Kyle Smith

Had a nice little 4-day break from work this past weekend. Friday was spent doing laundry and cleaning up my apartment. Saturday was a pretty lazy day — just hung out with Stacy all day and generally enjoyed not having to do anything. Sunday my parents came down from VT to drop off a Hoosier cabinet and have lunch with us. Spent the afternoon lounging around before driving to Red Hook to see The Family Stone, which was okay. The final day of my vacation was spent in Kingston searching for end tables and a wine rack that would fit in the bottom of the Hoosier cabinet so I don’t have to take up counter space with bottles. I came up empty handed. :-/

Woke up this morning and was greeted by 3″ of snow covering everything with more coming down. Thankfully the roads were fairly clear and the gym was relatively dead (as is work) so I got to have a nice quiet morning.

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As Mike pointed out, WordPress 2 is out. I too upgraded this morning. And my Gallery 2 has been working for a while now. I kinda like the new WYSIWYG editor but hate the admin theme.
Summary of the last 2 months, for those of you I haven’t talked to:

• I’m now living in Poughkeepsie and work for IBM.
• Photos of my apartment and my new furniture are available here (new as of October, that is… this post has been sitting a while)
• Since my last post, I have accomplished most of the tasks I outlined, which the exception of registering my car in NYS. I may be a resident, but I still hate the regulations in this state.
• NYC in December is crazy busy but also really fun.
• I have the coolest girlfriend in the world. She got me the Dr. Seuss book I wanted for Christmas along with a Napoleon Dynamite talking keychain — gosh!
• My parents are moving to Florida in January. They’ve already sold their house in Vermont and will be closing on a place in Florida shortly. This means I won’t be visiting the Green Mountain State all that much anymore.
• More photos from me may be forthcoming, as I picked up a Nikon N75 SLR camera recently (film, not digital!).

In short, 4Q05 was excellent and I can’t wait to see what the new year brings.
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For the computer scientists in the audience that miss Tino’s exams:

I used to live in Vermont, The Green Mountain State. As of October 1, 2005, I now live in New York, The Let’s-Fuck-You-Over-With-Stupid-Regulations State. I purchased a vehicle in December 2004 which I financed (so I’m still making payments). Now that I live in New York, I would like a NYS driver’s license and I would like to register my car in NY. I would also like to refinance my vehicle to lower the monthly payment.

Notable facts and constraints:

• NYS requires a NY-based insurance policy. You must have a policy before attempting to register your car.
• In order to purchase a new policy, you need a NYS driver’s license or proof of address (i.e. a copy of a signed lease, a utility bill). Keep in mind that I have been in my new residence for 12 days.
• To trade in a driver’s license from another state for a NYS license, you must show your old license and your Social Security card. You must also provide 2 additional points of identification (1 if your license from another state is still valid).
• As I discovered today, if your SS card has been altered in any way, the NYS DMV will refuse to accept it as proof. “Altered” could include covering the card with clear mailing tape in order to help preserve it, as I did (it is just lightweight cardstock, after all).

Refinancing the vehicle produces additional questions: do I register my vehicle, then refinance and update the title? Do I refinance first and register the vehicle later? Both involve paperwork at the DMV at a minimum.

Additional complications:

• My car registration in VT expires at the end of this month.
• Monthly payments for my existing (VT) car insurance policy are processed at the beginning of each month.
• NYS requires residents to trade in their out-of-state licenses no more than 30 days after becoming a resident.
• Refinancing a car requires an insurance book for the vehicle with the appropriate coverages and the new lender’s name.
• The new lender (in my case), Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union, requires the title and a letter showing the payoff amount to complete the refinancing process
• Most lienholders (who hold the title) do not relinquish the title until the lien is paid in full.

Design an optimal algorithm that accomplishes all of the goals outlined above given the aforementioned constraints that is both time and cost efficient.

Am I missing something?

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Been a busy 4 weeks. After several companies contacted me out of the blue about jobs, I did some thinking and decided to not return to Clarkson for my MS. Informed of this, my manager at IBM extended my co-op an extra few weeks and then I ended up flying first to Maryland for job interviews and then to San Francisco this past weekend for more interviews with another company. Having traveled something like 6,500 miles in the course of three days (including driving home to Vermont from Poughkeepsie), I am now hanging around the house waiting for a few more offers to arrive before I make a decision.

I’ve put up a few pictures of my trip to California. Unfortunately I was unable to take photos of everything, like the bushman who I saw while walking from Fisherman’s Wharf to Ghirardelli Square. There are a bunch of photos from Union Square and the Stockton Apple Store as well.

If any of you happen to be in Vermont or New Hampshire in the next few weeks and would like to get together and do something, let me know ’cause my schedule is wide open.

Also, Death Cab’s new album, Plans is friggin’ amazing. Go buy it!

Random fact: approximate number of miles flown for job interviews so far in 2005: 13,000.

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I feel bad for my current housemate Jason. This evening he had to listen to me utter a near-constant stream of obscenities and insults as I attempted to navigate IBM’s Opportunities Marketplace.

My intentions were rather simple. At first I just wanted to see what positions IBM had open around the country. Later, after browsing through several hundred openings I decided, “What the heck, I might as well apply to the three that sound really interesting.”

