Thursday, December 10, 2009
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Week 10
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
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The break is nigh! Woo! well now i have to do all the assignment work this weekend or else i'm up data structure creek without a dimension (that really bad, i know). But seriously, i finally will get a proper crack at doing the assignment this weekend. I could have made time to do it earlier, but that would have meant that i would need to have sacrificed AFL blogging, hygiene, going to the footy, friends, other uni work, girlfriends, etc. And i don't want to do that, as much as i might enjoy doing BI. I use a complicated algorithm of how much time and when i work on assignments and because of the due date of this assignment i haven't got to it yet. Luckily, at least i'm hoping, i'm a gun and can get it done in the 'break' along with a shed load of other work. I will have to resist playing tennis a lot, lol. The girlfriend is away, so that might cut me some time, but i expect that i will be on the phone to her a bit, so maybe not.
Lecture
I think i've heard most of that lecture before, not just the last story about the scanning POD. So if you thought that was boring me, you should have thought you were boring me the whole time. I think all the interface stuff you said in SDI and in that one lecture to IE has been ingrained in my psyche.
Tutorial
I'm in love with screenr. I have the biggest tech crush on it. I used it to do a demo for my group members for one of my assignments. I thought it was really useful, but it seems they still didn't understand. I think that's both my fault for bad demo without enough explanation and the fact that they didn't really understand the context of what i was doing, which i assumed they knew. I watched the screenrs and read the stuff. I didn't do anything though. Blogging is much more important :)
I have the feeling i am going to need those 3 marks from blogging come the end of semester considering i haven't started the assignment and Olga has asked more questions to Steve and POD then I ever have about anything. Hopefully the forum shall save me, luckily i can pester POD and Steve on twitter during the break. Hopefully i won't be too proud and seek their help when i need it.
Chao internets.
Lecture
I think i've heard most of that lecture before, not just the last story about the scanning POD. So if you thought that was boring me, you should have thought you were boring me the whole time. I think all the interface stuff you said in SDI and in that one lecture to IE has been ingrained in my psyche.
Tutorial
I'm in love with screenr. I have the biggest tech crush on it. I used it to do a demo for my group members for one of my assignments. I thought it was really useful, but it seems they still didn't understand. I think that's both my fault for bad demo without enough explanation and the fact that they didn't really understand the context of what i was doing, which i assumed they knew. I watched the screenrs and read the stuff. I didn't do anything though. Blogging is much more important :)
I have the feeling i am going to need those 3 marks from blogging come the end of semester considering i haven't started the assignment and Olga has asked more questions to Steve and POD then I ever have about anything. Hopefully the forum shall save me, luckily i can pester POD and Steve on twitter during the break. Hopefully i won't be too proud and seek their help when i need it.
Chao internets.
Week 9
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
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As i have stated a million times before week 9 is a hard time. Trillions of assignments due, haven't slept properly since week 2 and everyone is in desperate need of a break that is still a whole week away. I would, however, hazard that POD has the best attendance in week 9 than almost any other lecturer in the uni that doesn't schedule a test for week 9, lol.
Aroma some more, I finished it pretty quickly. I noticed that we needed another measure so I added the dollars to the product sales cube. That was pretty logical I thought, not much point having product sales, without the sales bit. I'm getting really used to excel and VSASBI now. Luckily i'm awesome so I have time to write my blog now that i'm finished with it.
I haven't started the assignment, i haven't even finished reading the joke spec that POD has made. I really have to start. I have no idea how long it is going to take. I really need to figure that out after I go to the football on Friday night for free (sort of).
Law of diminishing returns; oh how i missed you. I like how you tried not to use the words 'marginal' and 'unit' even though they were begging to be said. Not sure if you said unit, but i deffo don't remember marginal being said. I kinda lost concentration from about 9:30-9:40 i think, that's not a slight on POD, it's a slight on my brain which wasn't working today as evidenced by me leaving my keys at home and putting a USB through the wash.
Well it's time to get out of the lab, so i best end it here.
