Well, I like stop motion and I like lego…
I remember when I was young Lego used to make amazing adverts with everything building up in stop motion and flying around all over the place. Maybe if I’m feeling ambitious I might try something similar, but for the time being I’m just proud I got this to work. I want to try and make a little bit of traditional style animation using the same software so this has turned into a wonderful little test.
If anyone has been trying to read this thing tonight, I apologise for the rapid updates that I’ve made over the course of the evening.
This is somewhat of a redundant post, but I’ve changed the layout a little bit. I managed to get rid of those annoying widget things in the top right that I’m fairly confident nobody used and I know I didn’t like at all, I’ve updated the colours and of course forged a lovely shiny new logo, shown above and to the left here in small pin-badge-able form. I have decided to retire the faithful “Speedy” from my previous logo as he did after all belong to Blizzard, and they might want him back sooner or later.
I am aware that the colours are quite different to what they were before. On one of my monitors it looks ok and on the other monitor it makes my eyes twitch a little, so if any of my lovely readers have any comments on this change, I have enabled comments for this post and you are allowed to have your say (whereupon it may well be ignored because the way I’ve updated this is through a series of technological voodoo rituals that I am already starting to forget. All I know is that my fingers are hurting from excessive crossing).
I must admit that I have definitely come a long way since I started this blog (and even further from my Blogspot days and further still from my not-completely-functional webcomic site) and fiddling around with css files and snippets of php was starting to make a little sense.
I have this horrible feeling that spam might be driving me to a point of paranoia where I may have unapproved a couple of legitimate comments, as some spam is getting clever and just subtle enough for me to think “maybe they did just like my article and want to say so?” despite their login name being something like FreeRegistryCleaner. Then of course I tie myself in knots thinking that maybe they’d called themselves that to be ironic or that maybe they had the world most boring yet intriguing nickname.
If I have unapproved a comment of yours and you are a real person and not a robot (not that I’m robot-ist) then drop me a line and I’ll reinstate it.
Additional Notes:
The internet can become a paranoid place. I started looking around on a Minecraft server last night and made the mistake of asking for building rights, which started a long “interview process” where the admin in question was definitely suspicious of me and convinced I was going to try and destroy their carefully crafted world. I completely understand why this is the case but it is sad all the same. Maybe there’s a broader comment about the human condition and the few making life hell for the many in there.
A process map is meant to make a process more obvious by displaying it in a visual form. I occasionally have to do this in my current role.
Things like this baffle me:
A process map apparently can't just have two boxes. That's less of a process and more of an event I suppose.
This is not from my company and I’m not saying who it’s from, other than it’s from a regulated financial services firm, all of which are potentially facing some slightly stricter complaint handling requirements fairly soon.
It seems mostly unnecessary. The obvious diagram for me would just be “complaint received” followed by “log complaint”, but maybe that’s just me.
I see this quite a lot at the moment. Documents that have a purpose and are a business requirement often take so long getting to the point and so much longer talking around the point that by the time they’re finished and published, nobody in their right mind is ever going to read them, much less update them. In fact, the only people that will read them are going to be regulators inspecting a business, by which point you have provided your own noose by producing process documentation that nobody has read, nobody updates and most likely does not reflect your current business practises.
All the same, inexperienced staff like myself look at these things for inspiration on how they should be doing things and feel their productions are inferior if they don’t have a similar word count, so the cycle repeats.
From City AM this morning, I picked up this little nugget under their “Marketing Campaign of the Year”:
“Celebrities do it all the time,” said Norwich Union when it changed its name to Aviva. It argued that the old name – which dated from 1797 – was due a change in a world where it operates in 27 countries, and that one name should be used across the group.
Of course, the name change from Norwich Union to Aviva was nothing to do with the £1.26 million fine levied against them by the FSA for being incompetent when it came to protecting client data and protecting against fraud that was so damaging to their reputation that they had to distance themselves from their own name. Of course not. What a crazy suggestion that would be. It’s because the name was old. And they work in countries that don’t know what a Norwich is.