Well, 95% complete. The first users have their accounts and will be looking around the site tomorrow. Arena4 is a learning community product that I have been working on. I was asked to redesign the user interface in October. The product was working but needed to be rebuilt from a usability and design perspective. A task I have now pretty much completed.

The project has been quite a big one and hard as I haven’t been paid cash. I am a shareholder in the company as this is a new venture. I’m happy with that, even though my finances have come close to the wire on several occasions. Today is a case in point, my rent went out successfully, but I only have £12 left in my account!

However, I’m very chuffed with the product. Only now am I starting to be able to move naturally around the site and use it. As I do, I swell with pride. As a budding usability professional one of my key concerns is that unless you use a product, you can’t really know its faults and advantages. I feel that I need to use Arena4 more really, but it seems to work OK despite being designed kind of as individual chunks. I may ask Mat, another budding usability professional and a close friend, to review it for me. See what he comes up with.

From here it really starts to get interesting, to see what the users do with our baby. Which bits will baffle, which save time? Will they use things as I designed them to be used or will they rebel against the structure and revert to email? That’s the worst-case scenario. Sadly, if that happens it will most likely be because they can’t gain value from the product rather than due to interface incongruities, which would mean we have really failed. We’re planning to do a round of questionnaires in a couple of weeks, guage the response from the group.

It’s a bit early to start shouting, as I haven’t been yet, but I’m very much looking forward to being able to tell people about my place in the Tai Chi lineage :-). I’m interested to see how different it is. I did like my old teacher, Kenny, a lot. He was obviously very passionate about Tai Chi and I hope that Michael will be the same. I also hope that there’s room for a slacker who doesn’t train enough.

Really, I ought to do more training. I never did anywhere near enough outside the weekly sessions at the centre. Oh, that raises another question, should I where my Reyukai Centre (the Norwich centre where I trained) tshirt on Thursday?

The lovely case that Louise and I bought came today and when we tried to fit everything in it the expansion cards wouldn’t fit! Evidently the web page “forgot” to mention that it only takes low profile PCI cards, which would mean being limited to PCI or onboard graphics, as you don’t get low profile AGP cards AFAIK. It’s a moot point as Louise and I are not about to buy any other new bits of hardware.

It’s a pity, as soon as the case came I liked it. It is very small (in all dimensions, but especially depth) and the design is pretty good for a 40 PC case, i.e. almost non-hateful. The one we’re going to swap it for can take my GFX card, but is pretty ugly.

Judging by the fact that Julia (the machine) hasn’t been upgraded since 2000, when I was given a second-hand Riva TNT 2, I’m considering whether it would be worth it for us to limit our upgrade options by buying a really small case. Would we rather have a tiny PC than a super up-to-date one? Given that it’s been used for games-playing about twice in the last year, it does seem silly to buy a super-spec machine that we can’t fit in the house. However, Louise would eventually like to fit a video editing board, and I doubt they’ll come in low-profile format.

Haven’t blogged for a while. I’ve been meaning to. I’ve had a funny week or so.

My Dad was meant to get married for the third time on the 27th of December. He didn’t and instead split up with his long-term girlfriend. He’s really sad about it, understandably, and I’m quite depressed by it too. I don’t really know what’s happening but she seems to have just given up on their relationship. This may have been going on for ages without me knowing it, I haven’t seen her since August, but still, I’m sad.

Then there’s the whole LShift thing. They told me they didn’t want to hire me as a developer/designer because they didn’t have the role. I wrote back imploring them to consider me as a straight programmer. They agreed yesterday, as long as I produced a whole load of my code for inspection, wrote new answers to a questionnaire gauging my opinions on various programming issues and provided three links for their links page. This was hard. First off my code library is bad, full of little-more-than-started projects and nothing really meaty. Secondly I wasn’t sure what was wrong with my first set of questionnaire answers and I wasn’t sure how to fix them. Lastly, the page is very much links to programming issue articles. I read this kind of stuff loads but rarely feel strongly enough about a particular issue to have favourite articles about it. I tried to find pieces about stuff I care about, OSS, standards and usability, with a slant towards deploying good software being good for you. I did discover the quite interesting but badly named EvangCentral section of Sun’s site (BTW I fucking love Sun’s redesign, Nielsen must be apoplectic with joy). Anyway, the stress levels were high last night, I got into a mental block. I have no idea what the end result will be, I’m kind of hoping that they will just turn around and tell me to fuck off, because I’ve got the over-riding sensation that I’m lying and cheating my way in or at least that I’m not really good enough and only narrowly hiding this fact. Even though that may not be true, it’s the prevailing mood and is affecting my attitude. If they bring me in for interview I’m going to be terrified.

Louise has started her new job. It seems fairly drudgeful, but she doesn’t hate it too much. It is not well paid but the company seems to be growing. It was started in 1997 and will make a profit this year. Not bad for an internet company. It’s because they have content, you know.

Must go, lots of work to do and a score with younger more successful people to settle. Oh who am I kidding, I’m never going to be a superstar developer. I want to be, but I spend my time doing other stuff. Mainly prevaricating. I prevaricate so much that playing on my GameCube is something I “keep meaning to get around to,” how bad is that!

Plus, I’m writing this on Apple’s new KHTML-based browser, Safari. It’s nice and a bit different from other stuff. It uses the background of the address bar as the loading meter. It at least has nice Aqua form controls!