Aroma some more, I finished it pretty quickly. I noticed that we needed another measure so I added the dollars to the product sales cube. That was pretty logical I thought, not much point having product sales, without the sales bit. I'm getting really used to excel and VSASBI now. Luckily i'm awesome so I have time to write my blog now that i'm finished with it.
I haven't started the assignment, i haven't even finished reading the joke spec that POD has made. I really have to start. I have no idea how long it is going to take. I really need to figure that out after I go to the football on Friday night for free (sort of).
Law of diminishing returns; oh how i missed you. I like how you tried not to use the words 'marginal' and 'unit' even though they were begging to be said. Not sure if you said unit, but i deffo don't remember marginal being said. I kinda lost concentration from about 9:30-9:40 i think, that's not a slight on POD, it's a slight on my brain which wasn't working today as evidenced by me leaving my keys at home and putting a USB through the wash.
Well it's time to get out of the lab, so i best end it here.
Week 8
Saturday, September 12, 2009
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oh yeah, week 8. Should probably blog then. I must say i am a little bit hung over so apologies for any increase in ridiculous comments.More aroma. I'm getting used to Visual Studio BI stuff more now. I got the hierarchy the wrong way around in the tute. I'm not sure if i was dyslexia or me thinking the other way around. It did have me thinking about whether i was understand or just following directions though. I got that working after some help from Steve. I hadn't saved the database file along with my other aroma stuff so i just downloaded the aroma file from moodle to save me time, lol. You gotta love how you don't have to do the tut. before to do this tut. it's very convenient.
Lecture was about Business Performance Measurement and it was titled Business Performance Measurement (I) which means next week at least will be about this too. I noticed you broke the diagram (pictured), all the words are outside their shapes. You don't win the noble prize for BI with that quality of diagram. I put that in here to remind you to change it. Also remember to change the transition on slide 15 too. Unbelievably this week, all my lectures had probability and/or stats in them. I am so bored of normal distributions right now. If week 8 wasn't hard enough, without having the same thing told to you in varying degrees of confusing ways that you have understood since primary school or at least 11th grade. I mean (no pun intended) seriously, so many people don't know the difference between mean, median and mode; it's shocking. And standard deviation too, it's so easy to understand. What's worse than that is somebody teaching it badly, not you POD, but other lectures of the methods of research for IT (like what i did there?), go in to the deep dark depths of Bayesian theory to describe relatively simple things. end rant.
most thought provoking idea came at about 9:55 in the lecture "There is no conclusive experimental evidence to verify that the use of graphics improves a decision maker's understanding of data" which i can agree with. But understanding is different to speed or other characteristics which may be beneficial to the user. Especially because every user learns differently, i'm a bit ahead of myself, cos i know a bit about VAKT from when POD talked about it in IE. I can see arguments for graphs even if they don't aid understanding as much as others. Prettiness is probably underrated academically, but some people will reject a system if it doesn't look the way they expect it to look, not to mention all the ideas of HCI to do with signals that appear to be similar will likely be confused; tables look quite similar to each other, but by making different graphs we can differentiate the information domains. There are a thousand other ideas that I have like that we a conditioned to like graphs from school. But i think the biggest idea that is for graphs is the speed of use. If i am used to a graph i can tell what is happening in a split second. I don't think i could do it as quickly with a table. I think the amount of information that you can take in visually with a graph in an amount of time is much greater than in a table. I think a person would remember better too. I also want to ask questions about how the studies were done. If the question that needs understand is something simple like 'what were sales yesterday?' then a simple number is obviously the best graphic. but for questions such as 'how did sales vary over the three weeks?' i think graphs could be better than plain numbers.
I have been spending way too much time thinking about this clearly, i mean it's as good a thing to think about as anything, just i didn't need to. In conclusion i'm looking forward to the explanation of this in week 9, see you then.
Week 7
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So I really have got behind in blogging. It's actually the end of week 8 now and i'm doing my blog for week 7. Needless to say that i'm a bit behind in a lot of my subjects at the moment and things that are actually due in now are taking precedence.
