Who cares about user interfaces? (by alaric)

Developing user interfaces to software systems is incredibly rewarding.

If your software system has a user interface at all - and most do, even if it's just for service engineers - then interacting with a human is, presumably, part of its function. And since humans generally pay the bills or otherwise reward and motivate the development of software, I'd hazard a guess that whatever interaction your system has with the user might be the most important thing it does. So having a poor user interface might well mean that whatever else is wonderful about your software is meaningless, because nobody can use it.

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Burns Night Poetry and Songs to be! (by sarah)

Tomorrow The Folk of Gloucester (a lovely Tudor timber framed building) will be hosting a Burns Night which is very exciting especially as we are going to have Scottish folk tunes from Jessica Law that we can all join in with! And poetry recitals by me! There will also be haggis of various ilks!

I really enjoyed their last Burns Night two years ago so am very excited!

tix are here (its £10)

Here are some photos from the 2023 celebration:

The weird and wonderful world of corporate finance (by alaric)

Ok, so, let me start with this: I'm an engineer. I'm not an accountant or an economist or a hedge fund manager or anything.

However, I have studied those worlds from time to time for various reasons, and I've always kind of enjoyed it because it's a complex world of systems, and there's a lot of engineering behind it. But it's all explained in weird jargon and kind of inaccessible to engineers.

So, this blog post is my attempt to document the aspects of corporate finance I understand, but explained in a way that makes more sense to me, and hopefully to other engineers, or people who think they aren't engineers but are really.

If that sounds interesting to you, buckle up and let's get started!

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Tyroids and Singing (by sarah)

Back when covid hit I lost my voice - it was a whisper for about 18 months and the sore throat was horrendous. Of course we knew why this was as I was hospitalised with chest pains a few months after appearing to recover - my thyroid was inflamed, I did in fact have Grave's Disease or hyperthyroidism - it was over active and it had gone there from being slightly under active and the damage thyroids do isn't so much how high or low they are but the rapidity of that change - my eyes ached all the time but I was on medication relatively quickly and there was a lot of other stuff with mum etc going on. There wasn't really time to process it all.

Things improved and my voice came back and it wasn't quiet right, I always feel I have a lump in my throat and I find doing some of the sounds I used to hard... mainly I get coughing fits, and often I have a mild sore throat. Like my soft weirdly wide nails with ridges on them - they are kind of normal shape again - kind of but the ridgedness and softness remain - this is all just part of the corse with Grave's disease but the sore throat wasn't too bad and my voice was basically back so I started singing again - first at the monthly Folk Music Jam sessions, just whispers with the general melee, then I joined a Folk Choir that is lets you sing the part you want rather than being split into sopranos, altos etc... and then I joined a group called The Cryptid's and even wrote songs to make the general public sing!

I've got two project exploring voice coming up and I also got to be the Fairy Cryer and do announcements in my loud announcing voice including support from the actual Town Cryer - I even have my own bell for the role. And then a few weeks ago it happened...

The sensation of being strangled, the weird loud swallowing noise, wheezing and whistling when breathing which both kids hate and if I touch my neck I have like a flesh collar under the skin. The cough is worse, the sore throat worse - ear ache and my levels of tinnitus have shot up... and my voice is wavering, changing pitch and cracking randomly. And I have been blaming everything rather than facing the fact it's the thyroid again. I had been back under the GP's care for endocrine issues and I don't really want to trek back to the hospital but it is what it is. I have been mainly avoiding the Gloucester hospital since mum died and have been doing relatively well with that - I don't want to go to the hospital.

Its weird though because my main thing is that I really want to sing and that is the thing I have latched onto - if I have to have the thyroid removed what happens to my voice?

The Tangled Tale of My Career (by alaric)

I've been feeling a bunch of despair, boredom and ennui about my career lately; so I've decided to attack it in the way I know best - by writing about it.

When I was little, I wanted to be a scientist. Of course, that wasn't what I actually wanted - but popular media had created this vision of a mad scientist labouring in a lab making weird and wonderful things. I later learnt that what I wanted to be was called an "Inventor", which is a kind of engineer; the application of science to make things - the goal of building a fantastic machine is to get that fantastic machine, not to test some hypothesis. So it's definitely not science.

This was fed, in part, by the reading material I had around the house. My maternal grandparents had been an electrical engineer and a science teacher, respectively, so I had a mixture of O-level science textbooks and old cloth-bound tomes about electrical power distribution networks. Plus, my mother was a science fiction and fantasy fan, so I had stories like E. E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman books (epic space battles, written by an engineer so tending to linger on the technical details) inspiring me. I saw technology as a way of solving real problems, and I found learning about it fascinating, and the challenges were engaging - and what's even better, I found I had a knack for solving them. The future looked exciting!

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