Recently I had to hire some IT staff for work, and since it’s difficult to gauge someone’s technical skills from an interview alone, I decided to create a short “quiz” or “exam” for the candidates to complete before their interview.

I intentionally made the level of the questions difficult for the sort of candidates I was expecting. As anticipated, no one got all of the questions correct. The better candidates managed to get around half correct and this was about the level that we wanted — too low and they were no good, too high and they probably didn’t really want this job anyway.

The reason for all of this blabbering is for me to link to the quiz for anyone interested to try. Print it out or whatever and see how you go.

Mike’s IT Quiz Exam Thing

Justine and I frequently do our grocery shopping on weekends, since we find it difficult to do it during the week. This past weekend, we were too busy to even contemplate going shopping, which left us with a choice: Buy food or end up having take away all week.

Sure, the take away option sounds good, but it’s expensive and the food isn’t usually as good. On Sunday, we decided that we would try one of the online shopping services.

Coles Online is the better known of the online grocery stores — at least to me; the service launched a few years ago now — eight? nine? — though the availability was very limited. Safeway (Woolworths) also has a service: HomeShop, which appears to have launched four years ago.

Since we shop at Coles — our closest supermarket is Coles; the local Safeways are dirty and have rude staff — we decided to give Coles Online a shot. The first thing I noticed is that the design of the site does not appear to have changed since the first time I checked it out, which just so happened to be a few weeks after it launched. The second thing I noticed is that the site is slow. Molasses slow.

HomeShop, on the other hand, is a far nicer-looking site, loads faster and just seems to be a more user-friendly and polished experience.

Using our regular shopping list (we just jot it down on paper located in the kitchen) we added all the items to our virtual trolley. It took quite a while navigating the site, as finding items only by their name is not as easy as recognising the packet.

Eventually, we had our shopping list, and proceeded to checkout. HomeShop charges (for us, at least) between $7.50 and $10.00 for delivery, depending on the times and delivery window. Conveniently, though, they deliver during the evening. We chose a 5-8pm window, though a 6-9pm one was also available. This delivery window was $7.50, but as we were first-time customers, the fee was waived (which we didn’t know until the final total was presented).

All that was left was to wait. So wait we did.

At 7:50pm the delivery truck arrived — and I expect this would be the norm — with our bags of groceries. Everything we’d ordered was included, as well as a sample of Nivea face wash. Why? No idea. The ice cream was a tad melty, like it’d been left in the car for an hour or two, but everything else was fine. We included fresh fruit and vegetables in our order and they all looked fine; some looked better than in-store produce, likely because it came directly from a warehouse.

A fuel discount voucher was also included — with eight cents off, which is twice our normal discount.

We didn’t get any meat, as they don’t offer the brand of chicken we buy and I like to choose my cuts of beef. The delivery may be a bit more expensive, but we refrained from impulse purchases. All in all I can see us using HomeShop again; since it saves everything you buy in a list, successive shops will be significantly faster.

After almost eighteen months, I have finally achieved a small personal goal of mine — to clock over the image counter on my camera. That’s right, the image numbers have switched from being high numbers, near the tens of thousands, to being small numbers in the low tens.

I did it while taking promotional photos for Chris’ new album that he’s trying to get “out there” (the photo on the triple J Unearthed website isn’t mind). Luckily, photo 9999 actually turned out rather well — not the best of the bunch, but more than acceptable. Speaking of taking those photos, we managed to get a reasonable number of different promotional shots, and even managed to design what I think is a pretty decent album cover.

Ever since I’ve needed driving directions from place-to-place, I’ve used WhereIs. More recently, I’ve been using Microsoft Virtual Earth (unless the trip passes through tollways, as it doesn’t know about them — or maybe just doesn’t care). I’ve only been using these two services because Google Maps didn’t provide driving directions yet.

But now it does! It’s in the same boat as Virtual Earth in that it doesn’t know or care about tollways, and the directions provided are different in all three (I just checked!) but I think Google Maps is the best of the bunch.

WhereIs is annoying to use with Firefox, and you have to fill in the address details in their annoying little boxes. Virtual Earth is just far too slow, and always assumes you’re looking for US locations, even after typing ‘Australia’; it even centres on Australia when I load it but still assumes US locations! Google Maps allows free-text entry, and if you go to their Australian site you don’t even have to bother with the ‘Australia’ suffix. It’s also the easiest of the three to use.

Back to Virtual Earth being slow, it’s still loading the directions, and I started that before I started writing this.

Of course, having a GPS which downloads weather information, traffic details, constructions zones and recalculates the directions should you deviate is a far better option. But Google Maps is free.