This week heralded the beginning of the aroma stuff in the tutes. I like how stuff builds in the tutes, adding knowledge every week so that you can do more and more complicated things. This week wasn't as straight forward as others. I did manage to do all the required work in the tute. though. None of the extra credit stuff.
Thomsen, ADAPT and pivot diagrams in the lecture this week amongst other things. They seem pretty straight forward, but as POD said, that could be misleading. I would like the opportunity in the tutes to do some diagramming. I don't really know what's ahead of me, probably doing diagramming if i know POD, lol.
That's enough crapping on for this week. I have to do week 8 now anyways.
This week heralded the beginning of the aroma stuff in the tutes. I like how stuff builds in the tutes, adding knowledge every week so that you can do more and more complicated things. This week wasn't as straight forward as others. I did manage to do all the required work in the tute. though. None of the extra credit stuff.
Thomsen, ADAPT and pivot diagrams in the lecture this week amongst other things. They seem pretty straight forward, but as POD said, that could be misleading. I would like the opportunity in the tutes to do some diagramming. I don't really know what's ahead of me, probably doing diagramming if i know POD, lol.
That's enough crapping on for this week. I have to do week 8 now anyways.
Week 6
Monday, August 31, 2009
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I'm a bad human being. I haven't started the assignment, eek. Been way too busy not doing it. It still doesn't make it okay. I can't decide if i want to do it at home or not. I might download some shiz from dreamspark if i have quota left in my internet usage cap at the end of the month. I really should start.Le lecture was okay. I apparently am not as good at identifying dimensions as I thought. I made a rookie mistake in the model i was making in my head when POD made us think about the data (pictured). I can't remember what my mistake was but i was a little bit unhappy with myself. I thought i was going to get it right, but i messed it up. I was effected by the overconfidence bias i believe. Which is weird cos when i did the overconfience bias test i got 9 or 10 out of 10 when we were meant to do it with 90% certainty, so i was on the money.
Crappy labs slowed me down, i had to login to another computer once i had already got VS up and running, what a bummer. I am going to be sick of pivot tables by the end of semester aren't i? I see how they are quick and easy, i just don't like them. I found myself using them at work the other day, i wanted to shoot myself then i realised i was saving heaps of time using it rather than writing vlookup statements.
I didn't get up to MDX in the tut, which i was gutted about. That was the bit i wanted to do the most. I got stuck with my cube not loading properly in excel, it was really annoying and it really slowed my progress. I had to refresh the cubes in VS from memory. I tried just redeploying the whole project but that didn't work. Anyways that's over now.
I'm really over my Thursday schedule now though, cos pretty much every week I am busy from 9am-4pm with group meetings and classes and have no time for a break and considering it's week 6 that's not going to change in the next 7 weeks. I think i need to do what happens in Multiplicity.
Week 5
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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Already it is week 5 and weird things are happening in the lecture theater. Sound mishaps and internet dropping out. The weird and wonderful things that happen at 9pm in K-block. POD was complaining that he wasn't coherent. What's new? just kidding.
The lecture was a little like what you said when you subbed in for David Arnott for IT for Management Decision Making with a little bit of stuff about what OLAP was. Seems like POD is on a quest to prove that nothing is new. Although I agree, it's pretty hard to prove with a lot of things and boundaries are blurry. Last night Alex and I were talking about Ford and how they brought cars to the masses. I said something like 'all he did was use Colt's idea for the production line and applied it to cars' and it got me thinking about what invention actually is. Which I shall not get in to now, but it's pretty interesting.
This is probably going to be a short post this week cos i wanna dash off to COSTCO to see what it's like. I went to COSTCO in London and that was an experience.
More handy pivot stuff this week in the tut. it seems like you want to make us experts in Pivot tables. Not sure how much i want to be good at Pivot tables though (see last week's rant). Steve is as excited by everything as always. He and Olga seem to get along very well. The others in the tute are pretty quiet, it's normally infoholic, Olga and I talking most of the time.
Till next week...
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