HCI group cw links

Websites I have bookmarked regarding the use of HCI in Apps.

I know it's a little unorthodox, but I couldn't think of a neater way to link you to these.

"What Type Are You?"

"Designing Accessible Applications"
"What font should I use"
Those lecture things you've probably already seen
About text and background colours
Theo Mandel -Golden rules of HCI chapter5

Websites I have not really read yet, but intend to:
Someone's Thesis on UI
Report on Mobile Web accessibility 

~~~~~~~~~General links about Apps~~~~~~~~
Engaging Apps - I'm probably going to veer into 'apps in general' as well as 'apps in tourism' in my lit review bits. 
A look at what makes good apps great

Writing a literature reveiw

Slipping

My eating habits are waay off, and this is not a good sign. I'm doing the thing again.
At the moment I'm still mostly eating, so that's good, but it's the start of a slippery slope of unstructured time-scales and disorganisation.

Yesterday I skipped breakfast and lunch, had rhubarb pie at about six, and some kind of savoury food at about maybe eleven. I am really going to need to get some more structure over here. I also need to do something. Like a thing that isn't necessary for my living (like going out to buy food), and maybe something not organised by someone else. I need to get off my butt and do something recreational out side, while being very aware that I am doing this to get out of the house and for no other reason. If I could get out the house early enough I would go running. I'm really craving some running sometimes. Maybe to some good old Radio Able.

Also my Brother is the most amazing because he just bought me FF7. He is the best.
I am torn between playing it, and not playing it because I'm supposed to be working really hard, so I think I might play it after I have done some really hard work. Now I just need to do some really hard work.

I think my state of unpacked is starting to get to me, and this may well be the cause of my unstructured routines and that feeling of something. Things are in boxes and bags and everything seems so disorganised. Everything is a mess, but more than that a mess of things that have never been put in the right place. Things have no place, places need to be found, things need to be moved but they just keep moving in circles.
Maybe if I fix this everything will go back to normal.

My new espresso thing makes good coffee (and satisfying bubbly noises.) I offered some to my hall mate, but I'm not sure he understood what I was saying. I would kind of like for there to be a higher proportion of native English speakers in the kitchen.
I would kind of like to be able to go for late night runs without people declaring it unsafe. I've got some creepy things to listen to, and I think it would be nice to listen to them while running through the night.
If it got too creepy I could always run a little faster ;)
Besides I like the night.

Post- Time Skip arrival

Hey guys, guess who?
That's right: ME!
Or in terms of metaphorical-verse world thing: post-time-skip!Me ! (Because I'm counting last year as a time-skip. I think it serves the same purpose and fits in quite well that way.)

I'm back at LoBro, and getting ready to rock the scene with my awesome presence. I was a bit upset at first because the university messed up all the room bookings and now I'm not in the hall I was supposed to be, being instead further from my lecture halls and not with an en-suit (it also has much narrower hallways), and those of you who know me may know that I get a bit upset with last minute change of plans and expectations (amusing there actually were plans or expectations.) However as said by the great Sid the sloth 'you know me, I'm to lazy to hold a grudge.' I've got a room, internet connection and coffee, so things are fine. I can't really be upset for more than a day anyway. 
My hall mates seem nice from what I've seen so far. They're mostly international students, I guess from China as we seem to have some sort of 'third years from China' thing going on.
I'll probably talk more to them later.
I hope they don't think me weird, as I've spent a lot of time watching TMNT and as of today Sailor Moon, and now I'm listening to the levian polka pretty much on repeat.
If anyone recognises that just from audio, they've probably watched too much of the shows themselves anyway. Except maybe the levian polka. 

Well I seem to be running late again, you know how it is: Things to do, places to be.
Till next time, I leave you with this cool 'hands snapping things to the tune of the levian polka' because I rather like it. 

Three Months Later

Hey Guuuuuuuiz!
I'm not going to apologise for it being so long because really, is it ever not?
It's been a weird day, and I'm starting to regret the decision to have really stodgy cake and custard for dinner (it wasn't actually supposed to be that stodgy.)
I think at some point it was supposed to somehow symbolise the chaos of my life now that my family has seemingly abandoned me.
Now I'm just sick of stodgy rubbish tasting cake.

