squatting style toilets (see this link for good toilets in Japan info) and they are still found in many public restrooms. Often they are the only choice and sometimes you will be asked if you are okay with using the squatting style toilets. In the past I have always answered with a confident, “of course, I’m from Saskatchewan”. I had some complaints though. Like why I had to balance while reaching behind me to get toilet paper…why couldn’t they hang it from the opposite wall? Well. Minna no Nihongo informed me via stickwoman drawing that this whole time I have been facing the wrong direction. Why didn’t I realize this before? There is even a splash guard on the one side. The first time I used one, I likely just transferred my western toilet orientation to the new case. We get used to facing the stall door. So now I know and I hope this little bit might help someone finding themselves in a similar situation (sorry I did not include a diagram - if you are interested enough, I imagine Google will be suitable for all sorts of interesting diagrams).
Last weekend I went to ATR around Kyoto for an Open House event. It was a whole new place. Very international and a little bit culture shocking because when it came to reception time, people were just taking their own beer. An intern from Canada working at ATR, Anton, was super kind and let me crash at his place. Again culture shock or space shock as he was put up in a 3 room + dining/kitchen apartment. If I had that kind of space I’d be learning how to do cartwheels! Anyway, I met a number of his coworkers and they were all very fun and interesting. I also learned that this is not an unripe tomato, it’s a fruit called a persimmon (in English). Actually, I knew “about” persimmon’s but had never actually seen one. Persimmon’s are yummy, they have little barrier between object and eating the object (like seeds and skin) and the flavour is a little almond-y, leaving one quite satisfied.
It’s getting cold here. But it’s not really that cold. It’s weird. I’m weather-confused.
October 20, 2006 at 8:42 pm · Filed under Mundane, Work
I have a lot to do at work. A lot. Sometimes my brain hurts but I think it is from learning. So, when I feel discouraged, I just remember that day after day I gain experience bit by bit. I am overcoming the “this is too hard” freeze-up which feels really good.
Today I realized that it was time face character encoding hell. Making an application for Japanese mobile phones so it has to handle Japanese characters of course. This is not always so easy. It feels like it should almost be easy, but it is not completely. Many attempts result in screens showing mojibake. If you don’t know, mojibake is a term borrowed from Japanese to refer to garbled appearance of characters that your computer cannot support (or is not configured to support). Moji = character, bake = appear in disguise. I like it - mostly because before reading that bake is “to appear in disguise” roughly, I thought of bake as in baked, broken, toast, kaput.
After a day of surfing the Japanese Java forum, using rikaichan for rough translations, trying, testing and seeing a lot of mojibake and question marks, I finally added something to my database that phpMyAdmin showed as being really, truly, Japanese script. Yay! There is still the other half to deal with - assuring that I can retrieve text from the database and present it non-mojibaked but I don’t think that will be too hard.
Not much else going on but work. Yesterday was another intern’s birthday and a number of us went for supper in Yokohama followed by delicious delicious ice cream. This weekend I have work to do, and likely next weekend too, but sometime in November I will travel somewhere. Where, I don’t know yet.
Oh, and I think I might like earthquakes too much. Last weekend early Saturday morning we had one a bit bigger than the normal little ones. I woke up, felt it, had some half-asleep thoughts of my apartment building tumbling over, smiled, went back to sleep. Forgot about it until someone mentioned it later that day. I know earthquakes are scary, kill, cause damage, etc….but it just feels so incredible when something that seems so sure and constant (the earth below you) shakes. I might become an earthquake chaser. Like that movie…with the cyclones…but not them…
outta here!
October 17, 2006 at 3:03 pm · Filed under Work
I’ve been staring at the same powerpoint textbox for 15 minutes and I wonder where my time goes.
July 28, 2006 at 3:07 pm · Filed under Work
Man I feel sorry for the poor souls who have to read the user scenarios I write, especially when they start with: “hey dude, …” and end with “…heh”.
June 9, 2006 at 6:28 pm · Filed under Mundane, Work
I read this very enjoyable short paper today, Uncovering traces of mobile practices: “the Bag Study” (Robertson, Kan, Sadler, Hagen, 2005). Abstract:
This study addresses everyday human practices in order to inform our thinking around the design of technology to support human mobility and mobile device use. Building on traditional ethnographic techniques, we investigated the contents of people’s bags, seeking traces of planning, decision making and other social practices that people rely on to construct and maintain relations between particular mobile objects and their particular mobile lives. The research contributes to the development of novel methods for researching mobile practices and its initial findings question assumptions about information use and storage, and about the personalisation of mobile device and services.
