Thank you

Hi readers and visitors! Given people are still checking out this blog from Facebook (thank you!), I thought it was well beyond time to update this blog and explain myself.

This blog was a wonderful pastime and creative outlet for me, and gave me membership to a wonderful community of fellow bloggers and readers.

My main theme in this blog was the combination of full-time work and motherhood.

I wrote a lot about full-time work, parenting and twins. I also wrote about books, modern life, some popular science and general thoughts and opinions. Some of my posts were cringe-worthy, some were not bad, and a few were pretty good! No doubt ALL have dated badly.

So what happened?

In 2015 I switched careers to working in IT project and program management, and though I had been  a project manager for some years, working for a technology start-up and later for a small-to-medium company as it matured and developed its own technology capabilities was fascinating and FULL-ON.

I have spent the last few years fully immersed in product development, "agile" development, lean technical projects and the many and various philosophies and community conversations around those. I have been LIVING on Twitter.

Combined with this, my children were growing up and my day to day challenges and interests were different.  Plus, they won't let me post stuff about them anymore - a challenge that hits most blogger parents around the same time :)

So to my poor, neglected personal parenting blog: I unintentionally ghosted it, and the wonderful community who I connected with through here.



via GIPHY

I am sorry to my fellow bloggers whom I stopped visiting, stopped reading, and for whom I left no explanation on this blog! I am sure they are used to it - bloggers come and go, and most blogs end without fanfare or a proper good bye.  I hope everyone is doing well, and I will try and visit your blogs from time to time, as I loved reading them and I miss those perspectives sometimes.

Where am I now?

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to check out my current, more professional blog, it lives here:

https://nonprojectproject.com/

My latest post may be something relatable to some of you :) -
An Introvert's Defence of the Open Plan Office


And I make NO commitment to weekly or monthly updates!

Stay well everyone.
Thanks for visiting, and thanks for reading my stuff.

Keep in touch via Twitter!


Jackie

Tech Life: Build, Test, Release Adventures

For the past year and a half I've been working for a small and smart financial software vendor, which I love. I'd been inching my way from financial services to "the other side" of the software fence for a few months before I made the change, and I thought at the time I had developed a solid understanding of technology vendor-ship and what that work would be like.

But of course, you only know so much until you get there.

Two App Ideas (please send money)

Dear Venture Capitalists, Developers and Marketers,

I have two great app ideas and would like these developed as soon as possible please.  Please note these are my intellectual property but I am open to sharing the millions of dollars we make on them under a reasonable arrangement.  Please let me know when they are ready.

Minecraft Part 2: Getting Banned

Last week I wrote about Minecraft online gaming, known to non-parents as pvp (player vs player) - an arcane universe inhabited by ten-year-olds and their demonic alter-egos, where good times can turn to crap at the tap of a birchwood block.  

At some point in their recent Minecraft career, my kids discovered the shock and horror of being BANNED.

At this point you may want to refresh yourself with the PvP glossary presented in Minecraft Part 1.  

Being BANNED is worse than being KICKED. Being KICKED just means you've been kicked off the game (disconnected from the server), and you can get back in another time. Being BANNED means the Admin (owner/moderator) has BANNED you from the server, probably forever! (At least in most cases).

To cheer up my kid and out of curiosity, I googled "reasons for being banned in Minecraft" and the result is very funny. You can be banned for all sorts of reasons, from legitimate ones like griefing or trolling or killing other players, through minor infractions like speaking in all caps or asking for "OP" one too many times, to baffling ones that apparently involve saying or doing the wrong thing in front of the wrong Admin.

Most of the ones below came from this Minecraft forum thread.  They made me chuckle.

Some reasons for being banned from a Minecraft PvP server

Upsetting an Admin

For being impatient

For unintentional destruction

For following your architectural dreams

For not obeying the laws of gravity

For being too badass

Because you peaked

For solving a game challenge too quickly

For asking an annoying question too many times - like once

For possibly being a Brony

For saying Hi

For wanton destruction

For committing two horrible crimes at once:

For unrepentant warmongering

For being American

For annoying the French

For being called Dylan

For swearing

For hate crimes against art

For inverting a Minecraft element to reference a pop culture trope

As a result of a complex battle which ended with mutual respect

For killing everyone and taking their stuff - actually this ban sounds pretty legit:

For inadvertently playing against someone's political beliefs 

Just because

And perhaps saddest of all: FOR NO REASON

These cheered up my kids and gave me an entertaining evening's reading. 

But I still don't quite know how to play Minecraft.

galaxybackground.com Wallpaper 15

Minecraft Part 1: What the hell are you talking about, kids

I thought I was a very tech savvy parent and secretly felt pretty smug about my preparedness for my kids to gradually enter the fray of online life.  Then along came Minecraft.

I'll admit, gaming has been a bit of a black hole for me. What little I know about gaming I have gleaned from 9Gag and Gamergate (which, you know, both make gaming seem super awesome).

