callenb.org

The role of car parks in children's football

2011-10-22T00:00:00+01:00

Bear with me on this one.

I first started taking my eldest son to play in football matches in 2004 when we lived in the USA and he’s still playing today, and now his younger brother plays too. They are at different clubs, but that is neither here nor there. The eldest is at California FC and the youngest at Pinewood FC. It is something they both look forward to and is an important part of their lives. I went to a Rugby school, but still played football at breaks, on the street and occasionally in the park. I even played every Friday evening when i was about 14. I loved it too, and when my boys started to play, I found myself learning to coach and as well as managing age groups for some 7 years, I also ended up as a Club Welfare Officer.

In my short time as a Club Welfare Officer, I managed to get about 80 coaches through their CRB check, most come willingly but others just don’t get it. I also got rid of one coach. Another coach at a tournament had seen and heard his behaviour, and was concerned. Seeing the good side of people, he offered to mentor him to help him understand how you treat children. The offer was declined and because children were upset and things said that were inappropriate, he had to leave his coaching role. It caused a bit of an uproar with the parents because the team was doing well. I had a meeting with them all, including the coach in question. Basically, they all agreed the coach was a bit “strong” at times and a couple of children cried and were upset. It turns out that since it wasn’t their kids he was picking on, it didn’t seem important. It wasn’t all the parents, but I really have no time for the ones that it was. I consider them cowards.

So what has that got to do with car parks?

Before I get to that, I watched my eldest son play in a cup match last Sunday. They lost 3-2 in extra time. I ran the line and I have to say it was a good match, only spoiled by the behaviour of the opposition coach and some of their parents. The referee was challenged for nearly all his decisions, I was challenged and the coach was having a right go at his players who were an under 12 team, so most would be just 11. The referee was a teenager, and I felt he handled the situation and the game excellently. I made sure I congratulated him after the match and said I wouldn’t referee here if that is what you had to face. That’s right, it was their own referee.

What I don’t get is this was an 11 a side match so there are about 11 mums and dads who are happy to let their kids be treated like that and a young referee who thinks it’s normal. If a teacher in school said half of what the coach and some parents said, they’d be straight up the school in a blink of an eye, and too right. Somehow, when it comes to football it’s sadly a different matter.

On the other hand, I was very pleased with my son’s coaches and despite losing they never once stopped providing encouragement. The end of match talk had them leaving with their heads held high. It is my eldest’s first season at this club and the move has been good for him. My other boy is still at another club and guess what? He plays the same opposition on Saturday. I’ll watch out for behaviour, but it is usually at a team level rather than a club and I hope it will be fine.

I urge anyone who watches children’s football to take a few steps back or stand on the opposite side of the pitch and just listen to what the coaches and spectators are saying. I’ve done this a lot, particularly at football festivals. One thing I’ve noted is that teams that get into finals have quiet coaches for the most part. They talk to players and not bawl them out. They also tend to have parents that support rather than coach. When I was a Club Welfare Officer, I would intervene with some spectators, who were trying to argue with a referee or having a go at players, and I’d ask them what car parks had to do with children’s football. They never knew so I had to tell them. the car park is the best place for you to be when your child is playing football.

EDIT: My youngest son, who plays for a different team to my eldest had a match against the same club today (Saturday 22nd October 2011). Two phrases the coach repeated with the kind of venom normally reserved for a stereotyped Sergeant Major were “Get stuck in” and “Take them out”. He came out with more crass phrases, but they were the two most “popular”. It wasn’t the volume, because volume isn’t bad in itself, it was the tone and the delivery. The play stopped on more than one occasion, just because he yelled. We’re talking about a U10 match where most of the children are just 9 years old.

I had a camera with me that could video and it wasn’t until after the match that I realised I should have videoed the coach in question. I’ve come up with an idea to name and shame these people, and am busy looking into it. I hope I can make it happen.

Workpattern Re-started

2011-08-17T00:00:00+01:00

It’s no secret that I’ve always wanted to produce a piece of software that is generally available, and I’ve been trying to write a rubygem called Workpattern for some time. I have restarted it for what I hope is the fourth and final time. Workpattern will be a date calculation rubygem that takes into account patterns of working and resting time. The core Ruby classes that represent date and time allow calculations by adding a duration such as days or seconds to a date and returning the new #Date or #DateTime as the result.

