Graham Chastney

Last week I referred to the TC1100 here on my desk as “Top Cat“, please accept my apologies for this momentary lapse of judgement. I have not got so attached to a piece of IT equipment as to be giving it a pet-name and normal rational service has been resumed .

(I don’t even like cats anyway).

I’ve been out for a few days training – ITIL Foundation.

I haven’t done any classroom training for year and I’d forgotten how enjoyable and frustrating an experience it was.

It’s very enjoyable to have the time to interact with others and to learn from each other. The people dynamics can be frustrating too.

I did the ITIL Foundation exam straight after the course and passed (92%, swat).

I can now confidently say that I understand the difference between an “incident” and a “problem”.

I was going to write a post on setting the TC11OO setup with Vista RTM but Steve beat me to it, And not for the first time in my life: Vista RTM on TC1100

Top Cat (my TC1100 tablet) made it home from his holiday visit to the health spa today with a new digitiser and a nice new unscratched screen .

Time for a rebuild as all of the software on it has gone from Beta to RTM while he was away.

Can’t fault the repair service, apart from the slightly bizarre delivery scheduling scheme. They don’t schedule anything, they just try to deliver it, if the delivery fails then they schedule .

Yesterday I went into hospital as a day case, when the nurses who were doing all of the pre-operation checks knew what my job was they decided to show me the software that they were using.

It was very interesting.

The software was very complex and the nurses had to know some amazing tricks to get it to do what it was supposed to do. At my initial check-in asked me a number of basic questions, when it came to the pre-operation checks they asked me the same questions again. Both times they asked the basic questions they asked me my height and weight, both times the software was supposed to convert the number that I gave them. I deliberately gave the same answer both times just to see, and both times it failed even though the two nurses entered the details differently.

The lack of intelligence in the questions being asked by the system were mostly masked by the nurses. Every now and then they would skip over a load of question when I asked them what the questions were they said that they were all questions that were only pertinent to a woman, or a person under 16 etc.

I was also struck by how impersonal it was that myself and the nurses were both pointing towards the computer to answer personal questions. If it was me, I would implement the use of tablets for this one reason. Using tablets would definitely let the nurse face the patient, in the same way as paper used to do.

Clearly no-one had thought about the user experience here.