It's been three months since my last update. I still haven't finished any of my drawing projects, or my dissertation, but I have seen shawn of the dead, started portal 2 (Wheatly yay! OuO), came second in a pub dartz game (while only hitting the correct area of the darts board once) and caught up with Homestuck.

I also finished Mystery Incorporated. This is one of the many reasons I need my sister back: No one reacts the right way when I try to tell them about this. I've got lots of 'that doesn't sound like the scooby doo I used to watch' or 'Why were you even watching Scooby doo?', but what I really want is someone to talk through why time travel was even involved in this situation, and how I'm supposed to feel about a) literally everyone dying, and b) the universe being reset, and whether anything we saw actually happened any-more.  I know what I was sort of hoping for the last episode, and in a way it did all happen, it's just that the utter destruction of the entire Mystery Incorporated universe as I knew it sort of put a dampener on that for me.

I don't really have much cool to say, but if I find some I'll try and come back here and let you know.
In this sudden absence of family and like minded same show watching peeps, you never know, maybe I'll come back and start theorising over stuff here. It'll be just like the good old days of 3am Trock and fairy lights. Just with less 3am, trock or fairy lights.

Also I'm still sort of hoping that the Cravendale bar crew are going come back in an epic hero moment to vanquish the evil thumb-cats.

Not Invasion?

So my house-mate returned through the front door. Neither of us mentioned any potential intergalactic threats, and I don't even know if she's at all involved. It's all a bit confusing.
Still, if she wasn't using the invisible portal in the back garden I can only summarise that the intergalactic lawn mowers can now open 'pull' doors. It may look bad, but rest assured that I will fight until my last to save you guys and the rest of the world from whatever comes through that portal. I'm not sure how assuring that is, but there you go.
On a more positive note, it looks like Oven might pull through. One side's definitely broken but the other has regained a little control and can cook meringues and Baked Alaska (but not much else). I think my house-mate is seeing if we can get her fixed up.

I'm supposed to be writing an Easter report right now (that was due in before Easter.. ¬-¬ ) but I seem to have forgotten how to words. Hopefully sticking some here will get my fingers in the mood for typing and I've got some epic-sads music going. I don't know if that will help but you never know. I could get some epic sads into my Easter report.

Also I saw the hobbit. I love Martin Freeman [although I always say John Freeman. I have literally just realised this is because he plays John Watson and not just because of actual John freeman existing.] That guy is both a brilliant Bilbo and ace in general.

Oven Conspiracies

I arrived home today to find the back door open. Not that this is particularly unusual because its a rather nice slightly warm day, which practically counts a heatwave compared to the freezing cold that's been raging around these past few weeks. I'd taken my time walking back from church, and my house mate has a car so she had probably arrived much earlier and was enjoying the sunshine in the garden. Except that she wasn't.

After taking a look round and locating the fish pond, (which actually a giant plant pot, and I think that's pretty cool) I briefly looked round the house and could see no sign of her. This lead me to wonder why the back door was open at all. The door itself is quite stiff and usually locked, and I extremely doubt my house mate forgot to shut it before going out. (It's more likely I forgot to lock it after opening it on Friday to let some air through, but even then it's a bit too convenient that it would open all by itself right when the weather was looking up.) 

The oven started playing up last night (and still is), and before turning in for the night she was going to tell me something as we passed in the hall (before she was interrupted by the oven alarm for my evening meal.) At the time I thought nothing of it; it sounded like something about not seeing me on Sunday morning which is not particularly usual as we rarely see each other on Sunday mornings (she gets up a good few hours before me), however in hindsight I realise I only assumed this was what she was saying.
What she could have been trying to tell me was that the ovens were uprising and that she was planning on stopping them by travelling to a different plane via the invisible portal in the garden and would probably be around much today. 

In which case I should probably not shut the back door because when she returns from her adventure she would find herself locked out in the back garden.

However I do not believe this is entirely the case as my house mate is pretty level headed and would have left me a note or a text to let me know not to shut the back door if this was the case.

In the great scheme of things one cannot simply assume that one's house mate does not want you to shut the back door because she is on a crazy adventure to stop the ovens as this is not a very practical thing to assume. Indeed I do not even know if the ovens are the cause of this whole fiasco: maybe the oven breaking was simply the first sign of something yet to come, they might have even been defending the earth from attack but were recently attacked themselves and can no longer both defend the earth and cook food properly.