I am, however, a technophile and ambitious to know it all. I mean, I switched from an iPhone to a Samsung two years ago, so I'm like, pretty cutting edge.

Now that the kids have an Xbox, I fully intend to give up some Netflix time to learn how to steer the goddamn Need for Speed car down the middle of the highway instead of careening from barrier to barrier and getting stuck in reverse, and I am looking forward to trying a first-person shooter game to see how violent it makes me.

But commanding the Xbox controller is, like, hard. Why are kids immediately so dextrous at this stuff? I cannot get all my fingers plus my brain to work in unison. I cannot get my car or skateboarder to go more than a couple of metres without crashing. This is a good way to immediately feel like your own parents as your kids try and keep the laughter out of their voices while they show you how to use the technology. Karma.


Back to Minecraft...

The kids have long loved Minecraft and spend a borderline unhealthy amount of time glued to their screens building stuff and playing interactive games.  And here's where I (also) got caught napping. I had no idea you could play Minecraft online.

When my kids started having run-ins with online etiquette and trolling, they came to me with complaints and lengthy descriptions of online interactions I could barely understand. And I thought I knew about online interactions! I was a bit shocked and had to have some quick tutorials from my ten year olds on what the hell they were talking about.

Here's the deal: you can join servers run by other people and build stuff in their world, or play battles or racing games where you are playing against, and interacting with, other players. This whole world is subject to a whole lot of arcane rules and etiquette the kids pick up fairly quickly, but is also obviously subject to the whims of the people running it.

There are also the usual dispiriting online spats between friends where someone gives some people access to a game but not others, or kicks one person out for bad behaviour but lets their best friend behave worse, etc. There are days when this seems to be happening all the time and I have to tell the kids to take a break from it and do something else, and sometimes they even listen to me.

The thing with online play is that your kids can be sitting calmly in the lounge room tooling around on their iPod and you can be sitting a metre away, and a whole world of turmoil can be going on where they show no sign and you have no idea.

For me (and I'm trying not to sound smug here, as I know I don't have this solved) the answer is to try and be involved enough to understand what's going on and be interested in the games and the online world so they will talk to me, and we can talk about the problems as they come up.

There are millions of kids playing Minecraft. Most Minecraft players these days are probably under 13, but there are a lot of adults too.  My kids and I have talked a lot about this, what it means and what they need to keep in mind. We've had a couple of ugly moments, but for the most part, it's been fun and educational and the girls have been handing it well.

There are Minecraft glossaries and guides online you can Google if you want to know how redstone is used, or what a creeper or an Enderman is - this one is a good place to start - but they don't have the words my kids and their friends are using when they talk about interactive play.


Here are the Minecraft words I hear all the time and what they mean:

Minecraft online play words and meanings 

Seed - the code that Minecraft uses to generate terrain and content in worlds you create. There are online directories where people have shared good seeds or people pass them on through word of mouth. The reason these are valued is that without a good seed you have no idea where you will "spawn" to start your game: it could be awesome terrain, or it could be "a bland, uninspiring world full of flat grassland and the odd chicken" (that sounds familiar as that's what I got the one and only time I tried to play Minecraft on my own)

Server - any Minecraft player can set up a game on a Minecraft public server and others can join if they have the IP address of the server (which is passed around by word of mouth or found in the Minecraft public server directory)

Admin - person who runs the server, gives access to players and polices behaviour

OP - "give someone OP" - full access to all the available commands. The Admin as someone who is already OP gives OP status to other users. If you are given OP, it is generally bad form to give others OP without permission from the Admin.

Donate - Admins will sometimes ask players to donate money to the server, which is fair enough when it's a couple of dollars to help with the cost of an established game, but can be a bit rich if players are asked to donate as soon as they join, or if it's more than a couple of dollars, or if it's in return for getting a ban removed, etc.

PvP (player vs player) - term refers to interactive play with other online players, but my kids and their friends (in which case others they play with online as well) are using it as a noun to mean the server/game hosting the play, e.g. "I was on an awesome pvp yesterday but I updated my iPod and now I've lost it"

Grief (verb), Griefer (noun - person who griefs) - destroying things others have built, generally causing trouble in the game

Lag (verb) - perform moves that cause the game to lag - a major infraction that can get you banned. Eg flying.

Kick - to be "kicked" is to be kicked out. Not as bad as being banned because you can usually get back in, but it is done as a warning, or in a fit of pique

Ban - you can get banned for griefing, lagging, trolling, speaking in all caps, using annoying phrases like "lol" or "yolo" or... all sorts of things really! I will cover that in Minecraft Part 2...

Wallpaper image by dkjjr at Minebook

New job

I have a new job. 

After 15 years working in stockbroking operations, I am now working for a software vendor and loving it. The vendor's product is fantastic and the company is small, nimble and growing - everything I've been looking for. 

The last couple of years have seen an explosion in agile and cloud-based business and I decided a little while ago that was where I wanted to be. In my last job I worked closely with a couple of very good vendors and it really opened my eyes up to this whole "new" world of agile methods and business in "the cloud".

