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Up until a couple of years ago, going out to a restaurant was something we did only rarely - usually it would be a big family occasion, or the end of year celebration with a bunch of people from my wife's work or from a group I'd been performing with.
But since I've become part of the team at work, I seem to spend far more time at cafes and restaurants than ever in the past. In fact, in the last few weeks there have been several outings of this kind. We sometimes just go out and have a coffee while still working, since working at our place often consists of discussions about where things are going or have been. It's taken me a while to accept this as part of the job.
But we've also had dinners which may or may not be part of the working day. Last night was just such an occasion. It was a colleague's birthday last Wednesday, so we went out for 'drinks' after work, and wound up staying in the place for dinner as well. My boss joined us eventually with his wife, and most of the group who'd come for drinks stayed for dinner too. (And very nice it was, at a place called Mannequin, in North Rd). Four of the group sing together as a quartet called One Lucky Feller (there being only one bloke in the group) and while they were all together, they sang three songs for the birthday girl. They do close harmony and upbeat, jazzy numbers. Very satisfying on the ear.
Mannequin is an old two-storey house that's been altered quite considerably inside - at
least as far as the downstairs goes. There's a bar area in front, and the restaurant on a slightly lower level at the back. We went there last four or more years ago on my mother's birthday, so a return trip was probably overdue.
The group we were with last night were mostly from our house group, a fairly fluid group that meets irregularly. All of them have been people who've attended the same church as us at some point (with maybe one exception) and all of them have either moved to a different part of town or become somewhat disenchanted with the particular church milieu.
So we are mostly old friends. A couple of them have a small vineyard up near Otematata, where we went for a holiday at the beginning of the year. They were talking about the making of wine, and way different wines are put together. The wife of the couple commented on my wife's contemporary jewelry, but the latter pointed out that she'd bought it at church as part of a fundraiser for people in Asia who actually make the jewellery (!)
(Note that the spelling of jewellery seems to be getting altered more and more - note the recent version: jewelry - all excess letters removed!)
Anyway, I'm off to another party - a grandson's this time. More to eat....!
A friend of mine and I have been trying to work out a way to itemize the number of hours spent individually on various tasks in our office so that we can do reports at different times in the year that reflect how much time is spent on what projects or activities.
He's not working in our office, so it's required quite a bit of time to bring him up to speed as to what we do, how it's categorised and how we want to report at the end of it all. He only comes in for about an hour or so once a week, roughly, so it's taken a bit of time (although an hour is all I can manage at a time in terms of thinking about the topic!) And in the middle of the period all the staff in our office were up in the North Island for a wedding of another colleague - and this took out another chunk of time.
He's a person who looks at what's wanted first, whereas I'm keen to get onto the how as quickly as possible. This difference in approach required a bit of getting over - on my part. I like complex tasks dealt with as soon as possible. Complex tasks don't like to be dealt with that way.
At present I'm trying to figure out codes for the various areas in such a way that they're not totally impossible to enter as data, but they're not going to be useless when it comes to reporting either. He's managed to cull down my original idea of having two lots of codes for the same items (so we could report to two different groups separately); he likes to keep things as simple as possible, and keeps reminding me that computers are simple beings when all's said and done.
It isn't essential that we have extensive, detailed reporting; rather knowing that we can report in that way is a kind of cheap insurance for the day when someone decides that they'd really, really like to know details, the sort we can't easily provide at the moment.
Our next step is to see if there's any ready-to-go software that we can use rather than having to build something from scratch. I already have Mind Your Own Business on my home computer, so I'm familiar with that, and I've used a programme called Prophet (at my old shop). We're also going to look at the programme the church uses: Quicken. So there are some options, but whether they'll be adaptable enough for the task is something we've yet to discover!
Photo of my corner of the office - I mean, literally: that desk in the corner is where I hang out...
I haven't written much on here recently because I'm rehearsing for a play, and that always chews up some of my blogging time.
However, I came across an article in the Harvard Business online site the other day about the advantages of Twitter for businesses, which led me to the Twitter page: Twitter 101 for Businesses. . This has some very helpful information on it, and businesses would be well advised to read it. In fact, some of what they're discussing relates to a book I've been reading on and off - What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. In this book, Jarvis tries to reverse-engineer the success of the fastest growing company in the history of the world, the one company that truly understands how to succeed in the internet age, and then take those lessons and apply them to a number of industries, companies, and institutions, from carmakers to restaurants to universities to government.
