As pointed out by Graham (my office mate) this morning. Chanelle, one of the house mates in this year’s Big Brother, looks suspiciously similar to my banned poster from a few years ago.

Remember the scene in Clueless*, where Cher turns to Dee and, talking about the new girl, goes, “Ooooh project”? Well that’s me. Pretty much my whole world runs on lists and projects. I’m far from being a good organiser/leader/mentor/presenter/teacher/inventor or any other of the incompetences we’re judged on at work, but give me a self-contained project and I’m away.

There’s something about turning a task into to a project that makes it more fun. It feels like one of those tricks parents use to make their kids do something they don’t really want to do, but it’s a trick that still fools me. The best work projects are the ones you’re not really supposed to be doing. When you’re not supposed to be doing a project, you can’t have anyone tell you how it should be done, monitor your progress or add requirements.

There’s this whole thing about mashup applications being quick to develop. I wonder if it is really quicker to develop them, or just that they tend to be small self-contained projects that people do for themselves or with a few of their friends and so they can get a lot done quickly?

My current in-progress projects include: a birthday card, a thing to show people’s IM status in video, an entry for a work situational application competition, some kind of cloud identification wall chart and something to show blog archives in a nicer way.

* It may be a chick flick, but it’s a great film and I’m not ashamed to admit I like it.

Thank you to everyone who voted for my picture in the Hursley Photo Competition. I won the “People’s Choice” award, which as Hanan said, is the best one as it’s the fan’s who vote.

Talking of great Hanan quotes, I can’t not make a written record of today’s, “when I was at my husband’s, wife’s funeral…” Rob’s threatened to ban her from dinner and I’d worry about her if she wasn’t ten times brainer than the rest of us.

Voting has opened for the work photo competition (yes yes, if my school had been the type of school to have had an audio visual club, I’d have been in, but it wasn’t that type of school).

The entries are all here (if you’re inside the firewall or some hotshot hacker dude) and I think it’s pretty obvious which one mine is.

Reasons You Shouldn’t Vote For Me

• Technically, it’s not going to be the best picture in the competition.
• It’s over-processed.
• Realistically, I didn’t have the best looking model.
• I don’t know what I’m doing, ISOs, f-stops, apertures you name it I don’t know it.
• The colour isolation thing was old hat when Speilberg did it in Schindler’s List.
• You already entered yourself (unlikely as you’re all far too cool).

Reasons You Should Vote For Me

• Well at least it’s not some overly pretentious abstract close-up.

We had to explain social networking to Royalty. I’m the one on the left, the guy on the right is the one with ten thousand men.

I’m doing a little side project at work, based on some stuff that the MIT Media Lab have. We want to do video representations of instant messaging status. So, instead of just having a, “darren is away” message you’d get a video of me showing that I’m away. It’s not for anything all that useful, we just thought it’d be cool and funny.

As a first step, I needed to build a flash video player that could respond to some javascript messages and queue up the appropriate combination of video clips for that status. Next step is connecting it to the Sametime server, but for now feel free to Control Darren.