I hate moving. I think most people do, but I have more experience. With my mom and dad we lived in 4 homes. With my dad and Marie we had 5. With my mom (with and without George) we had 4 and on my own I have lived in 12 houses and flats. When I say I hate moving, I am truly speaking from experience.When we moved to Leicester I told Nina I would like to find a fine place to live in and I was quite specific in stating I didn’t want to move again. When we first viewed our current flat, we fell in love with it. And there are many reasons why someone would love it; vaulted ceilings, large rooms, original heritage features, private garden, great neighbourhood etc.
But the house has problems; big problems. In our bedroom and bathroom there is mould growing due to the poor insulation in these old houses. In the living room the ceiling is slowly growing a bulge near the location of the 3 water leaks we had in 2010. The moulding has even starting to crack from the varying elevations of the ceiling.Throughout enduring these two disturbing problems, we have been paying a small fortune to heat our flat which is usually drafty
and chilly between September and May. When there are freezing temperatures outside, the thermostat in our hallway reads 12-14 degrees and there is nothing we can do to increase the temperature. Our living room with the two radiators on can barely manage 21 degrees. And, something particularly worrying is the bulge in the living room ceiling is right above where I sit and work at the dining room table. I cannot use my office between October and May because it’s too expensive to heat that room.I hate to it say, but we have to move. We found a lovely “Victorian Villa” which is a particular style of house in this neighbrouhood. It’s a semi-detached meaning we would only share 1 wall with the adjoining house which means our neighbour count would decrease significantly. It’s less than a 10 minute walk from our current house and is actually closer to the universities and Queens Rd; our main shopping street. But, we will be leaving the prestigious Stoneygate area and moving to Clarendon Park which is almost as posh.
Mid January Nina was able to finally enjoy her Christmas present from me; tickets to see 2 Charlie Chaplin films accompanied by the London Philharmonia Orchestra playing the scores at De Montfort Hall. I had not seen a full Chaplin movie and was really blown away by how talented he was. We saw The Rink (1916) and Modern Times (1936). Afterward, we were quite eager to see the movie Chaplin about Chaplin’s life which we saw the following weekend.
We also enjoyed a Robby Burns night as a new colleague of Nina’s is Scottish and hosted a large party. She cooked a great meal and even addressed the haggis before we all had a nip of scotch. It was a wonderful evening full of laughs and our first true Robby Burns party.
I have particularly enjoying the social aspects of being in university as my Master’s group has started to bond outside of the classroom. There are a few guys in particular I get along especially well with. We have been going out on the weekends and I have enjoyed the experience of heading down to the pub after work and meeting friends for drinks. One of our colleagues lives in Nottingham and invited us up for a party. We took the train on a Saturday afternoon, booked into a hostel and came back on the Sunday. I get along the best with Rupert, a Londoner who worked as a graphic artist at the BBC. Since he had not been to Nottingham before, we spent Saturday afternoon looking around the old city. As I had been there on a day trip in November 2009, I remembered it quite well and I showed Rupert around. We stopped for a pint at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem which sits at the foot of Nottingham Castle and dates back to 1189 AD. It purports to be the oldest pub in the UK. It was a great weekend away and it solidified new friendships.
Work is plodding along, but I don’t have the security in my job I hoped (and thought) I had. It seems the company is short on money and was in fear of going bankrupt. We were issued a warning in January that we had enough cash flow to last another two months. We have been working extremely hard and have made a few placements which will keep things moving for the time being. My university workload is manageable and flexible as most of my modules have projects which span the semester. This gives me the flexibility I need to focus on work when I need to. Thus far I have received one grade from last term and it was a merit. The grading system offers these marks: fail, marginal fail, marginal pass, pass, merit and distinction. So, I’m quite happy with a merit.
Although I am doing my degree over two years and I am not required to submit a proposal for my thesis until the end of the summer, I have been very proactive in starting to think about what I want to do. I had a meeting at the beginning of this year with the Program Leader and laid out the criteria of my thesis: something within the topic of usability, preferably done in conjunction with an industry partner and with a defined outcome of an MSc opposed to an MA. The first step was to locate a lecturer or professor I wanted as my supervisor. It was an easy choice; Tracy Harwood. Tracy is the Usability Lab Manager and comes from a marketing background. Her specialties include running and mediating focus groups and analysing data for statistical purposes. I had met her a few times last semester and she had the background which would compliment the type of project I was interested in. She was also very thorough and I knew any project she was overseeing would be comprehensive and held to a high standard.
I met with Tracy last week at the Retail Lab; a B2B arm of the university that works with industry to organize, optimize and design retail environments and products. It opened just under a year ago and they have barely begun to scratch the surface of what they can do there. They have certain equipment that hasn’t been used yet and part of my thesis will be to investigate one particular piece of equipment; an electroencephalography (EEG) cap which reads brain waves.
They are working with a client who is launching a line of sportswear and wants user testing done on their target market to get feedback on their designs, fabrics, colour schemes etc. Traditionally, this would be done through observing and questioning users. However, that information is not always reliable. I will investigate subconscious reactions with the EEG cap in conjunction with the traditional methods to see if their conscious and subconscious reactions are the same. I have been doing some preliminary research on the topic and it seems to be the next level of usability and ergonomics testing, although so far I have only found 1 company in the UK that uses it. I have found a fair number of academic papers written on the subject over the past 2 years, so there is clearly some interest. It is being referred to as neuroergonomics and it could offer me the chance to do some highly relevant research with real job prospects as the outcome.
For the first time in a year and half Leicester is a far more agreeable place to be than Vancouver. So far the temperatures haven’t dipped anywhere remotely close to -17 degrees. I can’t even imagine how that feels. Brrrrrr.
