How deep was it?

Whenever I've talked to people about our flooding, the obvious question they ask is "how deep was it?". I can tell them it was six foot, and we have a lot of pictures of the city under water to demonstrate it, but it's still hard to visualise exactly how it feels to have so much water in your house.

We managed to take a few pictures inside the house during the flood, I already posted up a few in an earlier post. We finally got around to scanning some more and brightening up the darker areas, so I'm posting them here for all to see.

The first picture is the only clear one. I don't remember the timings exactly, but I think this is probably after about 1 hour.

Click for Larger Image

The second and third pictures just show the progression of the water level. Unfortunately the flash caught a couple of stairs in the foreground and these had to be heavily brightened.

Finally, a picture of me by the same doorway, taken today. As you can see, our house is being torn apart for renovation.

Alpha? Beta?

What do you call a software release when it's not really an alpha or beta release?

I've just updated the "Preview" version of our staff rota/roster software, Oriador Rota.

A couple of months ago we hit upon the idea of releasing a version of the product which would cover the automatic scheduling features we were getting requests for. We knew we could get the core working relatively quickly, but that it would take much longer to perfect. Just as importantly, we knew that making it easy to use and developing a quality interface for all the new features would be a major task.

So, we could keep the new features to ourselves until they were 100% ready, or we could find a way to make them available without affecting the majority of users. Once we reached the stage where we felt the auto-scheduling would work in enough scenarios, we decided that if customers need access to these features, we should make them available.

Internally we called it a beta release, we even called it a beta when talking to some of the customers who were requesting the features. But it's not a beta by any definition I've ever heard! First of all there was no alpha stage, but also, the interface and the feature list aren't even fixed yet. There are still a lot more features on our development schedule for the next version, and the features added so far need to be a lot more friendly for first time users.

Maybe we could have called it an alpha release, but alpha always implies bugs to me, and I'm a developer. I don't know what non-technical users would think of an alpha release, but I don't want anyone to feel apprehensive about trying the software.

So we settled on Preview, and I still think that's the most appropriate name for it.

Empty Forums, Chicken & Egg?

You may or may not have noticed, but the Forums on the Web Helper Browser site are a bit empty.

I'm really glad we have them, as I want our users to have as many options as possible to contact us. I also want to make sure they know we're available to answer their questions quickly and that we'll pay attention to their comments and suggestions; forums seem like a great way to do this.

But maybe an empty or underpopulated forum is actually a liability. I wonder if any potential customers leave the site because of an empty forum.

I realise there are options available to me. I could rope in everyone I know to register. I could have friends, family and staff post simple questions and suggestions and then I could answer them. Or I could start posting messages to the forums each time I fix a bug, release an update, or post a new blog entry.

I could do those things, and I'm sure I wouldn't be the first, but I'm not going to. Perhaps I should have created the forums 6 months ago and had our testers use them. That way they certainly wouldn't be empty, but they still wouldn't contain any useful information for users of the live product.

I'm happy to accept the fact that the forums are going to look a bit bare for a while. The product is new, so it's natural for it to have new forums.

Download.com

This week I listed one of our products on Download.com. The impression I got from looking around the web is that it's the only download site that generates enough traffic to justify the investment. If any readers have other suggestions please let me know.

I went for the basic listing package, it's quite reasonably priced at $79 for a whole year. They do have a premium package, which costs $199 per month, but that seems expensive. Also, they didn't really sell me on what the premium package had to make it so much better than the basic listing. I'm sure it's useful to have my updates processed and online in 1 day instead of 5, but I think I can live without it, and I can pay a $249 per update fee to have one rushed through in an emergency.

It's too soon to say if it's worthwhile, but as I write this we've had 14 downloads. It's only been up 2 days (and their figures don't seem to be instantly updated), so I guess that's a reasonable start. Some people could also be finding our software on download.com, then clicking through to our product site for more information, and using our standard download form. I've noticed a small increase in downloads over the last couple of days, download.com could be easily be responsible for that too.

The product I listed was our Staff Rota/Rostering software, Oriador Rota. If I still think it was a good idea in a couple of weeks time I'll list our web browser too.