It interested me particularly because I think I’ve had a bag obsession since childhood. I take pleasure in unpacking my bags and purses and then repacking them again. I feel good when someone needs something and I can say “oh wait, here…here you go!” I like things like lip gloss and new pens and notebooks and handy small sample sized products not for their actual use but because I can put them in my purse or bag. Though I am not a bag in bag person. My pencil case is on my desk. It doesn’t come with me, and I only carry a makeup bag when I take items that I fear might explode and make a huge shimmery mess. Instead, I usually try to find bags with many compartments and pockets. Pen holders are the cat’s pjs. I remember the first bag that I felt really obsessed about, this blue backpack of my sisters from Jump-Rope-for-Heart. It had a large main section and then a smaller front section that opened all the way to reveal many convenient bag-pocket/accessories.
After reading the above paper and thinking about the contents of my bag, I felt compelled to share. Actually, I am considering making a bag log or a “bl…”, hmm…no that won’t work. (My word mashes never work out.) I think that a bag log would be a really good way of keeping track of the more mundane things in my life. Those things that I will forget about in two years, but are important nonetheless because they will trigger other memories. No promises on the log, but for your pleasure, the contents of My Backpack:
1 GB USB Memory Key
Ipod Nano USB Cable
MUJI notebook, 100 pages, soft covered (for writing down spontaneous things in Japanese or tearing pages out to give people notes)
Hanko (personal seal)
Brush
Tin of Cinnamon Altoids
Ninento DS Lite with Japanese English Dictionary and Tetris cartridges
Sunglasses
Gatsby oil clear paper
Blistex Silk & Shine Lip Gloss
Card holder containing some important cards and 2 of my HCT business cards
2 safety pins
Omiyage from china, received yesterday – cookie and tea
Japanese Living Language textbook
Japanese lessons notebook, spiral bound
Moleskine Agenda/Calendar
Keys
Word cards on plastic ring (You can get these sets of Japanese-English flash cards on key rings here. They are very small and handy. I found blank ones to make your own word lists at Loft last weekend)
Bus card, train card, Brastel international phone card, membership card to iCafe in akihabara (I went there once for observation work but just in case I go back…)
Ipod Nano (syrup)
Mobile (orange juice)
MUJI double tipped black felt marker
PILOT Hi-Tecpoint V5 Extra Fine black pen
Pink Sharpie Accent highlighter
Breakfast bar
Wrapper for soy bar snack (snack eaten an hour and a half ago)
Finally, before I leave I will add a binder with notes from work, a map to a place I will check out this weekend, the score for a song to practice and some extra staffed paper for music notes.
Stepping away from myself, I am thinking about the above study again. When you are trying to study what people do in very general everyday settings, personal information like this is very very valuable, but can be quite unattainable. Or can it? I am thinking about - what are those small common things that we personalize? That we take with us everywhere? What do they say about our desires and our behaviours? Hmm…some thinking for the bus ride home. If you have any interesting views on me based on the above list, please let me know : ) I hope you all have a good weekend!
June 5, 2006 at 5:52 pm · Filed under Travels, Work
I mentioned before the weekend that I would be going to Kyoto for a day and that I did. It came up fairly quickly, but I was given the opportunity to go to a work related thing. I would have stayed for the weekend, but I had no time to plan as well as other plans for Saturday and Sunday, and on top of that just an instinctual feeling that I should only for one day…don’t ask me why. Maybe it is related to the amount of money that I could spend there.
I really enjoyed riding the shinkansen. Amazed at how quickly the ride is, without the wait of check-ins and security. I took the train with Yoko and, having an hour to spare before our final destination, we had a really good lunch at a restaurant in the station:
I still can’t tell you what a lot of that is. People tell me the names of food over and over but it never sticks. I’m on the lookout for an encyclopedia of Japanese food.
After lunch we headed to another NTT location for our business and then came back to the station around suppertime. This is a popular shot in Kyoto station:
…taken while we were looking for omiyage shops, and boy did we find them. So many yummy things and a tip - they do give samples so if you are ever hungry in Japan, head to the food areas in department stores, usually the first floor (1F) or B1. We bought some omiyage and then station bentos to eat on the ride home. Also very yummy. I will have to go there again.
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