John's Ramblings

Last night was the much-hyped inaugural banquet for the HCDE department’s diversity mentorship program.  Boeing gave the department a grant to start this program, and this kickoff event was intended to bring together a bunch of “diverse” undergrads and then meet & chat with alumni.  While the turnout wasn’t quite as high as what was expected, I don’t think, we still had eight or nine undergrads and a fairly comparable number of alumni.  After everyone had finished eating the provided dinner, we undergrads rotated around speed-dating-style, giving each of us — in theory — about five minutes to talk with each graduate.In reality, though, this didn’t work out exactly as intended.  Some graduates sat by themselves, some sat in small groups, some students rotated correctly, some bounced around randomly…  The layout of the room kind of sucked, as well.  Rather than a bunch of small tables, we all sat at two long tables.  Not only did this kinda get in the way of the intended “small group setting” feel, but it also meant I pretty much had to stick to one side of the room since I couldn’t squeeze between the tables without everybody having to get up out of their chairs.  Even so, though, I was still able to meet with most of the grads.

The idea was that, at the end of the evening, each of us mentees would have hopefully met with at least a few potential mentors with professional interests similar to our own.  After we got home, we had this little web form to fill out where we were to name three people that we would potentially like to have as our mentor.  By some mysterious system unbeknownst to us, these top three lists will be gathered and a mentor will be assigned to each of us.  Slightly disconcertingly for me, a significant portion of the potential mentors I talked to were purely tech writers or editors — fields I really don’t see myself going into into the long-term.  Fortunately, there were enough IxD / UX people I was able to talk to to have some solid possibilities.  No idea when I’ll find out to whom I’ve been assigned, though.  Hopefully sometime in the next month or so.

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In completely unrelated news, I’ve been playing around with the Diomedes IRC Client over the last couple days.  It’s a lightweight client built on Adobe AIR that supports the standard set of features you’d find in your average client.  For years, I’ve been using Pidgin/Gaim for both IM and IRC.  Lately, though, I’ve wanted to be able to easily just pop in and out of IRC networks to see what’s going on in various channels without having to login to all my IM services as well (or screw around with modifying autoconnect settings for all of my different accounts).  Finding a replacement client was harder than I anticipated, though.  Web-based clients are just…crap.  Always.  Mirc’s nice, but way more complicated than I need, it’s shareware, and it doesn’t integrate very well with Dragon.  So far, though, Diomedes seems pretty solid.  If you’re an IRC user and aren’t philosophically opposed to Adobe AIR (seriously, I don’t know why these folks are coming out of the woodwork lately…) you should check it out.