He does it pretty well. But one thing he discusses early in the piece is how the Dell Computer Company nearly came a cropper because they failed to pay attention to the bloggers. The latter were complaining about the poor and offhand service received by Dell users, and the groundswell quickly reached epidemic proportions - as far as Dell was concerned. Once they cottoned on to the way to do business in the new world of the Internet, they had a huge turnaround in terms of positive feedback. It's a kind of online backup, if you'll pardon the pun.
That's what Twitter 101 is talking about too. They state: If you run a search for your brand, you may find people posting messages about how happy they are riding your bikes in the French Alpsgiving you a chance to share tips about cyclist-friendly cafes along their route.
Others may post minor equipment complaints or desired features that they would never bother to contact you aboutproviding you with invaluable customer feedback that you can respond to right away or use for future planning. Still others may twitter about serious problems with your bikesletting you offer customer service that can turn around a bad situation.
These are the sorts of things Dell discovered it could glean from the Net, and has been doing successfully in recent years.
When Twitter mentioned the word, 'search,' of course I immediately went looking for my name in their search engine. I mean, what else does one do? Yet again I discovered how many people use the word crowl when they mean crawl. On a single page of Twitter search results I found the following:
Going to crowl under my COVERS into my BED . ... and nap before ii start my DAY
A whole swarm of ants will crowl Your site
Omg dis bitch jus burped while im sittin here eatin ......UGH !!!! That makes mi skin crowl [this person needs to grow up, I think, as well as learn to spell!]
*Low crowl emanating from cooker in your direction* [don't ask me what that means - were they trying to write 'growl'?]
I heard the crowl of the jaguar. Is this a good omen? [Yup, looks like 'crowl' gets used for 'growl' too.]
Sad, isn't it.
For several years now, a friend of mine called John Arnold (he's actually a doctor, but we don't let that come between us) and I have been getting together about once a week to chew the fat.
We started out on this journey when I was still working at the bookshop, and could take time off in the morning for an hour-long tea-break. John and I used to meet in a cafe out in South Dunedin (where his medical practice is) and at first the purpose was for me to take him through a discipleship course. He'd not long become a Christian
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I'm assuming here in New Zealand the new FTC rules about declaring when you're being paid to promote an item in your blog don't apply. Unless suddenly everything the US does applies everywhere else...!
One Virginia Smith gave a good overview of the situation in a recent email that I was sent - you can find a web version of it here.
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Someone on Twitter pointed me towards an interesting blog post by David Mullen, in which the latter writes about five ways in which Twitter makes you smarter.
One of these was that it makes you be concise - in fact there's a certain delight in getting to exactly 140 characters in a tweet. Mullen actually says Twitter will make you a better writer. Well, I guess that's possible considering that having the ability to refine your thoughts down to the basics has a certain value. It's not necessarily a sign of good writing, though, in my opinion. The good use of words, long or short, is a better criterion
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Isn't it funny how some words survive that seem a little odd? Sconce is an example. It's a word used in relation to candles or lamps, and merely means a kind of holder. In fact if the examples on the Net are anything to go by candle sconces can mean a great variety of things of many varied designs. Check out the example in the picture, for instance.
It comes with the name Bigso Leaf Wall Sconce. Bigso is just as odd a word as sconce.
I always think 'sconce' is something to do with scones - those wonderful doughy things that are great with lashings of butter on them, and cheese mixed in them, or even dates (though dates come a good second to cheese in my opinion
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While avoiding working on things on the computer I was supposed to be doing, and spending too much time on things I wasn't, I received a couple of emails.
One was from a guy in Canada who is the historian for a magazine called Chess Scotland. He'd been looking for something completely different and found a photo of my father and some dozen or more other chess players at a tournament in Australia. I'd posted the photo on my family blog, and then put a second post up after having tried to decipher my father's writing on the back of the photo, and list the people who were there
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This week at work I've been on my own in the office the whole time. It's been great: I've got rid of a whole pile of little jobs that had accumulated, and a good deal more on top. I had the time to concentrate on stuff that needed thinking about (especially when it came to thinking about figures and why they didn't balance). I enjoy working with the other two people, but it's also good just to have some time to focus without interruption!
One thing I haven't managed to do much with is the clutter. Ours is a great office for piles of cluttered paper. Usually we each have a fairly good idea what's on our desks, but it's not ideal. A lot of stuff could be filed away if we had time to do filing
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September 30th 2009 08:33
Along with five other trainees, I began a course today to become a Supervisor. Not as in supervising people who are working under me, but as in supervising those who come to me for supervision.
Plainly I've learned a lot already
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least as far as the downstairs goes. There's a bar area in front, and the restaurant on a slightly lower level at the back. We went there last four or more years ago on my mother's birthday, so a return trip was probably overdue. 
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Comment by Mike Crowl
on Three strikes and you're out
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