Pat’s Point of View

Over the weekend just passed, I joined my wife and baby daughter at a Tresillian Family Care Centre for an intensive programme of ‘parent craft’. The idea is that parents and baby stay in residence for five nights, learning best practice techniques for settling, sleeping and feeding. We wanted to brush up on technique and shed any bad habits we had accumulated whilst trying to survive the first four months of parenthood.

This “live-in” method gives you 24-hour access to experienced childcraft nurses and allows you to concentrate fully on the task of parenting without the distractions of cooking, cleaning or going to work. It’s the perfect opportunity to master the necessary skills, with expert support at hand, should you need it. It’s a very effective method.

They demonstrate techniques in a realistic environment, as opposed to a classroom or conference hall. They observe how you handle situations, and attempt to adjust your behaviour as necessary (after all what we’re talking about is a change in attitude, awareness and behaviour, not a fundamental change of the game).

The nurses’ intervention reduces from near 100% at the start, down to a bare minimum by the end of your stay. This serves two purposes, at the start they give you a break by taking the reigns for a short time, which is crucial in terms of ensuring the sanity of parents and the effectiveness of the learning. Additionally, reducing this intervention is crucial to getting parents to a point where they can go home and successfully continue using the practices they have learned, on their own.

Throughout your stay, of course, the nurses are always on hand should you need them. They give that all important advice, at the crucial moment it’s needed. This is really important, because by allowing any time to pass allows for post-rationalisation and self-denial. Getting help at that point when things get unstuck also increases the likelihood of remembering what to do.

This live-in approach really struck a chord with me, and I started to consider how it could be used in other fields of expertise. I think it would be an absolutely great model for consulting, and more specifically mentoring. At least in my field, which is information architecture, user centred design and information management.

Techniques and guidelines, no matter how simple and refined, can’t give you the wisdom to know how to apply them to all situations that might arise. Raising a child is complex because life is complex, but many work situations people find themselves in are very complex also—such as managing an intranet, redesigning a large website or any number of major IT projects. This is where mentoring has much to offer above and beyond training or the self-taught approach.

I’ve long thought that mentoring is best done in-situ (in my presentation on Mentoring Collaborative UCD I concluded that an in-house mentor works best) where the team being mentored has access to their mentor’s advice as and when it is needed. Additionally, it should be face to face. Having to call or email your mentor, or wait for them to come in for a meeting, really stifles the inherent intimacy that mentoring thrives on. My experience is that even a relatively small physical distance, such as a taxi ride away, reduces the effectiveness of mentoring.

A traditional consulting engagement doesn’t allow for this, but there are some relatively common tactics to improve the situation. Such as clumping together several visits into one whole day, but this lacks the impromptu nature and feels slightly forced and hypothetical. If you tackle problems when they occur, the better the results are.

Another alternative could be the use of a contractor, to supplement the team. While many contractors and freelancers would have the skills and experience in their particular field to be mentors, they typically aren’t hired to do so and of course don’t have any motivation to go beyond their remit. Contractors are usually hired to perform a specific piece of self-contained work, with little “leave behind” for the rest of the team. To approach the live-in model, they would have to actively coach the team in which they are embedded, but also gradually reduce their intervention.

A ‘day stay’, where the mentee comes and works in your office, is another approach. This gives the access to their mentor, and is close to the Tresillian model. However, most often in my work, the mentee is more than one person, so to be truly analagous to the live-in model, the whole team would need to come and live in the mentor’s facility. While you would gain the same benefits, primarily the elimination of distractions, it just wouldn’t be practical to do so (plus who wants to have a sleep over with their work colleagues?!).

This arrangement would also share the potential problems with the Tresillian model, which is the fact that once you leave their facility you may not be able to match your success once you get home. The very nature of taking the problem to a controlled (or semi-controlled) environment could jeopardise its success; practicing any technique is more difficult in your day-to-day environment.

But if we reverse the scenario, it may be viable. That is, the mentor becomes part of the team being mentored, for a length of time, and operates as part of that team. This is a longer interaction than normal consulting would allow, and something akin to secondment, but more flexible. It needs to be long enough to ‘get into the thick of it’ and practice techniques in a realistic environment with realistic situations. And this is definitely such a thing as too early. Like an advanced workshop or master class, you need to have a bit of distance under your belt. In the case of parenting you need to know your child and what works and what doesn’t, and as with most things, you need to give it a genuine go yourself, before seeking help.

