If you are sick of hearing about me talk about GITI and her problems, upgrades, etc, feel free to skip this entry (unless you are Chris, in which case, boyfriend, your help is required).

I am having problems with GITI, but not on the level of things technologically working or not working, it’s more a matter of things not being philosophically right with it. It is one thing to record academic assignments in a fairly plan way, that’s all there is to it, you enter an assignment, do the assignment, then enter a grade for it. No big deal, no crisis, everything is self contained. Now, this philosophy does not hold for components of the Health module. Logging meal records and workout records that way is good for record keeping sake, but it is lacking for usefulness in life improvement. The masturbation log is probably ok as is, not much to it beyond a journal entry. My primary concern with these things is that GITI is not being as useful as it could be. A select box of exercises is fine for the most part, but it is lacking in depth. I find myself wishing I could have GITI describe the workout to me, or better yet, give me a description with a picture. This of course would require me being able to supply the information to GITI, but that shouldn’t be a problem. As it is now, I have no ability to add such information, mostly because of the limited nature of fields, but how much do we want to expand fields. Is there a use in other modules for that particular functionality? I think there could be. Category icons could be useful, and would certainly be something that might be welcome in GITI v3. As for the meal log, it is difficult to access and utilize. There is no clear way to retrieve data from it, other than entering a date by hand and that is not very user friendly. I know that GITI doesn’t have access to a huge nutritional database, but it would be nice if something simple could be added, but looking at the module, I do not know where such a function would be placed. I find myself looking at other modules and thinking that their functions are so simple, most have the functions of insert, update, view, and when we are lucky, delete. They do not tend to contain more than one major type of data, which in my opinion makes them less useful than they could be (with the exception of Education, that monster is self contained and everything makes sense in data structure land, just not in the UI).

A few days ago when preparing a user account and also when packing up GITI for a theoretical off-site implementation, I realized how little GITI actually does. Without user data GITI is a cold, barren place. It doesn’t even look like itself without user data. Perhaps having more information available in GITI would be useful. Obviously information that would have to be licensed would be out of the question, but yet, simple things that are fairly common knowledge (or can be easily obtained from Wikipedia) may be useful. Why should a user have to leave the site to figure out what a particular exercise is? At the moment there is no construct in GITI to allow for The Interface itself to have such information, all information is owned by the end users, and areas where System could own data for such purposes are not elaborate enough to handle the ideas I have. I suppose GITI Doc could handle a great deal of it, but it is still limited and is not secured for any type of inter-user sharing or anything like that, hence, System Docs would not be safe from end-user edits, which makes me uneasy.

Any time I think I have finished in some major way with GITI my life changes in such a way as I have to either add a module, or bring back to life a module from my past which had long since been forgotten (I know it’s been a long time when it still tries to access the common data commands, oh how GITI v1 can we get). I am not looking to overhaul GITI, I just need to figure out how to add a little more information and make GITI a little more useful.