Lessons Learned

I'm sure there are more, but three of the most obvious things I learned from the flooding of our house were:-

1. It's not a good idea to keep all your shoes in one place. I used to keep all my shoes under the stairs, so obviously they were ruined as soon as the water hit. I managed to squeeze into a pair of Bea's boots (flat soles fortunately), they were a couple of sizes too small, but it didn't matter at the time. Once we got out of the house we were stuck in the center of town, no traffic could get in or out. Fortunately my parents were available to collect us (and accomodate us), but we had to walk 15-20mins across town to an accessible street. Three months later I can still see my blister marks as a reminder.
2. Disasters are a lot easier when you're young, childless and petless. It was scary helping Bea down into that little boat, and climbing out onto the ledge to lower myself down, but compared to our elderly neighbour we had it easy. I can't imagine how it must have felt for those handing down their babies and children. And as for pets, my brother lived a few doors away from me, and while Bea and I had time to pack, he was busy trying to round up all their animals. So, while I hobbled across town in my wife's boots, at least I had a change of clothes, he had a snake in his shirt and a rabbit in his bag.
3. The values you put in insurance policies really matter. Seems like an obvious one, but next time I have to renew my home contents insurance I'll be making sure the amount is actually enough to cover what I have. This whole experience would have been a lot less stressful if I'd just taken the time to calculate it when I took out the policy.

Here's a little series of pictures we took inside our house during and just after the flood. The first was quite early, not long after we decided the water was too cold and dirty for us to risk wading around trying to salvage some of our things.

I think the second shows the flood water about as high as it went, it's hard to say for sure as it may have risen after we left. We know from the water marks on the wall in the aftermath that it peaked at about six foot.

This final photo shows the aftermath, maybe a day or two after the flood. As you can see, river water is very dirty.

Getting things done

A long time ago, Joel Spolsky wrote an article about getting things done, called Fire and Motion.

I've read a lot of great articles on Joel's site, but this one really helps me out on a regular basis. When you set your own goals and rely on yourself for motivation, you really need an external voice of reason sometimes.

I can be very hard on myself, and usually expect too much, but this article always makes me feel that any time I spend improving either of our products is something to be proud of. It also reminds me that people do have unproductive days, but that things usually turn around before too long, and it all balances out in the end.

So when I have one of those days I think about all this, and I take pride in anything I've already done, and try not to worry too much about what I still have to do.

Punch-out a Bagel

Anyone who knows the old Nintendo game Punch-out will love this little web game (turn your sound down first if you shouldn't be playing games):-

Frusion Breakfast Brawl

It's an ad for a breakfast drink, but you can tell a lot of effort has gone into making it feel exactly like the original NES game.

I found this on 4 color rebellion.

My First Post

Welcome to my blog.

I'm not sure exactly how to start this, except to give you some idea of the kind of posts you can expect from me. I've always heard that you should only write about what you know, so I guess the best thing to do is tell you the kind of things I know.

On the evidence of the last few years, I know about software development and starting a software business, I know all about weddings and coping with a long distance relationship and I know all about living on a tight budget. I now know more than I ever wanted to know about flooding, and how it feels to lose almost everything you own in a couple of hours. In the last year I was also unfortunate enough to learn something about employment tribunals and racial discrimination (from my wife's case).

I also expect video games will come up quite regularly, as it's really the only hobby I've had for any length of time that I still manage to make time for. I think I'll always feel a little guilty that my X-Arcade survived our flooding while wedding photos drowned, but really we both just grabbed what we could... there really wasn't time. Really. I would probably have saved some of these if there'd been any time.

In the coming months, I'm going to be learning about culture shock, as my wife and I start extracting ourselves from the UK to eventually relocate to the US. We just booked a ticket today for a three month trial period. It's about time I was the one to suffer the culture shock, Bea is originally from L.A., and I'm sure that I'll have a much easier time than she's had having to adjust to rural England for 3 years.

As I keep mentioning, we had a recent problem with flooding. Back in January there was a major flood in our area. Here's a link to some news reports:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/photo_gallery/4159523.stm

So that, combined with Bea's employment issues (see Too American scanned jpeg or News Link), has really given us the push we needed to think about relocating. Our house isn't likely to be inhabitable again for at least another 5-6 months, so while we're transient we may as well see how far we can go.

Finally, I'd like to link you to my favorite flood picture - we only found it a few days ago - which shows my wife being rescued from our home:-

http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/photos/details.aspx?id=32792&category=470