dale lane

Today was a day off to be a ‘school host’ for Blue Fusion – IBM Hursley’s annual week-long Science Fair for Year 11 (15/16 year old) school pupils. The aim is to promote the benefits of science, technology and engineering to a younger audience. We invite local schools to come to the Hursley Park labs and compete in a variety of activities. The activites are designed and developed by teams at Hursley, focusing on balancing education with entertainment.

As a school host, I got to show the students and teachers from one school around today. It’s been too long since I last got to spend a day at work doing something ‘fluffy’ like this. I really like Blue Fusion – it’s a unique chance for us to try and encourage and enthuse what could be the next generation of scientists and engineers.

I haven’t had much to do with it leading up to the event this year, but I know from my involvement in previous years how much work is involved in getting it all ready. Hundreds of school children, ten guest speakers (some from outside IBM), and ten original hands-on educational activities. It’s an exciting challenge, and a satisfying extension to the ‘day job’.

Some flyers have appeared in the canteen at work advertising a new benefit hopefully coming soon for us. The idea is that we will be able to transfer money direct from our gross salary to our ID badges which we use to buy food in the work canteen. In this way, we make a saving by not paying NI and tax on money we spend on food and drink at work.

When you add up the amount I spend at the canteen for lunch each day, as well as the amount at the coffee bars and vending machines, this could actually add up to a nice amount of money!

I already do this ‘salary sacrifice’ thing (paying for stuff out of gross salary to save money on tax and NI) on pension contributions, and childcare vouchers. Thinking of food and coffee as a benefit sounds strange though! 🙂

WebSphere MQ SSL Configuration Checker got released by IBM as a freeware application today.

It’s an application that I initially wrote earlier this year. It’s a tool that has been used by WebSphere MQ Service since last May with customers reporting SSL errors. The idea was that it’d be easier to ask customers to run a single executable tool which collects (hopefully!) all the information that we’d need to diagnose the problem, rather than asking them to send us their channel definitions, certificate labels, environment data, etc. etc. Over time, I’ve been extending it and improving it, to broaden the range of problems that it can identify, and it’s now got to the point now where a customer can hopefully run it on their own without needing us to review the output.

As a result, it has now been released as freeware – what we call a ‘SupportPac’ – to make it more widely available. Who knows – it might avoid a customer needing to wait for us to respond to a problem report to identify what’s wrong with an SSL setup?

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Delegates from the Institution of Engineering and Technology visited IBM Hursley this evening for an event billed as an opportunity to see some of our latest software development work.

They got to see presentations and demonstrations of six recent Hursley projects – one of these was my pitch about the Extreme Blue project that I worked on last summer.

I’ve not been a member of one of these professional bodies before, so it was fun to see what the event was like. The attendees were an interesting mix – some were retirees wanting to keep up to date with the latest news, some were professionals from other businesses looking to network and learn about what else is going on, and some were university students at the start of their careers. Some came in suits, some were in jeans and a sweatshirt. Some were young, some were old. The one thing that they had in common was a curiosity and an interest in technology.

It was a lot of fun – I enjoy the chance to do presentations like this, and they asked a lot of thought-provoking questions. I don’t get to do this sort of stuff at work nearly as often as I’d like!

It’s been a few weeks since I started working-from-home on a regular basis, so I thought tonight would be a good time to stop and think about how it is going.

When my daughter was born, my wife took a year off work to stay at home with her. For the second year, she started working part-time, so we started Grace at a local nursery Monday to Wednesday while my wife worked. After Grace turned two last month, my wife went back to work full-time. We didn’t feel the time was right for Grace to be in full-time childcare, so as an intermediate step I started working from home on Thursday and Fridays.

I was nervous about whether I’d get any work done with a two-year old in the house, and whether Grace would be able to cope without the level of attention that she gets in full-time childcare. But so far, it’s working.

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