( Now with video! )

So, that was the end of the local season, but if you don't want to wait until next year there is the Auckland vs Wellington Inter-league match on the 5th of December. Watch their website.

Who uses it?

I guess you could say that Wellington were Slade.

Two interesting musical works: a RATM/Electric Six mashup and the Legend of Zelda theme played on Heineken bottles; both via Radio Free Hipster.

If you like 80s music or mashups, check out this mashup album full of 80s classics: 10000 Spoons - A Boot Up The Eighties. Track nine features an inspired blend of INXS and Survivor of which I'd love to hear a longer treatment.

Something that I touched on a while ago was how you go about exploring the concept of a "performance review". We're used to these kinds of "rational" exercises in our cartesian world of cause and effect. A performance review takes a lot of forms: interviews, quality management processes,

Morgue recently posted on this topic; his words struck me as both true and discordant with the stated objectives of these processes:

The performance review isn't about reviewing performance - that happens all the time, in an ongoing way, the manager is always reviewing the employee's performance, the employee is always interpreting their own performance.

This has been true about most of my performance reviews over the years, and I was struck when talking to an acquaintance recently that this basic surety of outcome probably applies to most formal examining where there's a strong teacher/pupil relationship.

Perhaps Morgue's conclusions about the process enabling communication between moving parts in the machinery of your job are okay as far as they go. However, I am also inclined to think that this is a somewhat glib dismissal of the importance of the activity in many instances. If you already know the answer, why are you asking the question? Why structure your thoughts in terms of "performance" and "review" if the "performance" is already adequately monitored, and the "review" is nominal?

The most recent performance review for me has been the application of CPEng. It would have been easy to get complacent and/or cynical about this process for two reasons:
1. I well and truly exceed the minimum standards for experience expected in the CPEng standard.
2. I have done enough "peer" reviews of work by supposedly competent professionals that the standard itself begins to seem a bit thin.

In real terms however, I think that the truly professional attitude must be to undertake the self-review process with clear and open eyes, and attempt to actually fulfil the spirit as well as the letter of the standard. This is what worried me about doing it: I have never been too concerned that I couldn't produce sufficient evidence to convince the panel of my expertise; my concern was convincing myself.

This meant that a significant part of this process for me was looking into jobs where I had fallen short of the standard: jobs where mistakes were made. Nobody is infallible, and so if you look back without seeing errors one of two things is happening: You're missing something, or you're not trying hard enough. The standard for a professional engineer is that you can apprehend problems and utilize rational methods to determine a design outcome in the absence of a template. Sure, we have codes, guides, peer reviews: but at the end of the day, the standard is higher than plugging numbers into the correct formula.

Finding mistakes is therefore a crucial learning exercise. A performance review that finds no mistakes, which certifies the candidate's impression of total competence, has failed. It has not enabled the candidate to improve in their practice, or it has confirmed that the candidate is being wasted in their current role.

In my case, I think that the performance review found some significant shortfalls - I identified several of the 12 "core competences" where I now know that I have inadequate training and experience. Having identified these shortcomings, I was able to do two useful things:
1. I undertook additional reading and study to shore up knowledge not imparted in my real practice
2. I was able to limit and control my practice area to exclude areas where I'm not competent

The nett result of my labours has been that reviewing my competence actually improved it. Even in the short few months since I began to seriously compile my evidence and work through the self-review, I have found small benefits in how I deal with clients and problems compared to beforehand.

Proving my competence was always going to be the easy part of the CPEng challenge - the hard part was actually being competent.

The episode we played on Thursday, good comedic vampire fighting, some actual sharing of emotional issues by the characters (briefly) and a distinct lack of Darius: http://wp.me/pp6oN-Uf

The problem with talks at the Getty Villa is that they're always aimed (necessarily) at what we might call patrons of the classics; interested parties with disposable income, but not necessarily the interest in hearing an actual academic paper. As an academic listening to an academic this is problematic, as I'm often unsure whether they're simplifying and embellishing liberally (and in my view excessively), or whether they actually support the account that they're espousing.

Which is to say that I can't recommend this book, but I do want to read it myself. She has accumulated some fascinating information about the reception of Mithridates' legend down to the modern period, and she certainly tells a good story.

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À propos my last post, LJ is a lot more manageable with a trimmed list!

So, I decided that I’d put a bit of a methodology behind my selection of the new NFL team I’m going to support. To recap – the teams I supported in my youth (Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders, Washington Redskins in that chronological order) I have limited attachment to, either due to players moving on or the teams just having stunk for so long.

With 32 teams to choose from, I sort of need to eliminate some off the bat, otherwise this will be a very long process.

I think we can get rid of the NFC East straight away – although my attachment to the Redskins has faded due to constant sucking, I could never bring myself to cheer for the Giants, Eagles or Cowboys.

