A pretty easy month, with few issues or complicated situations, but also an unfocused month. There were days here that I could have used far better. On the other hand, I did enjoy myself!
Fun
Games
A couple of my friends make custom maps in Halo, and last week we spent a few hours touring their collective maps. Some were old favourites, ported over from older Halo games, while others were recently-created maps that we were looking for bugs in. My favourite of the modes was basically a Titanfall clone with Mantis mechs, which worked really well. Others are great in small doses but too chaotic for repeated matches, such as Thrusterball, where two teams fight for control of a throwable ball while armed with gravity hammers and max-speed thruster packs.
I continued to be stuck into Galacticare – both playing the DLC levels and trying to complete the regular levels on challenge mode.
Finally, I had been looking forward to the Iron Banner event in Destiny 2, but the skill-based matchmaking was not working out well this time – trying to play as a group of 4 resulted in massively unbalanced and hard-to-enjoy matches. So we gave the new community puzzle a try instead. We solved 20 of the 27 chess puzzles by ourselves, but realised we had solved them inefficiently and so had too few moves left to sensibly continue. We returned the next day with a guide, then decided to leave solving the unlocked ARG to the dedicated community!.
Data
While browsing the ListenBrainz forums, I noticed that someone had started a conversation about updating how podcasts are represented on the site. The current guidance is that the canonical title of each broadcast release (for podcasts, that means each episode) should be stored in this format YYYY-MM-DD: Program Name [, Series #, ][Episode #][, “Program Title”][: Location]. This is a lot of data to add, and the amount of information preceding the title both makes navigating podcasts on the site feel confusing and makes finding the right episode on other players/devices difficult.
While reading I was surprised to see that I had been tagged in the thread, alongside 7 others, to give our opinions on the proposed changes. I knew that podcast submission was a very small part of MusicBrainz, but I was not expecting the group of podcast submitters to be so small that my contributions warranted inclusion.
By the 26th, the forum thread led to two improvements. The guidance is now to use this format: Podcast Name[, Series 1234, ][ #1234][, “Program Title”][: Location], removing the date aspect from the title as it already exists in the rest of the data. The discussion also inspired two different people to create web tools that automate some aspects of filling in the data for podcast episodes, similar to the ones that already existed for music albums. I managed to find a bug in one of the tools, which was fixed later that day.
Other
I somewhat impulse-bought a proper e-reader from eBay. I’ve researched them on-and-off for ages, but never bought one because there were so many options and no ways to try them out before purchasing.
It’s an Onyx Boox Nova Pro, with a somewhat damaged power button but with full functionality everywhere else. While I did test out the note-writing feature, and was surprised to find that I could write quite readably on the device, I intend to use it as an e-reader with very occasional writing rather than an e-writer. Reading in e-ink feels nice, though I haven’t had any of the dramatically improved experience that people sometimes report. It probably doesn’t help that I’m nearly permanently attached to a screen anyway.
The Onyx syncs with Calibre well, which is the main feature I needed. My only issue with using it is that it has made my long-serving Nexus 7 redundant. I’ve owned it since 2012, and it has been my e-book and library-book reader for years after retiring from being my guinea pig for installing custom ROMs. I would like to find some way to still use the Nexus, but I am aware that this is sentimental, rather than practical.
The first book I read on it was Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammett, which I rememered reading many years ago, and which ended up solving a minor mystery of mine. I could never place where I had first learned about the existence of constructed lanaguges like Esperanto, as the time frame in which I vaguely remember having that knowledge was before my house had internet. But I think I first learned about the idea from this book!
I also gave my 19th (attempted) / 16th (actual) blood donation on Good Friday. I was asked if I wanted to join the Stem Cell Donor Registry and so learnt a bit more about that as a result.
Work
We are supposed to have safer staffing audits, which gather data about the number and complexity of patient visits to work out how many staff are needed, every 6 months. The audit tool has been dormant for retooling for over a year, and I had heard very little from the person now in charge of the audit, so I wasn’t sure if it would return any time soon. Then, at the start of this month, they announced that an audit was scheduled for June.
I’m in the “working group” for learning about the audits and communicating about it to teams, partly from just being able to navigate the spreadsheet tool and add data to it easily, but also partly because when I was first shown the spreadsheet tool 2 years ago I spotted multiple small errors that the national team creating the toolkit hadn’t seen. Being in those working group meetings always feels a bit odd because everyone else in the group is a Band 7 or 8 – and a clinically responsible person for their team – while I’m a Band 3 there on behalf of admins in general.
I also worked on a side-project for a colleague. They wanted a way to display the progression and results of a tournament that was more professional and more visually appealing than manually writing the results in a spreadsheet and keeping track of each matchup as they went along, and that didn’t require any technical skills on the day beyond entering text. They wondered if the solution was a presentation where the slides automatically updated themselves during the presentation based on text entry elsewhere (e.g. in a spreadsheet). However, my brief research suggested that while making a presentation that updated itself was fairly easy, making a presentation that updated itself *while in presenting mode* wasn’t achievable with just standard Powerpoint and Excel.
Working on this was interesting, as the collaborative and quickly-iterating problem solving reminded me of the best parts of my favourite job. For now I’ve made a “Version 1” of this idea: an excel tournament bracket which is embedded into a powerpoint slide as a Linked Object. My colleague / their helper will have two tasks on the day. Before the tournament starts, they will need to enter the names of each competitor into the right initial matchups. Then, after each match, the helper just needs to add a W to the cell next to the winner’s name. The spreadsheet uses filter formulas for each matchup, so once a name has a W next to it, it will automatically be fed forwards into the next bracket. Once my colleague has tested this out at home, then at an actual tournament, it will be time to see if I can evolve it into something more professional, or whether we need to try an entirely different approach.