This may be a common approach to consulting or mentoring in certain fields, but it’s not as widespread as it could be, in my experience. Especially considering how powerful it is as a form of up-skilling. I’ve not come across this in web design, IA or UCD fields, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone has used such an intensive, live-in approach to mentoring, as either the mentor or mentee.

See what people are blogging about: mentoring, consulting models

Popularity: 4% [?]

I recently saw a post to a mailing list where someone was asking for a consultant with expertise in Typo3, an open source CMS. Now, I know nothing about this CMS, and I’m sure it has its pros and cons, but isn’t that a strange name for something whose primary purpose is to allow people to type in content?

Talk about tempting fate, you’re almost willing your users to make a typo! I’m sure there’s some psychological pattern of subliminal influence that will result.

It’s like calling a telephone “Stutter” or a brand of high heels named “Tumble”.

Popularity: 5% [?]

TiVo will change the way you watch TV. Unless you’ve already owned a DVR, in which case you might not be that impressed.

Our living room is now home to a TiVo HD DVR after we upgraded from our old Humax PVR 8000T. Having played with the TiVo for a few days now, I’ve concluded a few things. Firstly, there is not much on offer on the HD channels, but secondly and more importantly, there are some flaws with the TiVo.

• It’s too polite, always asking you to confirm actions. A task that might involve one press of a button (like stopping recording) takes two or three. I can’t really speak for other devices, but the Humax is easier to use. Of course we are more used to what we know, but the Humax is a simpler device with a better remote control and more efficient actions.
• It’s always on and you can’t turn it off. I don’t know what the TiVo consumes in terms of power, but it must do so 24×7.
• There’s no volume control in terms of the audio output from the unit. You can set the remote control to set the volume on the TV, but that means controlling two devices with one remote and thus pointing it in two different places. Not a huge issue, I suppose.
• There’s no clock on the front panel. This may not be a big deal for many people, but the Humax had a digital clock on the front that was always on and it became very convenient.
• There’s quite a bit of screen flicker when the program resolution changes. For example a program is broadcast in full HD (1080i) but then you change channels to a SD broadcast, if the TiVo is in certain modes, the screen will flicker or go blank for a moment whilst it changes over. (We solve this by having a fixed output of 720p since our current TV doesn’t do 1080i anyway).
• Similarly, the volume fluctuates. At first I thought this was due to the change over between the 5.1 channel audio in HD programming and the 2 channel stereo of SD programming, but it happens during programs. Could be the TV but it’s never done that before.
• It’s a bit big and ugly, the thing looks more like a small desktop PC rather than a slick piece of entertainment kit. The Humax on the other hand is a nice slim, silver and mirror unit.

On the positive side, and the main reason I chose the TiVo over other choices, is the “Find Programs” functionality:

• Search by title allows you to choose a show by name and it will be recorded, without really having to worry about channel, date, time, duration.
• Wishlist Search allows you to find shows by searching for actor, category or general keyword. Doesn’t sound like much in this Web 2.0 age, but it’s pretty good for TV.
• Season Pass allows you to select a show and record all instances of it automatically, week after week or whatever frequency it’s on. If it changes timeslot or day (even channel?) it will still be recorded.
• TiVo Suggestions allows you to rate shows you watch or record using a thumbs up/down system and based on this other shows you might like are suggested.

Browsing what’s on all channels using the “Guide” button is also well done; it’s similar to Foxtel and better than the Humax. Eventually we’ll run out of space, so being able to pull content off onto a computer and burn it or store it is a great feature, or we can extend the TiVo’s capacity via an external eSata disk (strangely you can use USB disks even though there are two USB ports).

So why the upgrade? The Humax did change the way we watch TV, and we quickly got used to being able to pause TV—say if your wee baby starts crying and you don’t want to miss that all important cliffhanger ending!—or rewinding a bit to watch something again. And of course, just like VCRs before them, Digital Video Recorders are great for recording your favourite shows (but unlike a VCR most DVRs are pretty easy to program).

But almost as quickly as we got to like the Humax, we started to outgrow it. When we bought it, there were a few twin-tuner models around, but they were very expensive and we reasoned that the need for two tuners would rarely come up. How wrong we were. We constantly ran into situations where we wanted to record something on one channel and watch/record something on another channel. It was really frustrating to have to switch to the TV’s analogue tuner to watch the other channel and to not be able to record it. There was also quite a lot of deleting shows from our almost full hard disk, as we couldn’t get any content off the device.

