High Street 5 - Dance up your life

I was going to Funan to get some stuff when I saw this banner for a game called High Street 5. The banner had an attractive lady drawn on it so that's what caught my attention :p Then I took a closer look and realised it was some sort of dancing game. I'm not into dancing, and I've not even played the famous Audition SEA. But since I was bored I got a copy of the DVD client at 2 bucks. (Alternatively, you can download it. It's free to play.) Here's a preview of the game:

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Startup pain and an unintuitive user interfaceInstallation was simple, but getting to actually play the game was a tad more difficult. First I was required to download a patch to version 0.12 when I tried to start the game. But the user interface showed some IE page with a message on it. No go trying to update it by clicking on the "Update Server" button either. I had to go to the website and download the patch. After installation, I had to reboot as there was still a connection problem.

Then when I tried to register an account in-game, Windows Internet Explorer popped up and I was directed to the website to register an account. That's not a seamless experience but it's still not very annoying.

The worst part is that the user interface is not intuitive at all. I couldn't figure out how to get started after registering an account. The instructions said something about clicking some part of the screen, so I spend a good couple of minutes figuring out where exactly that part is. Out of frustration I went to the forum and finally got some help from one of the posts there. Now, any game that makes me do that gets an immediate poor rating for user experience.

Finally I get to play

After getting into the game, there's the standard character creation, choose name, sex, physical characteristics, etc. The story is supposed to be that you are talent-scouted for some agency or something. Not exactly intriguing but who cares about the story in this kind of game anyway? After initial part of the story gets out of the way and you are taught the basics of the game (hit the directional, space and some number buttons at the right time), you get to choose certain locations to dance in,like the school, beach, etc. As you get better more areas will open up to you.

And it's quite fun actually to see your character groove to the music along with the rest of the players. Here's a replay of one of my game sessions. The parts when the character is just standing around are the parts where I missed :)

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Summing up

It's a simple and addictive game. Currently the selection of songs is somewhere ard 30-40 I think, so you'll here the same songs being recycled ad nausem if you do play long enough. Hopefully they will add more songs to the library else it'll get boring after a while.

Switched webhosting to Godaddy

Finally switched my webhosting to Godaddy, it's value for money in terms of disk space, but the everything seems slower than Focushub.

Sitex 2007

Needed to get some computer stuff, so hopped down to Sitex to pick up some bargains.

Some stuff I've gotten:

HP F4185 AIO printer, scanner, copier - $99 (Usual price is $149. Challenger members can get it at $139, so the savings at this show is quite significant)

Maxtor One Touch 3 - $130 (Not sure if I saved much on this buy)

Disk repairer for CD/DVDs - $25

Quite happy with my buys, but I spent quite some time installing the AIO. During the installation, the program got stuck, some error message about unsigned drivers and USB printing. Downloading the latest installation frpm the support website didn't help. In the end, what happened was that when I was prompted to plug in the USB cable, DON'T! Wait for the installation to complete, THEN plug in the USB cable.

Browsershots - web app to check your web page rendering

For most of us who do web pages, we don't have the luxury of a Common Operating Environment. That means, we're not in an intranet environment with standardised OS, browsers, etc. So there's the issue of making sure your webpage renders correctly, if at all, on different OSes and browsers. If resources such as hardware or software (like VMWare) are limited, a sensible solution would be to use Browsershots.

Basically it's a web app that lets you submit a website and check if it displays correctly on a variety of OSes and browsers. It will produce a bunch of screenshots which you can view and check if the rendering is correct.



Hmm....this website doesn't quite pass the test.



A note though. It might take some time to produce the results. If speed is an issue , you can consider getting priority processing.

Trace Bundy - Pachelbel's Canon

An amazing rendition of Pachelbel's Canon on an acoustic guitar! You don't want to miss it!

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Granado Espada - Halloween Quest completed!

Have finally completed the Halloween Quest and gotten my pumpkin hats. It's not a difficult quest, but I've barely found time to complete it.

Policy-makers need to eat their own dog food

For the six months, some policies have been passed in my company which has greatly inconvenienced us. The workload ballooned but the manpower shrunk. It's pretty frustrating at times, having to jump through hoops to do some simple things. It's even worse when you have to jump through hoops to do what I think are stupid things. And just because you've jumped those hoops before, they think it is ok for you to jump through another set of hoops, because they ASSUME you can do it again. But it isn't the same set of hoops. This time they're barbed and set on fire and you need to jump through them twice as fast. But hey, they say, hoops are hoops. Yeah, it's not called a dog's life for nothing.



Picture source

Eating your own dog food

Still on the subject of dogs, policy-makers need to eat their own dog food. What, no proper meal? Not even a slice of Gardenia? Well, I'm not exactly suggesting that we feed them dog food, though I have a fantasy of stuffing it down their throats at times. As Joel Spolsky explains,

Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product.

Eating your own dog food is an important process during policy formulation. It is as someone said, it's nothing to them if they can't feel the pain. When they feel the kind of impact their policies will cause, hopefully they will be more discerning and refine them. Something like what HDB's CEO and senior managers do:

At the Housing Development Board (HDB), its chief executive officer and senior managers lead by example in addition to rewarding and publicising good service performance. During its annual Quality Service Day, for example, they will personally man front-line counters at HDB Hub and branch offices.

Knowing how your dog food comes about

This deals with the implementation of a policy. By that I mean mean that policy-makers should communicate with people who implement them. It's like if you're getting the same old brand of dog food all the time, don't expect that special can of mint-flavoured dog food with cherries in it to have the same kind of availability. In other words, don't dismiss that just it's just a piece of ice floating on the water when there could be an iceberg underneath. Don't set deadlines according to your own whims and fancies or some unfounded assumptions when you can check with those who know the ground conditions better.

 Change is not always the constant

In the end I guess it's difficult to change the mindset and the culture of those policymakers I'm referring to. I guess this problem will continue to dog me.