It is more likely that my house mate found herself embarking on an adventure through the garden portal to suddenly to leave a note (hopefully of her own will and not because she was abducted by lawnmowers; I notice we do not have one of these, so there is a chance she knew a little of the situation before hand. If this is the situation at all.) and that last night she attempting to warn me that something might be going down but that she did not know the situation entirely at the time.

Hence I will shut the back door (for it grows a little cold.) 

Either my house mate will return from her sudden crazy adventure, after which I'm sure a closed back door will be the least of her worries, or she just went to a friends house after church (a common enough occurrence) and there are some crazy mysteries going down. (In which case I should shut the door anyway and pretend not to have noticed anything strange, lest I too end up caught up in some crazy intergalactic war of household appliances.)

Except with more lawnmowers and Ovens..

Price Comparison

The Go Compare adverts have really gone a bit far now.
 At first it was average cool, just a guy singing about a price comparison site. Then things started going down hill a bit,  people in the adverts started sabotaging/complaining about his adverts (thus confirming that in universe he is doing official adverts, at least to begin with).  I didn't really care for this, I thought the original adverts were ok and firmly in the 'this advert is fine, I don't mind it being on tv' category of adverts and that now they were trying to force the idea that this guy was suddenly the scrappy. I wasn't really buying it.
I hear some people didn't like his adverts, but I was pretty neutral upon his character and didn't really care at this point (although I preferred the initial adverts).

Then suddenly everyone hates him, and is being really mean and illegal about it.
I don't know if this is supposed to be some sort of AU where everybody has a irrational vendetta about this one price comparison advert guy, or if it's supposed to be reflecting real life. I'm not even sure of his motives any-more:  was he hired by Go Compare to do adverts for them, or did he just find out about a cheap price comparison site and actually want to spread the good word to all the world to share his happy findings?
However what I do know is that either way he did nothing wrong, it was either a harmless advertising job, or  he really had good intentions at heart but didn't understand that his method of communication was not appreciated.
People all over the world were going out of their way to cause  varying degrees of suffering to a guy who only wanted them to know that they could save money, and thought they might appreciate being told with a song.

Or maybe the entire thing was set up by GoCompare who broadcast his song to the world, letting him think he was doing good when really they were festering a crazy hatred for the guy in all that heard their adverts over and over again, until everyone wanted to kill that GoCompare guy.
It would be a conversation piece, both to casual complainers and the dark plotters. Everyone would blame the GoCompare guy, and in doing so would be talking about GoCompare the website, not connecting that the website was behind the adverts the whole time. The website created the guy; his rise and fall were all orchestrated merely to spread their name.

And now in their latest advert he sits dejected at a bus stop and tries to explain to an old lady his situation. He honestly doesn't know why everyone seems to hate him, but instead of informing him that everyone in the entire world is annoyed with his songs and maybe he should try a different method of delivery or ease up on his spreading the news, she just leaves. The entire world has cast out this guy, and no one will even tell him why.
Did they never think that maybe a little communication could have solved this whole problem right at the start?

They pretty much destroyed the life of a guy who at worst was an unfortunate actor possibly set up by an evil price comparison company, or just a kindly soul who is misguided about the best methods of communicating with people.

I guess it's true what they say:

In fact, if everyone sees you as such a villain, maybe you should become one and show them what real villainy is!
 Sing with all you can! Broadcast it through every speaker in every part of the globe!
Maybe their irrationally annoyed minds will melt in frustration; Death caused by both communication and a lack there of.
Become the villain they envisioned you to be, and show them how it's really done; They never deserved cheap insurance anyway.

Soup

Sup Dudes?
I've been at work for a few months now and I've leaned a few things so I thought I'd impart some of this valuable information on to you.

Soup. A while ago someone (More specifically my awesome and part time super hero god mother) taught me how to make carrot soup. It was very tasty and mostly made of carrots; I have no idea how that is possible. It's one of life's many mysterys. I'm told you can make soup out of anything ever: just boil it all up then blend it all down. I think this might also be how you make baby food.