Although there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in (almost) every day, the working day is not that straight forward. Many working days are 8 hours a day, some are less at 7.5 hours a day. Sometimes there is a public holiday instead of a working day, and sometimes people work at nights or longer hours but less days per week. The Weekend, Public Holidays and Vacations are all days that are non working or resting days.

This Workpattern rubygem was born to allow date related calculations to take into account real life working and resting times. In essence it is told about resting and working periods and will add or subtract durations and dates as well as find out the duration between two dates. All durations are in minutes and all dates include hours and minutes.

A Short Illustration

In real life we may be reasonably confident that it will take us 32 hours to write a document. If we started on a Thursday at 9:00am we wouldn’t be working 32 hours without interruption (let’s pretend we’re not software developers for this one!). We’d go home at the end of one working day and not return until the next. We’d also not do anything on the weekend. We would probably work 8 hours on Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday to complete the work.

The Workpattern rubygem will be able to tell you that if you started at 9:00 am on Thursday, you should be finished at 6:00 pm on Tuesday – you were allowed an hour for lunch each day! For it to do that it has to know when you work and when you rest.

Taking over a Hot Desk

2011-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

I’m currently working a mere 6 miles from home at a Gas company, where I am attached to the IT department helping them implement Oracle Primavera P6 for one of their business processes. I’ve been here since last April and have been using a Hot Desk until this morning, when I took possession of my own desk.

It had been someone’s desk a few weeks ago and then turned into a Hot Desk before being delivered to me.

I thought I’d share the list of stuff I found on the desk and in the pedastal filing cabinet underneath it. In addition there was a newspaper on the floor that was published as long ago as the 6th September 2010. Tomorrow I will be bringing in a black plastic bag and dumping all the rubbish in it.

I went back to my previous desk to see what state I had left it in, and am quite pleased to say I left a HSSE booklet and a hazard reporting card. Two things that should be there for new people. The next time you are sitting in work at your desk, please take a look around. Ask yourself if it is the kind of place you would show your husband/wife/children. You’ll be spending a good portion of your weekly life there so I think it is worth making it the best you can. I like my work desk to be tidy, and adopt a clear desk policy at the end of the day. Any drawers, filing cabinets and the like have just the immediate work in it, if anything at all.

I found no work related documents on my new desk or in the pedastal, but this is what I did find.

Stuff on the Desk

39 pence lying in a loose pile as 2 × 10p, 2 × 5p, 3 × 2p and 3 × 1p
a small reel of tape with a 2p in the hole in the middle.
a post-it note with a mobile telephone number on it.
an unsolved Rubiks Cube for one of the internal projects
an almost empty bottle of Cholula Hot Sauce
a 2010 Calendar setup on display and a 2011 calendar not on display – it’s 2011!
two swipe cards with nothing but a magnetic strip and an arrow on them
one unopened item of mail addressed to an individual – dated fall/winter 2010 so has probably been here for at least 2 months
2 sheets of paper stuck together by tape which looks like 5 rows of a very wide Excel spreadsheet
A novel called Autumn by David Moody with a tag line of The Hit Zombie Novel
A book called The 80 Minute MBA by Richard Reeves and John Knell

Stuff in the Pedastal

an empty food bag from the canteen
a pair of dirty Merrel trainers – see photo at top of post
a carton containing 11 Non-Drowsy Hayfever relief 10mg tablets from Boots
a Fruit Flapjack with a best before of 21 February 2011 – I won’t be eating it
a new box of Berocca 15 tropical fruit flavour effervescent tablets
a small bottle of Carex Hand Gel – Moisture Plus
a small bottle of Covonia Chesty Cough Mixture
a packet of Marks & Spencer liquid filled blackberry & echinacea flavoured gum
half a tube of King of Shaves Shave Gel
a little cannister of Nivea for Men Silver Protect
a razor
a tube of John Frieda Conditioner
an opened Lynx Rise Shower Gel
two tea spoons, one metal and one plastic
a small roll-on of 4Head headache treatment
a small tube of Norwegian formula hand cream
several Gaviscon chewable tablets

End of the Road, Start of a New Journey

2011-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

I’ll be making some changes to this site which should result in me making more use of it. As much as I like the Textpattern as a CMS, it is a bit too much for a blog. I’ve been looking around the place and came across Jekyll which I have found to be just right. As a result i will be converting this site to use Jekyll in the next few weeks.