The other thing I really want is a team that has a track record of being competitive – one that seems like it’s well run. With that in mind, I decided to get rid of any team that hasn’t had a positive win/loss record on aggregate over the last 3 seasons. That means they need to have racked up 24 wins in total from 2006. With that evaluation, it’s farewell to the Washington Redskins (22), Detroit Lions (10), Atlanta Falcons (22), Tampa Bay Buccaneers (22), Arizona Cardinals (22), San Francisco 49ers (19), Seattle Seahawks (23), St Louis Rams (13), New York Jets (23), Miami Dolphins (18), Buffalo Bills (21), Cincinnati Bengals (19), Cleveland Browns (18), Houston Texans (22), Oakland Raiders (11) and Kansas City Chiefs (15).

A shame to see Arizona go, they pretty much qualified as the 4th team I ever followed but just never had that same resonance with me. Also interesting that Washington nearly still made that 24 win threshold (5, 9 and 8 wins over the last three seasons) - they're sometimes a middle of the table team, but never really achieve excellence.

13 teams still in contention to be my new team to follow! Further updates to come...

So, I've been asking people about this piecemeal, and a couple of you have said yes or no, but I can't remember. So I'm just going to broadcast this; who wants to come to the Rollerderby in Wellington on Saturday night? It's a lot of fun, and not very expensive.

http://www.richtercity.co.nz/

(I have a birthday party to go afterwards, and I will be there, don't worry Mel)

Things I Love Thursday: http://jennitalula.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/things-i-love-thursday-67/

Buffy Fall, 'getting ahead': http://wp.me/pp6oN-Ty

I appear to be on the "no essay" part of the "success" track through the flow-chart.

They want me to amend one of my practice area descriptions slightly, but they may decide even that's not necessary. They're going to do a knowledge assessment on the geotech component. Why they didn't do this in the first place is utterly beyond me.

Now I have two choices:
1. Tick off engineering as complete and do what I really want to do viz. English Lit
2. Negotiate for more money

Sam and I are watching The Godfather part 2 tomorrow night if anyone's keen to come along. It doesn't matter too much if you've seen the first one, since it's a prequel. (I think. I could be wrong. I haven't seen it.)

Anyway, it'll be high def, and what else were you planning to do anyway?

Lemme know if you're coming :)

Interview this morning where a panel of engineers will grill me on my portfolio of evidence and make a decision about whether I'm suitably experienced, competent and qualified to be a Chartered Professional Engineer.

The flow-chart of outcomes here is basically:
1. Interview.

Pass? -> CPEng
Kinda Pass? -> Essay
Fail? -> Life carries on as usual

2. Essay

Pass? -> CPEng
Fail? -> Life carries on as it has for the past 7 years

This then completes my first career, I guess, inasmuch as there are no further goal-posts to aim for in terms of external validation. Unless I aim for "Fellow of IPENZ", which is like 1% of CPEng engineers.

Feeling a bit nervous - this is arguably the single most important day in my career to date - but also a bit resigned to my fate. The difference between today and an exam, say, is that this is a reflection on 8 years of work and thinking and effort, rather than an interrogation of retained facts passed down from on high. These people aren't deciding "is this a promising student" but "is this person my equal".

After this it's just North Island Mixed Nats to go, and then my stress for the year is over.

http://jennitalula.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/writing-5/

Booyah!

Odly, firefox now seems to hate google. I mean really ?

Stuff loads fine in IE

http://susan.sean.geek.nz/2009/11/i-really-miss-being-able-to-text-my.html

I really miss being able to text my blog from my phone.

Going to attempt to do NaNoWriMo. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. It's been years since I've written anything, and I'm finding it a bit difficult to get started. Point of view is a hard one, and I'm not sure I made the right choice there. It'll be an interesting experiment though. I find it really really difficult not to self-edit as I'm writing,

Dale ran the original Fright Night, obviously, about 2 years ago. In around March he put out feelers to GMs, and got 8 of us lined up. My recollection of this was like a training scene from a Marine Corps movie, with Dale as the drill sergeant.

"Who are you?"
"Sir, the GMs sir!"
"What are you going to do?"
"Sir, scare the shit out of our players sir!"
"I can't hear you maggots!"
"SIR, SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF OUR PLAYERS SIR!"
"That's right, you are the best of the best, and you WILL scare the shit out of your players and leave them haunted by terrors for weeks to come. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?"
"SIR, YES, SIR!"
"Sergeant, lead these men on a series of writes, re-writes and play-tests, and if anyone falls behind, beat them."
"You hear the LT, FALL-OUT!"

Despite the relatively hard-sell on quality, I think there there a number of games in that first con which weren't play-tested, and perhaps the quality bar was higher than CONfusion or KapCon, but it wasn't as high as I think Dale would have liked. None of us decorated our rooms, or re-wrote chunks of the game to really specifically tailor the games to our players. Both of my games in Year 1 were disappointing in some way.

For year 2 & 3, I was in charge. And I have somewhat less clout and prestige than Dale, and perhaps less of an idea of how to actually run a great horror game. I think though, that without too much prompting from me, all of the repeat customers expected the bar to be higher, and particularly the repeat GMs put a lot of effort into presenting a great game.