So it was time to upgrade, something which I’ve rarely had a genuine need to do. Of course there are times when you upgrade because you want a bigger/better/newer model but this was something we use a lot and there was a real unmet need. Thus, top of the wish-list was twin-tuners and the ability to get content off (either via USB or network). There have also been lots of ads for the High Definition channels from the free-to-air networks, so that was something we thought we should put on the list too.

What to buy? Well of course there was Topfield, which from the early days of DVRs was a leading name with features and price far better than what the usual brands offer. In recent years they have copped a bit of criticism for bugs but the new TF7100HDPVRt was definitely a contender. It’s got a big drive, full twin-tuner capability and wifi networking. Combined with Ice TV you get the ability to record shows based on their name, rather than a fixed date/time/duration. You see, the problem with a VCR-style scheduled recording is that shows run over time, under time and get moved between timeslots and even days. So your scheduled recordings can miss the start, end or entire length of the show you wanted. By taking ‘up to date’ programming data from the networks, the Ice TV service provides selected DVRs with a proper EPG (Electronic Program Guide) that you can actually use, as opposed to the guides actually published/broadcast by the networks which are inaccurate and unreliable.

There is of course another player who is renowned for this human friendly recording, the US smash-hit TiVo, which until now was not officially available in Australia. Their latest generation DVR has similar features to the Topfield, is similarly priced but with a reputation for usability. Even though the on-paper comparison might seem to suggest the Topfield 7100 is a better bet (bigger hard disk, longer ‘live pause’, full twin-tuner features) I decided on the TiVo pretty much based on the virtues of its integrated EPG service, which downloads current programming data from the web. The proposition is that, as part of the deal with the 7 network that brought TiVo to Australia, the programming data will be more accurate. So far it seems to be.

Overall, I am happy with the TiVo. It performs the main function we bought it for (recording or watching multiple channels simultaneously) and the “Find Programs” features are really worth shouting about—would help if there was more quality content on free-to-air though! But there are definitely areas for improvement.

And I will have to never ever look at that new Topfield lest I regret my decision :)

See what people are blogging about: TiVo HD DVR, Humax PVR 8000T, Topfield TF7100HDPVRt, HD, TV

Popularity: 7% [?]

I eagerly await more details on how Singularity will actually work. Here’s what their [quite nicely designed] website says:

Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world.

On October 24-26, join 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities for three days of talks at this seminal web event.

Attend from home or from a real-world local conference hub near you. Catch up with old friends (you can find them from your existing social networks) and meet new ones. And you don’t even have to take time off work.

Sounds interesting. Even though the list of speakers is fairly geeky, and I use that term with the utmost respect, I anticipate there being some good user experience design discussions.

Could this be a better way forward for traditional conferences, rather than going down the path of an un-conference (something which I’m not that fond of)?

Popularity: 8% [?]

OK enough is enough. I have finally ditched my Maxtor Shared Storage II NAS drive which I had so much trouble with. I was sick of it screwing up, but mostly I was sick of not being confident that my data was secure.

So today, after getting a refund for the Maxtor, I went and bought an Apple Time Capsule (500GB) from the new Apple Store in Sydney. (As an aside isn’t it weird how you can walk out of there with an item and no receipt—because I asked for it to be emailed to me instead—and nobody stops to question you?)

I’ve read lots of negative reviews from disapointed customers, but I reckon it’s the Time Machine backup functionality that most people are having trouble. For what I need it for, I think the Time Capsule (TC) will be just fine. Not only do I get what I hope will be a more reliable piece of network storage but I get Wifi “n” and gigabit ethernet, and my Macs should talk to it nicely (something the Maxtor and my old wifi router never did that well).

And so it was, pumped up on cold and flu drugs, I sat down this afternoon with my new toy, hoping for a pleasant setup experience. Setting up the TC itself was easy, and getting the machines to see and use the network disk was straightforward too. However when it came to getting the router to work with my ADSL modem, a few issues popped up. I remembered how I hated getting my old wireless router (Netgear WGR614v4) to talk to the modem (D-Link 300G+). But with some time and experimentation I found that putting the modem into bridge mode and giving my PPPoE details to the TC, gets it working nicely.

Now I just need to get my archives files onto the TC, not such an easy task when it’s a 200GB zip file. I’ll figure out some way.

Popularity: 8% [?]