Either I'm not a very great cook, or that second to last sentence just there is a lie. It could quite well be either, or possibly a bit of both. Maybe it's not a very great cook who tries to make soup out of pasta.
It tasted really great (probably the bacon), but it looked pretty gross.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to make soup out of anything, but I would advise you to maybe stop and think before you boil everything up. Is there something better to do with these ingredients? Is there anything here that probably really won't blend? Is this even how you make soup?
These are all good questions.

Another thing I've learnt is that people notice things more that I previously thought. For example they tend to notice when you're not wearing any shoes (even if you're wearing socks with laces printed on them), and other little things like this. So if you're walking down the street singing or doing a jig or doing something slightly odd, just remember people are watching you. There are eyes everywhere, looking at everything you do. Remembering.
Not that it makes any difference, I just thought that you'd like to know.

I finally got to see Terra Nova today. It's weird seeing someone you know on TV. She wasn't fighting any dinosaurs, but still. Someone I know is in a prehistoric jungle with dinosaurs and guns. Not only has she achieved the great hight of becoming fiction, but she's cool fiction.
I hope she gets to fight a dinosaur one day.

Anyway I have a cold and it's getting hard to think. I'm sorry about the absence of cool text and pictures these days; I'm just really lazy. Have a meme. I'm going to watch a movie or something. Maybe Mystery Men or Anchorman.

One of my favourite DTWHSB

Why are there so many drugs for un-blocking blocked noses, but none to stop them running? I'd rather have a blocked nose any-day.
Bye.

Portsmouth has Fallen

We failed today.

I'm not sure who 'we' is but the mission was to get into work, and it is completely not my fault that we/I failed so somebody else must be to blame.
I got the last bus I that made it through to QA (I know this because all the buses in Portsmouth terminated when we got to my stop, so no one could have followed behind.) It was a fairly cool bus journey though. Listening to the bus radio crackling with urgent messages and enquires  Snow thickening on the pavements all the while. Then the final command for all buses in Portsmouth to terminate at the nearest safe place. I'm not sure who lasted longer, the bus network or my work place. It doesn't matter anyway.
 I would have caught the hospital shuttle, or even walked if needs be.
Then work cancelled.
In all honesty it's a good job too. I don't know if I could have walked past the lethal snowy pavement-less roundabout on a hill, and even if I'd caught the hospital shuttle I would never have made it back. Especially not in the dark.
It was a good call that needed to be made, and that's probably why I should never lead any kind of army or mission. A 'never give up' attitude is not always the right thing to have, and a good leader should know when to cut their losses and go home.

I still walked back, which is not really any less epic. It took about an hour or so, and I did get lost once. Getting lost is less exciting when you have a gps thingy on your phone.
Never the less, it was still a failure; A heroic retreat is still a retreat. The snow beat us.

So we watched Stargate and Inception and Mystery-inc (Which is apparently on at 3pm, so I probably won't be doing that again. My house mate didn't watch that one.) and baked biscuits instead of going to work.

I'll win next time.

Half stabrgbldsx

Hey guys blog!
I got a little high towards the end of work today. I didn't mean to, but it ended up in a conversation about dopplegangers (which I think I've spent a little too much time thinking about to warrant normal. However after this conversation I have now concluded that if I had a doppelgänger clone who time travelled from the past, it would probably be ok because she'd still know the password around ten years ago. Also I'm sorry if I weirded you out work guy, weirdness is for fun times, not for work times. Kudos for finding my blog though.) Anyway I digress!

I was kind of interested as to why. I had eaten most of a Crunchie bar earlier, but that was earlier. The amount of coffee I had consumed was at the higher end of my standard, but still standard. It wasn't that late.
Does chocolate even make you happy? Everyone says that it contains brain dolphins that make you happy,  but I never really noticed chocolate actually making me happy. Brain dolphins are a lie.

My sister came up last weekend and we finished Cowboy Bebop.
Best. Anime. Ever.
If you haven't seen it, you really have too. It's really short, but every episode is brilliant.
I might buy the series one day, but series are expensive.

Also I dyed my hair purple, and someone said "You've dyed your hair purple."
This means it's officially purple, and I can now say I've died my hair purple and can check that metaphorical box.

Anyhoo.

See You Space Cowboy....