OK, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been lazy. In the time between this and the last post Christmas has come and gone (thanks to everyone for the hospitality and gifts; sorry I didn’t do the ‘haul’ roundup as usual), as well as the New Year. The drive-in the other week was cool, too.

At the behest of Justine, we made a trip into the city today to visit the Melbourne Museum. I hadn’t been to the museum since it was on Swanston Street and the underground train station nearby was called ‘Museum’ station. The exhibits at the new museum were — for the most part — quite underwhelming. The only exhibits that gave me any sort of pleasure actually centred around Melbournian history over the last hundred or so years.

The first, a short history of Melbourne, showed objects and explained what Melbourne life was like. I learned that Little Lonsdale Street was a slums to compete with some of the best slums in the World, as well as a red light district. Much of that exhibit wasn’t interesting but some of it was interesting enough to make me want to write about it here.

The second exhibit I found interesting was CSIRAC, which was Australia’s first computer and the World’s fourth (Wikipedia says fifth, but the exhibit says fourth, strange). The machine has six large cabinets to house it’s memory, which totals something like 2000 bytes of memory. Other large cabinets run the valve-powered 1000 Hz CPU and the 30,000w of power supplies. Obviously punch cards were a thing of the future in the 1950s, since CSIRAC actually used rolls of punched instructions. An amazing thing to see and it’s really the only unique thing I found at the museum of any interest to me that wasn’t a reproduction of the real thing.

There were also a couple of other 1960s computers which were interesting, but didn’t compare with CSIRAC.

So, Melbourne Museum: It’s OK … I guess.

Ever since all of the “current” generation of consoles — Xbox360, Wii, PS3 — have been released (sure, the PS3 has partly been released, but it’s out there) people have been working hard at making them do things the designers never really intended.

For the Xbox360, someone has converted it to a “laptop”, people are trying to get Linux on the PS3 (and indeed, all the consoles) which interests me as it’d make a good media centre, and people are hacking around with the Wii remotes.

One person has managed to make some software which allows the Wii remotes to be used as a controller on a Windows machine. You can configure the controls to work how you wish (i.e. set the joystick as either a joystick or keypresses, the motion-sensing can be used as a joystick or a mouse) and since it works over Bluetooth, it all functions pretty smoothly and is easy to setup.

Using GlovePIE, there’s very little required to get it up and running. After a little bit of tooling around, I jumped into an FPS game and was using the Wii remote in place of a mouse and the joystick in place of the WASD keys. The mouse was super-sensitive but able to be reduced in-game, and was a bit “stuttery” and the sensitivity made things difficult to aim, but I can definitely see that it’d work — if someone has the guts to at least offer this option in a game.

Well, the new Nintendo Wii launched on Thursday and since I have never done it before, I decided it might be fun to attend and purchase my Wii at a midnight launch Wednesday night.

Justine and I both went down to our local shopping center, had dinner, made our way to our local EB and grabbed a ticket; number #14.

We went back home for a couple of hours and when we returned to the store at about 11:45, I was surprised to see that there were around 60-70 people milling around the store. Not all the people were there to buy, there were quite a few people there for … something to do, I guess.

As the clock struck midnight, the store let two people in at a time to buy their consoles. After around fifteen minutes I walked closer to the front of the crowd to see what number was being called as it was difficult to hear from where we were sitting. Just as I approached and was about to open my mouth to ask, number #14 was called. Convenient.

I picked up all the stuff I’d ordered (except for the component cables, which weren’t in stock yet, what a pain) and we hurried home — OK, I hurried home and Justine sat next to me yawning.

We quickly setup the shiny new system and played a few games of Wii Sports before Justine went to bed and I attempted to get the wireless setup to work. A quick change of wireless channel and I was away… to bed… at 3am.

I’m not sure how I did it, but over the course of Thursday-Sunday (I had Thursday and Friday off), I managed to sink 25 hours into Zelda (and I didn’t play much Thursday), and I’m not even half way through the main quest, let alone all the side quests and bits and pieces you can do.

The Wii is a pretty cool system, but my hopes of it being great for FPS games were a bit dashed because the infrared pointer is a little bit laggy, so not quite accurate enough. Games that use the accelerometers though (twisting, turning, tilting the remote) are great and it’s extremely responsive.

The actual user interface of the system seems rushed and not quite finished; touted features such as web browsing, news, weather are not yet available, and the interface is inconsistent with regards to navigation — things that work in one aspect of the system don’t work in another.

I’d also really love an option to have it start up a game directly rather than having to wait for the system to boot up, then recognise the game, then have me click on it, click Start and then wait for the game to load. The DS has the option, why not the Wii?