ANZAC Eve Concert, South Bank, Brisbane – Saturday 24th April 2010

I went to a very memorable and moving ANZAC Eve Remembrance Concert on Saturday night.

The music played and sung included Amazing Grace (truly amazing), Ave Maria (tear jerking and spine chilling from the beautifully eerie and powerful voice of Suzanne Kompass), Abide With Me and Dam Busters March to name just four of a beautifully powerful programme that included poems, The Beach Burial, beautiful and yet so brutal and then to the haunting sound of the bagpipes and the bugler playing The Last Post.

Goose bumps and large lumps in your throat seemed to be the order of the evening. So sad and so beautiful. So sad because what a waste, all those lives, never will they have seen what they could have become, what their country became, never could their love-ones comprehend the way or place in which they died. So beautiful because of the incredible music, thought provoking, enchanting, so forceful and yet so pitiful.

The concert was an inspiring and sober event. Strange how you can describe and act in two opposite meaning and descriptive words, yet both are accurate. Why does a remembrance day event evoke such dynamically opposite emotions? Maybe it’s all our guilt. We know we should remember the dead who fought for us, but at the same time, what a waste of life, so the act in itself is futile, because we shouldn’t have to remember them, not in this way, because they shouldn’t be dead. What did war ever achieve for mankind? Blood-shed and waste? Greed and power? Who pays the price? And why should they?

It was a beautiful evening of music and talented people.

Lest we forget – and we never should.


Performed by incredible musicians and coral choirs from:
- Queensland Symphony Orchestra
- Queensland Police Pipes & Drums
- Australian Army Band Brisbane, Fanfare Team and Bugler
- The Queensland Choir
- University of Queensland Chorale
- So-la Voce Choir
- Suzanne Kompass – soprano

User Interface-ability - why good websites should be better

It’s a puzzle to know why some of the most popular and frequently used websites have annoying little features that can’t possibly have been overlooked for so long? I'm impressed by their search criteria, there storage capacity, release cycles, innovation, marketing, the list goes on, but, where are the user feedback options for suggested usability improvements? Are our expectations too high?
So a short list on a few annoying features of some favoured sites and solutions which may make some small improvements.

Feature number 1:
Website: Facebook
Someone (hopefully a friend) comments on a posting on your wall, you don't post very often so laugh and chuckle at the responses, you want to comment on a particular comment, but other friends comment in the mean time, so the only option you have left at the end of the page is 'Write a comment' to the last comment or delete to the individual comments. Why can’t a response be added to an individual friend's comment? If the response comes at the end of a list of comeents it’s out of context, so why not have comment, opportunity for a response, new comment/new response etc?

Feature Number 2:
Website: Googlemail
I like so much about Gmail and Chrome but for a few irritations where it’s tried to be too clever. I'll explain....

No.1 : The concatenation of the mails seems helpful but not always, you never really know if it's a mail you've sent that is the last email in the group or if it's a response especially if someone else like your partner on a shared mail account has already read it, you have to look at the number of mails in the group and remember the mail you sent was the second one and the reply will therefore be the third one. To avoid the confusion you need to file away the email so that if you are expecting a response it is obvious as it starts a fresh group.

No.2 The frustrating way again that mail is concatenated. If I forward a mail to someone to say 'what do you think?' and they then reply to the original sender (who isn’t me), then the intermediary mail is also sent with virtually no knowledge to the sender. Unless you purposely go and delete attachments and the in-between messages then the whole lot gets forwarded and it isn’t obvious to the person sending it what the receiver will see.

Feature No.3:
Websites that ask you to input passwords or pins but never jump the curser to the next security box. Some of the banking sites do this brilliantly, but the rest are just frustrating as you tap in your most sacred economic details, and the next second you've been blocked from your pin and your account has been frozen for the next two weeks or your email account has gone into non-committal, go-away mode..... Why not have a max of two digits in each box, then move the curser, don't leave it in the same box?

Modelling semantics: purpose or procrastination?

Sitting in an office listening to the every day twitterings of work colleagues around you is quite fascinating.
Do people believe expressing their problems out loud will help them or just ease the pain knowing that others can share their dilemma?
The current discussion going on around me is by a bunch of Information Modellers. They are discussing the fact of whether modelling attributes as 'Item Details' or 'Note Details' or 'Item Note Details' in a Prescription message is useful and sensible? Three of them think it is, one of them doesn't. The one that doesn't has a problem with the word 'detail', apparently it's not meaningful.
Maybe they have a point, but maybe none of them have a point.
While I appreciate the detail and use of comprehensive, coherent models, I can't help question at which point do you stop with the modelling because it's OK, it's good enough for now, and get on with the implementation and delivery aspects of Health IT?
Do we model forever because it's a riveting conversation to have over coffee or is there a means to an end that may possibly be to have some real use in real systems??
I think the former may be the order of the day for this office for sometime to come, unfortunately, thank goodness for headphones....