Too Much Work On The Brain

Last Updated on: 17th February 2013, 08:34 am

Oh my god I have to write this dream down, like immediately, before it loses all its awesomeness. Hopefully the people who follow me on Twitter and work with me don’t look at me on Tuesday like I’ve completely lost my mind. But one thing’s for sure. I think about work a lot even when I’m sleeping.

So apparently some people I worked with built a desktop version of Steve’s house helper app that he dreamed about. This thing was specifically designed for within D2L, but as an experiment. Let me see if I can capture all the awesome before it erodes from my brain as dreams do.

It could make any recipe you gave it, provided you put it through a recipe converter that changed the recipe into very very literal instructions. Imagine if you were giving your recipe to Amelia Bedelia. Then, you could ask it to do stuff like serve a bowl of the stuff and bring it to anyone in the company. It had a floor plan of everybody’s desk, and so if you said “Bring a bowl of soup to Sandra”, a robot would pick up a bowl of the soup, consult a map of everybody’s desk, and then walk it over to Sandra’s desk *oh boy. With all the moving and expanding going on, that could be painful for the map-makers for the program*.

Anyway, that wasn’t the point of the dream. It was the coolest software ever, because you could also see what was going on where the app’s actual hands were doing stuff. So on your screen, you could see the pot of soup bubbling. You could see the robot stirring it. You could see it putting stuff in it. It made pasta once, and you could see the mushrooms and stuff cooking. If it poked a noodle, it would tell you how tender it was…I assume in some measurable way. You could see it being strained, served, and eventually you could see the bowl of food being delivered.

So, I walked over to the person who wrote this awesome program and was telling them how cool it was…but I wondered if it was possible to have an ARIA alert fire when the program had served the bowl of soup, or strained the pasta, or completed whatever action you had asked it to do, because visually you were getting feedback, but I wasn’t getting any.

…

And there was a pause.

…

And a longer one.

…

At the end of which, the developer said “I just made you soup! From here! with a recipe! And you’re asking for an ARIA alert?”

At which point I woke up, and thought “Aww, come on! I wasn’t being too unreasonable…was I?” And then laughed my head off.

Please understand, no one at work has ever made me feel that way. Everybody’s pretty keen on making their stuff rock even harder. That’s what makes my awesome job so much more awesome. But I had to laugh. Is my brain trying to tell me I’m making unreasonable requests of people?

This is probably only funny to people who work with me, and Steve, because he hears about work and stuff. But I had to post it because whenever I get to the ARIA alert part, I laugh all over again.

Aside: For a long time when I heard JAWS say WAI ARIA, it sounded like it was saying “Why ARIA” like Why ARIA? What’s the point? I was wondering why all these people were questioning the validity of something so awesome…then I looked at the spelling, and felt a little silly.