0As a cool recruitment campaign, Barclays Capital made this little game in Flex to (link taken from Miron). I have no idea how people on the leader board can get scores of over 2000. My “Word Power” category here is low because there’s very little score incentive to forming each word (even with 5 or 6 lettered words, the points award are still relatively low).
However, I do think my score in the screen shot below is definitely way more awesome than what those guys got. :p
Go try your multi-tasking skills at Barclays Capital Mindmap!
Note: The competition is only open to undergraduate students studying in UK.
The past week has been no less than crazy for me and the entire Project IRIS team. From designing the overall presentation for hitting a moving target down to creating an unbelievable sales pitch, we all did the best we could have possibly done to bring home a deserved 3rd place in the Innovation Design category at the 2010 Ontario Engineering Competition.
Scott et al,
I am pleased to inform you that your project entry has been selected to represent the University of Waterloo ‘A’ at the 2010 Ontario Engineering Competition, taking place January 29 – 31.
Oh… January is going to be so busy…
I just found this on my camera from my recent trip. It was taken in my hotel room. I thought it was pretty funny 
Ah, doesn’t every look better with more pew pew? In the latest episode of UW administration hilarity, they decided to drop something like $60,000 to re-design the logo. The idea was to replace the current one year old refreshed logo with a complete new logo, removing the coat of arms completely. The new logo: nothing less than a mess of colours sloppily slapped over a W.
What I want to ask is, why such a quick change to another new logo when you just got one last year? Rebranding isn’t an overnight project. There are still tons of UW websites still sporting the old logo after a year, and plenty more who don’t follow the common look and feel.
I do not think the problem is that we need a new logo. I think we need competent marketing officers who can actually make sure that the “positioning” strategy is executed properly. When you can’t even get the logo right in the CLF that you publish, what makes you think that you can go and sell a completely new “position” and icon?
All of the departments and faculties have just spent a bunch of money last year getting stuff with the new logo on it. Now they want the departments to burn more money in the pit? That isn’t even part of the $60,000 cost and it has to be absorbed the the departments. Our Fourth-Year Project Lab is full of very very old equipment… even a thousand dollars saved could score us a new shiny new Agilent power supply so we don’t have to be using “old sparky” that’s not even grounded properly. “Hey you ECE guys got that new shiny E5 building!” Well, we can’t afford to move the labs over there, so we’re still stuck in E2 while E5 will be more offices for the most part.
So guess what, I am willing to bet in next year’s annual report, I’ll continue to hear from David Johnston about how the school is close to running a deficit and we need to increase the tuition rates to cover our costs at the maximum limit imposed by the province. This gets the seldomly awarded “bull shit” on my blog.
In the protest, the uwlive.ca homepage now sports loads of lazzzzzers. It really hurt my eyes just to make them…. I don’t know how that logo designer did it.
In case you missed my rave about Clayton Christensen at the OCE Discovery 2009 conference, this guy delivered an amazing speech at the conference. So if you did not wake up at 5 am in the morning and drive to Toronto to catch his speech, OCE has been kind enough to make all of the speeches available online for free! If you have that entrepreneurial spirit, this video is highly recommended. 
Alex and I are in the video too! Can you spot us?
You can watch all of the other videos at OCE Discovery 09’s website.
And work continues with Project IRIS… our demo date is only weeks away!
With all the projects that I am working on in the next little while, I did a bit of housekeeping with my Windows 7 superbar to make sure that can still ninja my way around the apps at an unnecessarily efficient pace. I am look at about 4 other app icons in the superbar before it wraps around to the next line. Do you have the same problem too?
The new Quest Student Information System update is no more than atrocious, especially when it took them years to plan for this change. Just from this first page after signing in, I already have issues with it.
- Page title: “Campus-facing registry content” – whatever that means.
- Content title: “Heng-Chun’s Student Center” – there exists something in my PeopleSoft profile called preferred name
- Font size – Gosh! it’s tiny!
- Tabs – Is there something missing in that space? The fixed height is really unnecessary.
Rants continuing after the break.
I actually have not check this view on my Google Analytics since maybe December, usually I only check the rolling 30-day statistics to see how well my Courselect project is doing. Here is a chart of absolute unique visitors since September 4, 2008 (the inception of the website) up until May 31, 2009.
I am actually really happy to see that the website is getting popular within the school population and no one will ever have to go through the same course look-up hell I went through.
In the last 8 months and a little bit, I went from a hacked up prototype interface through a few revisions to the UI into what is now a recognized self-sustaining website. Of course, I would not have been able to do this without the feedback I’ve had from all of you who read my blog and tried it out as well as the students who left feedback on getsatisfaction or email. I also saw a huge trend from searches of upper year courses down into lower year courses and into subjects other than engineering courses.
Why am I posting this? I just thought it’s friggin crazy manng. Look at the slope on that line!*
Also crazy enough, my original system architecture is still holding up well against the load increase and I haven’t had to make any drastic changes to how any of the component operates or how the data caches work. Crazyness!
*Past performance does not necessarily predict future results