I have already been using Jekyll for two other sites I am running. Both for different reasons.

Affiliate Marketing

The first one is an experiment in Affiliate Marketing. I’d like to see if I can drive some traffic to it and make at least one sale. The real objective to it is to use it to understand more about SEO. The site is called Stuff We Reviewed and I think I picked the wrong item to put on it, but it’s there. Only three articles at the moment, but more to come. I make money if people click through on the site and buy stuff from Amazon.

The site is about Kenwood Food Mixers. i have a general comparison page of four mixers called The Kenwood Chef Range and two separate articles. One is on the Kenwood Chef Classic KM366 and the other is about the Kenwood Chef Titannium KM020 . One thing for certain is that I have a much better appreciation of these mixers. I might even buy one myself.

Anyway it is really all in aid of affiliate marketing and learning about SEO.

Oracle Primavera P6

I have started another site which has just a couple of articles on it at the moment. It is inspired by Git Ready which is a site about using the git source control system. My site is about Oracle Primavera P6. It is called Using P6 I have three areas, one for Users, one for Programmers and one for Administrators. the idea is that I put tips up there as often as I can, along with any useful internet resources to do with Primavera P6.

Goodbye Apache, Hello Nginx

I’ve tried using nginx on my laptop and it seems a lot faster than Apache. As a result I’ve ditched Apache from the laptop and will be doing the same to my server. I’m moving from Apache to nginx. I hope later on to put Yaws on it, which is written in Erlang.

Other Ideas that May or May Not Happen

I’ll just list these.

Get the Workpattern rubygem to a state I dare let others use it. This is a gem that performs date calculations taking acount of resting and working times that can be defined to the minute.

Have a go at an application that allows you to schedule when to tweet on twitter. the idea is you send a tweet off and it tweets again at certain intervals. It’s for globals to catch the world at the right time of their day.

Look at the P6 Configuration Transporter. This could go one of two ways. the most likely is nowhere. the others are the original intent. This was to suck the configuration out of one P6 database and shove it in another. great for testing as well as applying the same configuration for different instances around the world.

P6 Configuration Documenter. This is an idea I’ve had a while to go into a P6 Database and produce documentation about the way it’s configured. The second phase was to apply further words to it.

Well that’s all folks

We Live In Hope

2010-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

The House Sale is going well, it’s just the House Purchase that’s causing problems. We’re on track to get the mortgage we asked for though I think I may have over-egged our income but we were well in the maximum. We’ll know for sure in the next couple of days.

In my original article on selling and buying a house in Wokingham I touched on some of the things that we’d like to do and reasons for the move. Although the one pictured is a new build, it presses an awful lot of buttons for us. It has a couple of drawbacks but we can live with them for now and overcome them in time.

The Drawbacks First

It’s right next to the railway line between Wokingham and Reading. We’ve been in the house during the day when trains go by and you can hardly hear them. We don’t know what it will be like late at night or early in the morning. Other people cope so we should as well.

The rooms upstairs aren’t that big. We need an office and the only place we can have one is if we convert half the garage.

The Big Advantages

It’s round the corner from the in-laws which is a very good thing. The boys can pop round if they want to and so can Grandma and Grandpa. We can look out of the back bedroom window and see their house about 200 yards away.

The Kitchen is a wonderful size and has granite work surfaces. All very nice. There is a Utility room which is a great thing to have. It’s long and loads of cupboard space. The boiler is in there and the design of the house means it’s away from the living and sleeping areas so no waking up in the night.

The garden is a reasonable size, not as big as we’d like but it’ll do.

It’s a very livable place for us.

Obfuscate email address on web page

2010-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

At home or in business, whenever I want to obfuscate an email address, this is the page I go to. Enter your email address and optional text and out pops the html. It’s actually the Finger Lakes BMW Club from Western NY State – thanks guys.

