I think my project is about to lose this battle. As I sit taking a short internet break in my frenzied re-prototyping of a sports informatics project, lights are flickering and dramatic lightning is again on the horizon. In this house, we can sneeze too violently and our power goes out. I’m not optimistic the brief storms Weather Underground says is on the way won’t have the same effect. (On the up side, it will force me to sleep.)
I wish I had more time to spend on this project. I’m a long-time participant in the fantasy sports culture, dating back to my first league in 1985. Our SI assignment deals with information systems for the Olympics, and I’ve had quite a bit of fun — computer crashes aside — playing around with a prototype for a fantasy olympic game. There’s a lot of research and abstract thought that goes into most of our HCI/d project work, so it is refreshing to just code once in a while. It’s just simple stuff, but I like the productive feeling I get solving very little problems.
Unfortunately, I had to bag a planned user test Monday when my original effort (built in Cold Fusion and Microsoft SQL server, the coding platforms I used before I got here) crapped out on my old laptop. I couldn’t get it all recovered, so I decided to try to re-construct the whole 7-8 pages in PHP and MySQL. Great fun … if I had another week.
Mini-capstones tomorrow in HCI Design II between 12:30-4:30p. A lot of great work by the first-years and a reasonable first stab at community service-learning projects. (Anyone in the vicinity of Informatics 107 Tuesday should stop in and see what the next generation has done.)