As the experience progressed, the list of problems only grew. It started with little things, like not preselecting options from drop down lists (when there was only a single option available!). Then I started to notice just how slow the site was. And how all the results had JavaScript links so I couldn’t just open interesting positions in new tabs in the background as I made my way down the list. The inability to use the Back, Forward, or Refresh buttons. The jobs that disappeared from my “Jobs Basket”. Queries being lost, forcing me to start from scratch.

Later on when I decided to actually apply the real frustration set in. Initially I was told that my account didn’t exist. Then the password for my new account didn’t meet IBM’s strict standards. Then suddenly my email address was already in use and I already had an account. After signing in and uploading a PDF copy of my resume, the tool failed to parse it, forcing me to go through 12+ pages worth of forms.

Eventually I reached a “how did you year about us?” field that was required. Trying to be nice, I attempted to mention that I originally learned about the company from a career fair, but PeopleSoft seemed to think that I was wrong and couldn’t have heard about IBM at a career fair and took me to a search page where I tried half a dozen combinations of words that lead to the same result: “No results found”. This was the final straw. Three hours of dealing with a slow, unintuitive user interfaced finally got to me and after an extensive stream of obscenities, I gave up. I couldn’t take another 11 pages of jumping through hoops for some brainless software application.

Cooper says that product interaction should not fail any of these tests: (1) not make users feel stupid, (2) not make mistakes, (3) allow users to get an adequate amount of work done, and (4) allow users to have fun. I don’t think IBM’s Opportunity Marketplace passed a single one of those rules.

I told Mike that I tried to fill out the feedback form for the application. I tried, I really did. For 15 minutes I tried to explain everything that was wrong with the application, but in the end, I couldn’t find the words. Did no one conduct any “hallway” or “50 cent” usability tests? Could a software developer somewhere actually have found the application usable?

Joel says it slightly differently: “A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.” This is a perfect illustration of poorly-designed software. I think most would consider me extremely savvy when it comes to technology and I shamefully admit that I’m an apologist (to use Cooper’s term), but as soon as I started using the site I felt constrained by the application and got the feeling that I was somehow wrong (I know the abbreviation and spelling for Vermont, I’ve lived there for 20 friggin’ years!). That’s not how a user should feel.

The sad part is that it’s not just IBM that uses shitacular PeopleSoft applications. Clarkson’s PeopleSoft Self Service application is equally horrifying. Where does the horror originate from? Bad application programmers abusing a framework, or is the PeopleSoft appliction/framework the source?

I think one of my deepest fears about being a software developer is that some day I might end up with a job working for a company that seems to care as little about the usability of their applications as IBM*, Clarkson, and others do. It’s almost equally as terrifying to be a tester for an unusable application because most of the time you don’t have a say about the overall quality of a product — the only thing you can do is hope that you somehow make a product suck less by opening defects against it.

*I don’t mean to pick solely on IBM, but those were applications and technologies that I have to use on a daily basis and so they easily came to mind.

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Awesome weekend (perhaps the best birthday yet). Drinking, cards, movies [1], wandering around Vanderbilt, and saw Theory of a Dead Man and Chevelle last night.

Thanks everyone.

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I’ve come to hate Java for everything except web applications. Writing Java GUI code is teh suck. Setting properties for each and every widget is so 1997. But when you need your application to run on Windows, Linux and everything in between, what other choice do you have? Can’t use GTK+. Can’t use Mono’s System.Windows.Forms. All I’m really looking for is a tool like Glade that will generate an XML file that I can easily just load and autoconnect all of the callbacks.

Does anyone know of such a tool? I came across this list several months ago but having looked at each and every one, none satisify my needs.

I’ve also come to loathe the various methods for parsing XML. Really I just want to load a file and have the properties bound automatically. JWhirli currently uses jConfig, but I don’t see any way to have the XML conform to an XSD. See, I’d rather have an XML schema define and enforce the property constraints instead of doing it myself programmatically.

Oh, and how ’bout some of that world peace too?

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A few pictures from the Vanderbilt estate this evening as the sun was setting. Ended up going to Rhinebeck to see Me and You and Everyone We Know, which was pretty frickin’ funny, given the subject matter. Definitely recommend going to see it. Useless trivia: turns out the director was born only 50 miles from my home in Vermont. Also finished reading Fight Club today. Always interesting to see how screenwriters morph the story from the original.

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Went and saw March of the Penguins last night at Upstate. Highly recommend going to see it if you have the opportunity. I’ll probably go see Joint Security Area tomorrow night there as well.

Picked up several new books this week: Joel Spolsky’s Best Software Writings, which has some awesome essays, as well as Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Kerouac’s On the Road, both of which I started reading today in Barnes & Noble. There are now somewhere around 15 books in the queue with about 6 in progress.

Site Update
I migrated to a new hosting provider this afternoon and while everything seems to be working now, there’s always the chance that I missed something. If you notice any problems, please send me an email.

Depending on when your local DNS server cached my record, it may take 12 – 48 hrs for it to get updated.

Points to whoever can determine the connection between the title and the items mentioned in this post. Mr. Dow is unfortunately, not eligible as I discussed it with him today.

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If you happen to know where my original copies of Hero or Jin-Roh are, please let me know.

That is all.

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