The Lazy Project Manager

2010-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Peter Taylor started this web site in 2008 and now he has just released a book, that I enjoyed reading. He was also good enough to respond to one of my e-mails. If you’re a PM take a look at his site and buy his book.

The Lights Are On But Nobody Is In

2010-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

I went into my office this very cold morning and started up my Dell Latitude D630 laptop that runs Ubuntu. The splash screen appeared with the scrolling output of the boot process. It then disappeared and was replaced with, well with nothing. The green power light and the Bluetooth light were the only sign of life. but it really was a case of the lights are on but nobody is in.

It took me ages to get my system back up, but here I’ll leave out the diversions and wrong routes I took. We have a number of computers at home, and I am now looking at Bacula to see if it can help automate my backups. I’m also keen to be able to just reload what I had from scratch, but that’s another story that’s hardly begun.

The Recovery Console

It was a cold day and so I tried rebooting now the laptop had warmed up a bit. This time I stared at the messages and the last one before it went blank was:
Waiting for root file system...

The next time I rebooted I hit the Escape key to bring up the Grub menu. I say reboot but it was actually holding down the power button for 4 seconds until it switched off, then pressing it to start again. Once there I selected the option for the Recovery Console for the latest kernel (2.6.31-16). This time I saw a lot more than the earlier messages. Unfortunately it didn’t get to the recovery console leaving me with the following.

Begin: Waiting for root file system... ...
[    6.804829] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WD       2500BEV External 1.05 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[    6.805521] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[    6.807014] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 488397168 512-byte logical blocks: (250 GB/232 GiB)
[    6.807902] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write protect is off
[    6.807962] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[    6.809673] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[    6.809712] sdb: sdb1
[   10.434396] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[   10.434438] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
Done.
Gave up waiting for root device.  Common problems:
 - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
   - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
   - Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
 - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules: is /dev/)
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/4eb02332-d390-46b0-8db6-d4af1abd992d does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

BusyBox v1.13.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.13.3-1ubuntu7) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands

(initramfs)

I’d never been in the recovery mode and it doesn’t look like I will now. This isn’t an area I would describe as my expertise. I work as a Project Management Consultant helping clients implement systems using tools like Primavera P6 and Deltek Cobra. I happen to do some programming, but this kind of stuff is placed in my mind under magic. There was only one thing to do so I did it. I read through the output to see if any of it made sense, and I think it did.

For some reason I am yet to discover, my laptop had stopped being able to find my hard disk with all the stuff on it. Yesterday it had no problem finding it. Today not a chance. I discovered that later versions of Ubuntu try and find the disk by it’s UUID. That’s the long hex-like number. If you look in the /dev/disk/by-uuid directory you’ll find a list of long numbers each relating to a storage device whether it’s your hard disk or a USB storage device. Now left at the shell prompt and typing ls /dev/disk/by-uuid gave me the UUID for the swap drive and a USB drive that was attached but not my drive.

The Road To Recovery

This was a long road for me, but I’ll shorten it for you. The first thing I should have donw was follow jadcox’s post on the Ubuntu Forums. When I do this I get to login.

Then I should have started up Synaptic Package Manager and upgraded the linux-image. When I did this I got 2.6.31-17 and I could boot once again. I then re-installed my 2.6.31-16 image and now that works.

All I can assume is there was some corruption crept in somewhere and it got me in this mess.

I feel quite vulnerable and so am looking at putting proper backup in and even being able to use Bacula to just reload everything from the last backup. In the meantime, I’m trying to find out how I can check the health of an Ubuntu installation.

Selling and Buying a House in Wokingham UK

2009-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

[EDIT: Today, 21st January 2010, we agreed to sell our house for £450,000. Now we get to compare our on-line Estate Agent with the high street ones. We also need to find a house somewhere in Wokingham. Any ideas?]

We’ve been talking about selling our house and moving somewhere else for over a year. We’ve now finally got round to it and it’s on the market with an internet Estate Agent no less. You can see it here We’ve had two viewings already and I’m sure it will run and run. No matter what any Estate Agent says or how quickly your best friend’s or them round the corner sold their house, I’ve never sold in under 4 months. So that’s a long way off. Whilst we wait for that day, I thought I’d go through how we looked at moving.

