I'm just talking to a client who's reviewing some changes I've made to her site. She's going through the changes under her breath. The whole "under her breath" thing is a very similar experience to watching a status bar. You know that there's business being attended to, but if you try to work out what that business is, it'll just take twice as long.

On Thursday I got talking to one of the guys at Tai Chi and I found out why the form they are teaching me is so different from the one I learnt in Norwich. It's the old frame and Kenny was teaching the new frame. Apparently the new frame is more complicated and is generally taught after the old frame. I learnt a little bit more of the 19-point form. I haven't been practising enough again. However, I have an excuse.

On Friday we had loads of guests come down and went to a Manga all-nighter at The Other Cinema in Soho. I saw Spriggan, Perfect Blue, Patlabor II and, against my choice, Spriggan again. They were planning to show Macross Plus, but somebody fucked up and they couldn't, when asked everybody else voted Spriggan (which I had seen on another screen). It was a ker-azy ride, felt pretty crazed in the morning and the next day. But free breakfast of croissant made it easier. Plus it was cool to see lots of people and meet some more Hype people (Silas).

Rich, who had been staying for the week, Martin and Miles left on Saturday evening after sleep and Full English Breakfast in Chelsea, but Greg stayed until today. I told him that I was thinking of messing around with SDL a bit and we cranked the API out. We managed to get a basic rotating sprite (blit-tastic) demo running on his machine built under MinGW and mine with Apple's Project Builder. MinGW is ace BTW and combined with Bloodshed's Dev-C++ IDE provides everything we need. For anyone else out there pissed-off with DevStudio I highly recommend it. Greg is basically ditching M$ tools, something I did a while ago with the leap to the Mac, but it's really, really nice to have alternatives that are free and better. Then we decided to stick the code in CVS so we could continue working on it remotely. I've never really used CVS properly and it's a bit mad, but it should be very useful for our purposes. At least all the IDEs integrate with it, if in interestingly different ways.

Developing a single piece of code which compiles on both my OS X machine and Greg's Win98 machine was immensely satisfying. It's clearly the way forward. Well done, SDL guys!

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.

I'm so totally stoked. On Thursday I'm going to a new Tai Chi class in Kensington. This one is taught by Michael Tse. He's the only guy I have been able to find teaching Chen style this side of London and has the added bonus that he's a student of Grandmaster Chen Xiao Wang. Xiao Wang is the current heir and head of the style!

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.

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Last updated at 15:53, Tuesday August 12th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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