You Shook Me All Night Long

by ACDC from Back in Black

Hi all. Right now it is 4 AM and I am typing this entry from the Embassy Suites in Anaheim. Why you ask? Well, it is good ole company trip and this year they decided to go to Disneyland instead of doing a ski trip. The reason why I am up so early is that I have early flight out so I need to be at the shuttle in about an hour and a half to get to LAX. Instead of sleeping, I decided to brew some tea, whittle the hours away, and hopefully crash when I get back to San Jose. Right now I am doing okay but I probably won't be for very much longer. So how was the trip to Disneyland. I must say I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. For a little background, the last time I went to Disneyland was way back in 1987. So yeah, its been a while. During those intervening years, I developed a disliking for Disney stuff since much of their stuff seemed so sugar-sweet coated goody goody that I couldn't stand it. Plus the WB characters were much more snarky and sarcastic which I preferred.

But since it was a paid trip to Disneyland, who could resist. And I must say that Disneyland is a very hard place not to like. For those of you HCI/design people out there, it is a marvel of experience design. All the way down to the smallest detail, Disney definitely puts in the extra effort to produce their desired customer experience. In addition, the rides were fun. I went on Indiana Jones, Big Thunder Mountain, Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Buzz Lightyear, Materhorn and of course, Star Tours again. Let's just say that Star Tours has not aged well since the last time I rode it way back when. Since it was Google, Disney was nice enough to close out the park after 7 PM so we could have a fun, adult-oriented time. So in California Adventure, there was an open bar which I took full advantage of. I must say that Soaring Over California is pretty good when you have been drinking.

The Disneyland trip came at the right time for me as in I have been drowning in work for the past couple weeks. Hopefully I can close out this week by writing some long overdue reports. As for the follow-up to my RITE study that I wrote about last time, it looks like we may do it again since there was positive reaction to it. However ,I am going to try some new things for it (and hopefully write a CHI paper about it). But one thing that I recommend is to build in a break into the study. So run a significant number of participants, take a short break to review the findings and see if you want to change direction. You can use the remaining participants to try out a new alternative or affirm your previous beliefs.

Speaking of work, Noor wrote a very good blog entry about contacting alumni about jobs. Like her, I didn't really do it when I was in grad school but I have been contacted on several occasions and I can definitely agree with all her points. I too received the same generic email and LinkedIn invitations that she did. The only thing that I would add is that you may want to ask your helpful SI Career Services staff about me beforehand (you know just for background - but if they mention an incident where I got so drunk I threw up in someone's front lawn that is totally made up). I still know a few people there and it may be helpful before contacting me. Just a thought.

Finally, I decided to do a mini-triathon in March. My friends are doing it so I decided why not. So I have to start hard-core training for it soon. So that will be eating up alot of my weekend from now on. Anyway, I should probably find some more things to do to waste time before catching my shuttle. Until next time...peace!