Reasons To Move.

First thing to say is we like our house, we even like our neighbours. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac and our house backs on to an IAPS school called The White House School There is a bend in the road a few doors away where a short path leads to an open field where the children can play if they want to. Recently someone erected a Samba Goal. Just brilliant for the boys. Elliott, my eldest at 10 years old, has two friends in this end of the street, who he can call on to play. Finley knows a boy from school, who lives a little further down, but he’s a 7 year old that likes to hang around with his big brother. It’s also in the catchment area for the desirable Forest School. A good place to live if you ask me. So why do we want to move?

We would like a bigger garden for a start. Both our children play football, and other sports too, such as Tennis and Golf. Our current garden is getting a bit small for Elliott as he becomes faster and needs more space and Finley is also needing more room. With the boys running around and their friends coming round there isn’t a quiet spot in the garden where Lisa and I can relax. We could live with our garden, but we would love a bigger garden that can accommodate marauding children and relaxing parents at the same time.

I work as a consultant and when I’m not working at a client site, I’m working at home. There is a study we call The Office, and though it would be just fine for me or Lisa by ourselves, it isn’t ideal when both Lisa and I are trying to work. It would be nice to have either a much bigger room or two separate rooms. As it stands I tend to mix up work items and home items and end up misplacing them. I could do with a clean separation.

Elliott has been learning Guitar at school for the last couple of years, and now Finley is learning to play the Drums. Finley would also like to have a keyboard. Sometimes Elliott’s friends come round and they “jam” together. Of course it isn’t music yet, but one day soon it will be. If there was anyway we could create a Music Room for them , where they could play and record music that would be another big tick in the box. The thing is, whilst they are in the Music room playing, the rest of the house will be a little quieter, giving Lisa and I space to think.

Between April 2003 and May 2004 we lived at 1209 Elmgrove Lane, Keller,TX in a lovely big house. It had a decent size everything, but particularly a decent size Master Bathroom with a Walk-In Wardrobe. Even I thought that was wonderful. Now I’m not expecting the same for us here in dear old England, but wouldn’t it be nice if:

We had plenty of storage space for clothes – about twice as much as we have today. No more putting stuff away for a season.
The En-Suite had a Bath as well as the current Shower, Sink and WC.
I didn’t have to squeeze into the Shower.
We didn’t keep hitting our legs on the bed when squeezing between the furniture in the room. Stubbing your toe is very painful, and doesn’t help when all you want is to go to sleep.

Last but not least we have a Kitchen and Dining room together. We would love to have a big kitchen with one of those central units with plenty of storage. A place where we didn’t live in the constant danger of bumping into anyone else in the Kitchen. Part and parcel of a decent kitchen would be a separate laundry room.

Elliott will be going to senior school in September 2011, and if we are going to move we feel we should do it before he gets there. There hasn’t been the dramatic changes in prices recently, and we feel we’re at an age when leaving it later might mean we won’t ever move.

There are other less significant reasons, but it’s fair to say this is what is driving us.

Dreams and Reality

To get all the things we would really want just isn’t in our budget right now. We’ve decided to look for a home that has scope to expand. This isn’t the same as one that needs a lot of renovating. I don’t think our work schedules could cope with that. We’d like somewhere with a decent size garden, or even a decent playing field nearby (compromising works for me) where the children can play. We’d also like a bit of space around the house so we can build on either now or in the future. That is really the key to find somewhere we can move in almost straight away and then add to it over a period of a couple of years. I say move in almost straight away because we are happy to rent for a month or two to tidy up a dated house – nothing major just making it liveable.

Money, Money, Money

Money is always an issue, though not to the banks it seems. The current interest rate is about 3.4%, but for the sake of affordability I work on 8.5% which I think is the average for the last 20 years. The rate will go up and we don’t want to be left unable to pay. We have a Virgin One Account and we intend to keep it. My Consulting work means that sometimes a lot of money appears and rather than spend it we can put it in the One Account to offset the mortgage. It works like a tax-free saving. Our Mortgage is split between Interest Only and Repayment, and when we move we’ll take any additional money as Repayment.

