Manda QoP

I have an aversion to meetings. I do understand some people like to discuss things and talk about things and that’s how they work best, but we don’t all work well that way. What’s best for one person may be very disruptive for another. The situation It's 4pm on Friday and we've come to the meeting. You explained everything perfectly in the first five minutes but you could've just emailed that info to us, and now we’re still sitting here an hour later. Why? That’s right, all the people who understood in the first five minutes need to take turns explaining the same thing in different ways to John from accounts, and now he's even more confused than when the meeting started. Within five minutes you gave us a spark of an idea to go and investigate more, but you’ve stopped us doing that for the past hour so there's fidgeting, window, floor, and ceiling staring, and possibly a touch of doodling (though I do that to stay focused on listening which can confuse pe...

How to maximise points and get in the top 100 Strongest Lord Event is in three phases: Building strength - most points come from building upgrades Resource gathering - you can get high points without annoying other teams Killing enemies - attack or defend - you get points either way If you want to protect your resources and troops, keep your shields up at all times. City and mine shields are best, but if you can only do one, choose city shields. BEFORE the event starts: Save up all your speed ups for building, recruitment, enhancements, tech research, healing - you will need these in large numbers so don't use them until during the event.  If you have stamina items, save these too so you have spare killing ability in the Kill Monsters phase.  Also worth saving up alliance reward points so that you can get recruits out of Valhalla. Start saving up resources so you can build something big for the event. You will need to protect yourself with shields to avoid l...

It's been a busy 2½ years helping out first with OSDC (Open Source Developers Conference) and then immediately jumping in to helping run lca2015 (Linux Conf Australia). Looks like another may be en route as well... watch this space... Whilst it's very rewarding helping to run a conference, there are also some traps for new players that I've learned about on the way. Luckily the first conference was a lot smaller than the second, so the lessons learned weren't quite so brutal as they could have been if they were discovered during lca2015. These pitfalls can be especially hard on those with certain mental illnesses and anxiety disorders, so I've come up with a top 10 list of how to protect your head space when helping to organise a conference. Make sure you have a 2IC/team for anything you're working on so that if you need to, you can take a month or two out without any feelings of worry or guilt. Remember to keep in touch with the team though so that ...

Setting up a continuous delivery process can be quite a momentous task, especially when retrofitting to an existing product, however, I'm quite lucky with a current project in that we're at the very start of the project so there are no existing processes in place. Once you've read this, I'd love feedback on my solution and ideas for improvements if you have any. When I joined the project the developers had already put continuous integration and deployment processes into place using Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Octopus. So the challenge placed before me was to extend this process out to a full continuous delivery plan complete with testing, reporting, full end to end life cycle overview, and of course, happy project, change and release managers. This is taking a bit of thinking.  I can easily do the geek thing and get down into the nitty gritty of setting all of this up but the business needs to see how it works at a higher level, and they also need to be give...

A while back I looked into getting Lasik because contact lenses were uncomfortable after a few hours due to dry eye, and glasses are just impractical when walking dogs in the rain or going to the gym. It took me ten years to pluck up the courage as I'm a bit sqeamish with eyes, but eventually off I trotted to the eye clinic with my loan offer all sorted for the fees so that I can do things quickly before chickening out. I get the eye checks done and find out that the only part of me that isn't too fat is my corneas. They are both too thin for Lasik and there's nothing I can do, there are no alternatives, I just have to live with being a speccy four eyes. ARRGGHHH... Fast forward a few months..{{{wibble wobble fast forward hands thing}}}.. I'm reading a magazine a few weeks ago and I read about something called Ortho-K. It's been around for a while apparently but no-one I've spoken to has heard of it. Why does no-one know about it? It's freaking aweso...

The new phone has shipped overnight. If the US postal service gets a shifty on, it could arrive next week and the queue of people wanting to check it out before I leave MBIE will not be disappointed. I have turned into an excited Tigger! Bounce, bounce, bounce.

I've needed a new phone for a while now. My first edition HTC Desire from a gazillion years ago is starting to get quite battered and its second battery is now starting to fail, prompting me to finally give up and buy a new phone. The problem I have with buying a new phone is researching them; I always end up finding something amazing that isn't yet available, which means a new phone never ends up being purchased. This time though my research wish list item from earlier this year was the Nexus 5, and given that my HTC Desire is due for retirement I have decided to stick to my guns, not look at any new shinies that are coming out in the next few months. I have closed my eyes to the Phone Arena phone compare tool - it will not taunt me with the pretty 50tetragigamegabyte camera phones covered in bling that would make a magpie envious. So, having decided to actually buy a new phone, it's time to research prices. As you probably know, this little gem of a phone isn...