Young people make a massive contribution to society

November 16th, 2006

This isn’t really something new that I learned today, but tonight did reinforce it for me so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Tonight was the Solent Youth Action Annual Awards Evening – our chance to reward the efforts of the volunteers that we support. In it, we try to recognise as many individuals as possible, while reflecting on the wide variety of activity that takes place over the year. And it was inspiring to see.

The evening was a mixture of entertainment, awards presentations and guest speeches. The entertainments were all demonstrations of some of the volunteering that young people have been doing, and I hope that we challenged a few preconceptions about ‘what is volunteering’ with these. For example, with the rock band of students from Mountbatten School. On the face of it, some might not see being in a band as volunteering, but musicians who play fundraising gigs to raise money for charity, provide free entertainment at charity and community events, and teach some of their skills to younger kids, are making a positive contribution to their community. This is volunteering.

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What IET members do in the evenings

November 15th, 2006

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!

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The etch-a-sketch approach to legislation

November 14th, 2006

The Companies Bill became The Companies Act 2006 last week. I’m technically (and somewhat scarily!) a company director, so it’s something that I need to be aware of, although I’ve got to admit that I’ve not followed the progress of this one as closely as I did the other recent Bill to be passed – Charities Act 2006.

This one is big. It’s apparently the largest Bill ever to go through Parliament. At one of the last debates on the Bill a couple of weeks ago, the amendments being discussed filled 319 pages so I shudder to think what the whole Act would look like if printed!

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The importance of presentation, part 2

November 13th, 2006

Does the look of blogs matter?

I’ve not done much to customize the look of this. I guess the main reason for that I because I read all of the blogs that I follow in an RSS reader (Egress, if you’re interested) which grabs the text and images. I hardly ever see what the actual site looks like.

It’s much the same with my own blog. I write most of the posts on my phone, so I don’t see the actual site often myself.

So, I’ve not had much incentive to change the appearance from the WordPress default.

Does that matter? Do people need a personalised look to the blogs that they read, or is the content enough?

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Using IContextMenu to extend Windows apps

November 12th, 2006

I read a couple of weeks ago about Google acknowledging that they’d released too many products, and deciding to focus on developing features for existing products where possible in future. screenshotWith this in mind, this evening’s idea for Windows Mobile development is an extension to one of the core applications rather than a new application.

‘Email Triage’ is my extension to Pocket Outlook. Pocket Outlook comes with Tasks, Calendar and Messaging (for emails, SMS, and MMS). Despite the way the ‘Pocket Outlook’ sounds, these are more or less separate applications, which don’t interact other than sharing a common database to store information. As a user, the common name feels like mainly a branding thing. So I thought I’d try bringing them a bit closer together.

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The importance of presentation

November 11th, 2006

I mentioned a couple of days ago how charities are increasingly becoming more business-like, or at least are keen to give the impression of this to support an image of professionalism. So, I thought it was worth pointing out that we’re no different!

It’s Annual Review time of the year again – with SYA having our Annual Awards Evening on Thursday and the Southampton Samaritans AGM next Monday. As part of the work for both, we’ve put together Annual Reports. And for the first time (for both), instead of doing it ourselves very simply with Microsoft Word, we’ve got a graphics design person to give it a glossy, professional look for us.

The finished products can be found here (SYA) and here (Samaritans). They look amazing, so much better than our efforts in previous years, and we owe a big thanks to the guys who did them.

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How to provide 24-hour cover

November 10th, 2006

Samaritans provide a 24-hour helpline offering emotional support to anyone who wants to phone. How the 24-hour-a-day service is provided is soon to change.

At the moment, we take it in turns to do the ‘night shift’ – manning the phone from 11pm to 7am. Opinions on the night shift vary – Artangel offers an interesting perspective on what it’s like which is well worth a read. Samaritans websites mention it in various ways, such as this from Guildford branch:

…a night shift – manning the phones from 11 pm till 7 am next day. So if you see a colleague at work, a family friend or a neighbour looking a bit bleary eyed sometimes, perhaps that’s why. We are one of the few 24/7 charities in Britain – and thus callers are welcome equally at 3 pm and 3 am.

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Working from home… works

November 9th, 2006

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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