Before we made our final decision I looked at the cost and built a little Spreadsheet. We intended to market our house for £465,000 and could potentially buy another home for between £400,000 and £550,000 depending how much of a project we really wanted when push came to shove. When I worked out the cost of selling and buying a home I arrived at an amount between £25.270 and £35,770, which is a lot of money indeed. I looked at reducing the amount, and took aim at the biggest cost.

Stamp Duty would be between £12,000 and £22,000 and is our biggest cost. The only way to reduce that is to buy a house for £500,000 or less, and I think we will look to do that. Stamp Duty would be £15,000 on a house that costs £499,999, but a house that cost just £2 more at £501,000 would be £20,040, an extra £5,000. Sticking under £500,000 would give us £5,000 to spend on upgrading.

What Have Estate Agents Ever Done For Me?

The next biggest cost was Estate Agent fees. Like all professions there are good and bad people, but I think the Estate Agent world has more than it’s fair share of bad people. I’ve bought three houses in the UK and in every case I have had problems with the Estate Agent and really can’t see what I would get for the £9,625 we’d have to pay them. Everyone I know who looks for houses will go to Rightmove or one of the other internet property search sites. This means that it doesn’t really matter that an Estate Agent can tell their other customers about your house, because they will see it for themselves on the internet. The big thing that Estate Agents are supposed to do is sell your house, but I’ve never bought a house because of anything the Estate Agent has said. In fact they often say the most stupid thing, and tend to be useful because they somehow got hold of the key to a property. So to cut a long story short, I checked out the prices of a couple of internet based Estate Agents. I was astonished that I could get almost the same service as a standard Estate Agent is supposed to provide but for under £800 instead of over £9,000.

My mind was made up and so we have made use of the services of Housenetwork We have a premium listing on Rightmove and within two days of it going live had our first two viewings scheduled. We have to show them round the house, but that is a good thing as far as I am concerned, because it means we have direct contact with our buyer and can sort things out without those pesky Estate Agents getting in the way. We can also add photographs at will, as the season changes we can update the photographs. In fact Lisa would like nicer photographs now. If you are in the market for a lovely 4 Bedroomed house in Wokingham for £465,000 then you can either take a look at the Housenetwork listing or try the listing on Rightmove

Internet Estate Agent

2009-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Here is the estate agent we used in the UK. You don’t need to pay £1000s on the high street. These guys did the sale for under £1000.

Wilshire | One

2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

wilshire|one is the personal site of Rob Sable, an avid Textpattern plugin developer.

This site covers topics including web standards-based development, web application development, Textpattern and other miscellany.

callenb.org uses some of Rob’s great plugins.

Wikipedia Commons

2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

A database of over five and a half million media files to which anyone can contribute. All the pictures on callenb.org are either from here or ones I did myself

My Mid-Year Learning Experience

2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

In the middle of 2009, I published a series of articles on ellfin.org about what turned out to be a very short consulting assignment of 10 days instead of 6 months. Looking back it shows that even an old dog like me can learn something new – and I have. It’s reminded me to listen to my intuitive side a bit more. If I had done so in this case I would have got down into the mud to sort the rot out.

I’ve collected those articles together and published as one here. It’s quite a yarn.

Day One – Into the Unknown

The Fear of Honesty

On this Monday morning I started a contract as a PMO Leader through one of the large enterprise project management vendors. This had been going on for the last two or three weeks. Typical of these things it started in the middle of a Friday with a demand to get 2 PMO Leaders and 2 MSP Planner/Schedulers to start by next Tuesday, as Monday was a Bank Holiday. Having worked hard finding the most appropriate people I knew and updating and rewriting CVs for all, we ended up with just me being contracted.

It turns out they only put my CV forward and didn’t tell me until last Friday. They also told me the client was only using Microsoft Project and missed the existence of Clarity altogether. Now I have to get back in touch with my people, some of whom I have known for 20+ years to say “sorry there isn’t a job for you after all”. Setting expectations in Consulting is very important so the client can make reasonable plans based on the certainty of what they are being told. Whatever we say we can do, should have a reasonable chance of happening and if not then it should be so close as to hardly matter. If only the same was true for some of the people who pretend to be Salespeople. I say this because I have worked with some great Salespeople in my time, and though they have different styles and approaches, the setting of expectations with their clients and other stakeholders, including the consultants is excellent.