I've also become a bit disillusioned with much of the financial services industry. I know! It seems like such a good, honest industry, right?! Actually, what I meant by that was, the last few years have just become a bit of a downer. No one is making a lot of money, clients are understandably leery, and as a result of everyone trying lots of different things to try and find new ways of making money, the landscape is constantly changing and there is a lot of "work" but not too much excitement or optimism to go with it. I love the people I worked with - some of them for many, many years - and I did like and will miss many things about my last jobs, but it was definitely time for a change for me.

The new job has been a learning curve for me. I'll admit my first week left me absolutely exhausted. By the end of my second week I was merely fatigued. So by the end of next week I should just be tired! Full steam ahead!

With a change of workplace comes also a change in location. I've worked at the eastern end of the CBD for nearly 15 years, and am now all the way diagonally across the city, at the north-west end.  Many years ago I worked down this way and always did like it. It's a nice part of town.  It's also much, much handier for public transport, and much, much worse for driving - so after only two weeks I have thoroughly broken my previous bad habit of driving to work.  My commute now takes no longer and is much, much cheaper!

The only downside is I am too far away to meet former workmates for lunch. But I'm sure we will work something out.

So, some photos.

My last photo from atop the Herald Sun building on Flinders Street. A little sad to lose this daily view:

My last iCaramba wrap from the Blue Bag cafe on Exhibition Street :(

You can also see on the right of this photo, the iPad loaned from my old job, which I spent my last lunch break restoring to pre-me condition to return it to work - deleting my daughter's Minecraft, Instagram selfies, photo edits, apps and webpages only to remember at the end that there is a one-step "delete iPad" option in Settings.

... And so to the other end of town:

Flagstaff Gardens:

King Street:

Some of the old buildings and remnants of old Melbourne:

 

And I have no idea what this is, but I love it:

A change is as good as a holiday, right?

I hope so, because I won't be getting a holiday for quite a while.

Great Innovations

There are great inventions that changed the world: things like paper, refrigeration, the internal combustion engine, the internet - even the shipping container.  There's great stuff that has saved lives and improved the world, like vaccines, seat belts, genetically modified food and the internet.

But what about the countless small innovations that have made daily life better? The things that you don't even notice, unless you're old enough to remember a time without them. Every time I use a ziplock bag, spray detangler on my kids' hair or pop open a milk carton, I think of what a marvel these things are, and how happy and proud I hope are the people who invented them. I hope, regardless of any money or kudos their innovations got them, that these people go home every night from their workplaces, content and satisfied, knowing their work has made life a little bit better.


I'm thinking of things like...


Non-Iron clothes. Thanks to permanent pant creases and drip-dry wrinkle-free technology, the only time I iron these days is when my daughter does a Hama bead project.

Of course, along with non-crushable fabrics and everyone's time-poor lives has come an increased tolerance for crushed fabrics, so we do wear clothes like school dresses and cotton shirts that really SHOULD be ironed but aren't. And so does everyone else.


Blu-tack. Blue-tack was around when I was a kid, so it's not recent. But it's still great.

Dauvlt Alexander/Flickr CC

Easy-peel stickers. Young people, you have no idea what things used to be like. Once upon a time, when you bought things from a shop and brought them home, you would spend a frustrating amount of time trying to remove the stickers, especially from things like books and CDs. Frequently, you would end up scraping them off bit by bit with sticky gum getting caught under your fingernails, and then rubbing off the residue with tea-tree oil (or leaving it there forever).







Car registration stickers (finally, as of this year, no longer required here) have been easy-peel for some years, but when I was a kid they required a bucket of soapy water and a razor blade to take off, and were a fun way for your dad to pass the time on a Saturday.







If I were writing this list ten years ago, I might have added sticker postage stamps. But actually I really invented those myself, because back when I used postage stamps and used to have to lick the backs of them, I used to say every time "Ugh! Why can't they make these stickers?!"


Pull-apart packaging. Cereal bags, coffee packs, band-aid envelopes - a world of ease and pleasure in opening things that used to be a complete pain to open. And milk cartons actually open the way they're supposed to now. Remember having to take a knife to them half the time in ye olden days?

Of course, there are other packaging types that are still in their "to be improved" stages

Every goddamned time

Aaargh

But back to the good stuff:


Hair detangling spray and equipment.  These sprays (any brand) are amazing, and these brushes are MAGIC.

The multi-coloured pencil. What a marvel! Checkered paint can only be around the corner!

The fuel cap tether, attaching the petrol cap to the car these days. Such a little thing. Such genius.

Travel packs of wipes. Because little kids are sticky all the time, and carrying around a damp flannel in a plastic bag was not as handy.



This drain on the edges of swimming pools, that lets pools be filled to the very top.  I'm pretty sure that this is recent. I remember a time when pools filled level with the ground was the stuff of top-level decadent fantasy.  Now it's every pool everywhere, and it's so good.

And: mini-dodgems just for kids

What did I miss? 

What innovations have improved your daily life?