An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

You know if it wasn’t for my girlfriend and my dogs that are over here then I’d be quitting my job and hightailing it back to Sydney as fast as possible, I’ve had it with being a relative high earner over here and not being able to get enough credit even to cover some of my bar tabs, what is the friggin point of issuing a credit card with a $200 limit? Like really what the heck is that going to do for me? Yay! I can do one week of grocery shopping on it and have to pay it off before using it again. Woohoo!

That isn’t all of why living in the USA is biting for me but it is the most prevalent issue right now as Dell in all their wisdom won’t even give me a credit line to buy a new friggin PDA so I’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way and pay in cash.

EDIT: Even BestBuy won’t give me credit, how much does that suck? Yeah you’ll give some part time waiter credit that sttruggles to make the minimum payments but you won’ t give an expat that rakes in the $$$ any credit at all, screw that!

I’ve been trying to think of a project I can put my skills toward lately especially as I am currently coming to grips with Ruby on Rails and one of the things I kept coming back to was writing yet (not just) another forum script.

I know there is probably already too many forum scripts in the wild but only one comes close to usability nirvana and that is Vanilla (bbPress also comes close), the rest in my opinion are a usability nightmare and just don’t facilitate the quick & easy exchange of information like they should.

Reading Tim’s blog helped adding to my motivation and gave me some extra ideas with his post about Forki, which is a concept that mixes a forum with a wiki where forum posts can be promoted to the wiki so it is using the same data but presenting it in two totally different forms one that is ideal for discussions and the other for reference purposes.

However I’m not just going to steal Tim’s idea as I have a lot of my own ideas I want to integrate first and may do something completely different than Tim’s concept, I especially want to use my experience as a quality assurance analyst and unofficial usability consultant that I have gotten through my day job. I want the forums to flow in a way where they are simplistic to use but not lacking in features so everyone will be able to easily do what they want to do without making the interface cluttered & confusing, possibly by building in some “AI” so the forum can adapt to your usage patterns.

For example if you often visit the forum index, login and then navigate to a certain category or to all unread posts then the forum should recognize that and redirect you. Another example, if for example you use a certain tag a lot like the <tag> </tag> I am using to tag this post then the forum should give you a quick tag to save you from typing it all the time.

Of course all functionality like that would be configurable, possibly by using roles and by roles I don’t mean something based on your level of skill or your status in the forum but something that describes the nature of most of the posts you make to the forums so the user interface can be catered towards your needs. For example if you’re a software developer then you’re going to want things like a code quicktag but probably aren’t interested in smilies and if you do use a smiley you want it to render as text.

Anyway it is time to let my mind think it’s way through all the ideas I have and start coming up with some design concepts so stay tuned for updates and if you have any ideas of your own then by all means leave a comment.

Anyone else enjoy the scene from tonight’s episode of Lost of Kate crawling along inside the air conditioning vent? Nice view wasn’t it?

I pay through the nose each month to get the best digital cable possible from Time Warner Cable so when I tune into ABC to watch something like Lost and am presented with something that looks worse than I would expect on broadcast TV then I get quite annoyed and right now I am very annoyed!

What is the deal with that? I know it isn’t the cable quality as other channels/shows have digital cable quality.

I still don’t understand this whole wildcard race thing but apparently if the Astros win tomorrow night and the Phillies lose their next match then the Astros get the wildcard into the playoffs so I thought going to tomorrow night’s match would be cool and couldn’t believe it that I could still get 2 tickets to the Crawford boxes!

It is the first time I’ve sat in the Crawford boxes so hopefully a ball or two comes my way so I can show off my cricket skills and show these baseballers how to catch a ball without a friggin mitt!

Microsoft some time recently have released service pack 2 for Entourage on Mac (The Mac’s Outlook, but Entourage is actually pretty good) and it looks like Send & Receive now functions as it should, before if you had it set to check for mail every 10 minutes, pressing Send & Receive would reset the counter to 10 minutes instead of performing a send & receive but now it does as you expect!

So is Martha Stewarts Apprentice pretty much the same as the original The Apprentice but with Martha Stewart in charge instead of Donald Trump? Lame!

I thought it was all going to be about doing Martha Stewart like stuff like home decorating & cooking and not just a cookie cutter version of the original The Apprentice. Although I guess the projects have a Martha Stewart flavour it is still too similar in my opinion but I’m watching it anyway…

Sometimes I just can’t believe the things I see on TV, tonight they had one of those fluff pieces that was about an ex-race car driver that was teaching defensive driving to teenagers (you know the kind where they put you into artificial trouble situations within a safe course to teach you how to respond), which I thought was a great thing.

Then some middle age female do gooder of a conservative safety expert comes on saying how putting teenagers in adrenaline inducing situations is exactly what we don’t want as it will only lead them to being cocky on the road and cause more accidents. Okay so now learning how to avoid accidents and control your car in dangerous situations is a bad thing? She even went so far to ask parents that were thinking about enrolling their children in the course whether they would like to celebrate their child’s 21st birthday or grieve & stand over their grave.

Give me a break!

Commuting in Houston is absolutely pathetic, Houston itself is relatively small yet it takes forever to get anywhere and heavens forbid if you ever decide to take public transport to get anywhere.

I was thinking overnight about how I used to commute to Sydney everyday over a distance that would take about an hour to drive when there is no traffic and it would only be about a 45 minute train ride but here in Houston I live less than a 10 minute drive away (without traffic) and it still takes me about the same time to get to work by catching the light rail, it just goes to show how bad the planning really is here in Houston. (Please don’t try to tell me that Houston is so much bigger than Sydney as it isn’t, in the closest figures I could find Houston had 2 million in 2000 and in 2003 Sydney had 4 million, I doubt Houston’s population doubled in 3 years).

I can’t believe how many times the light rail has to stop to let traffic cross the rails ahead of it, how difficult could it be to time the traffic lights so that doesn’t happen? Talking of traffic lights where are all the sensors to monitor traffic and adjust timings to accomodate the current traffic conditions? Where are all the red light cameras to make most Houston drivers poor and lose their license? Why do the traffic lights go out all the time if someone so much as sneezes within 6 feet of them?

When did FedEx become such idiots? I can remember when I used to order DVD’s from the USA when I lived in Sydney and would get them within about 2 days or so but these days even if you pay for their top priority shipping you are lucky to get anything within a week! Their tracker says they tried to deliver my Sydney Swans jersey and hat at 11am this morning but I wasn’t available, WTF? I was sitting there eagerly awaiting the fools. I eventually had to go out though so a little after 12:00 we left the house but I left a written, signed & dated authorization to leave the package at our complex’s leasing office stuck on our front door.

So FedEx, I ask you what the fuck?

UPDATE: “Delivered to address other than recipient” - Yay! Looks like they got my authorization to leave and left the package at the leasing office so I will be able to wear it to the office on Friday and annoy my West Australian manager!