At the start, when I put myself forward on that first Friday, I explained I would be away on holiday between 22 May and 29 May inclusive. Strange then that it was left to me to call the Project Director up before I went into the client building to tell him I would be on holiday.

This is a saga of fear from the guy winning the work for the vendor. He was to scared to tell the Project Director I was going on holiday, and he was too scared to challenge them about what they needed. Clients have a long history of wanting something different to what they need. The guy at the big vendor is a nice chap, but I can’t understand why he never bothered to ask about the other positions or why he never told the client about my holiday..

On Being Friendly

When I first go to a client or enter an office for the first time I make a point of getting to know the people in administration roles. It’s like an insurance policy that pays out over time. It also makes them feel good because many people take them for granted. This includes receptionists, security people, project administrators, mail room people and so on.

On entering this client the receptionist was in the middle of opening a packet of Rich Tea Biscuits and looked like she was about to stop for me. I moved first and talked about the importance of opening the biscuits first and having a cup of tea. We had a good conversation from that and I ended up with an unescorted visitors badge despite producing no identification whatsoever.

Being decent and appreciative of people makes me and them feel good and sometimes I get an unexpected benefit.

Meeting My Client

The Project Director I called earlier was on holiday so I met with the current PMO Manager and had a good conversation. I know this because I didn’t say much and listened to what he had to say to me. Gerry Weinberg says the client will tell you the answer in the first 5 to 10 minutes. It’s just that we don’t know enough to know what the answer is just yet. Over the next couple of days I should be able to work it out.

I did the same listening to everyone I met. By the end of the day, I had a list of a number of issues nobody told me about, but I believe are there:

The PMO consists of three people who spend a lot of time chasing project managers who should know better.
The PMO has no teeth because they have no authority
The schedules are rubbish
The plans rarely exist
Risk Management is unheard off.
They’re at least a year late
There is no respect for the PMO
There is no WBS structure or dictionary
Nobody has any time as they are mostly busy not delivering on time.

First Week – Clear As Mud

Tuesday

Much the same as yesterday but had the chance to attend a Dependency Review at 10:30 which is where the project managers come together to ensure hand-offs between tasks in different projects are managed. Only two Project Managers turned up and their appeared to be more issues generated than resolved. Clearly PMs either don’t want to or don’t have the time to prepare for or attend this essential event. [EDIT: Don’t have the time]

Two people from Capability Enhancement rolled by and it seems they were here to duplicate much of what I believed I was here to do. Further discussion took place and I provided my view from observation to date. Agreement to be at the client’s site the following day to see programme in operation and meet some key people.

Wednesday & Thursday

Meet with the Project Director for the first time emphasising my knowledge and skills in defining and building an appropriate PMO structure, processes and artefacts.

Rest of both days spent mainly with WF from Capability Enhancement and the three Work Stream Leads with our conclusions. Joined on a number of occasions by CM, who is also from Capability Enhancement. I was picking up information that I considered good input for PMO design.

We had a wash-up with the Project Director regarding the sick note we’d gathered, none of which the Project Director found surprising, which begs the question why it has taken several months before starting to address them. I was tasked with producing three documents which I said would be difficult as I didn’t have the information, but I’d do what I could and pass it to the PMO. I believe only one person was in the PMO on Thursday.

Thursday Evening

Tried to piece together a monthly and weekly calendar as well as roles and responsibilities from information I had been provided, but quite impossible to do. Eventually completing all I could and sending a note to the others in the “PMO” at 12:30am – Friday morning. This was the first day of my holiday.

Friday – Whilst on Vacation

Responded to emails regarding what I’d sent on the previous evening as well as a first stab of the points uncovered by Capability Enhancement. This right up until I got on the plane.

Day Seven Was Far From Heaven

What Happened?

On returning from holiday, I lasted just three more days at the PMO role and it knocked me back a bit and made me question my own worth. My last day was Wednesday 3rd June and I got the call on the morning of Thursday 4th June about 2 minutes before I entered the building for work. I’m writing this on Tuesday 30th June, and haven’t been able to find work since. It’s tough, in fact it’s very tough.

I had stayed until 10:00pm on the night before observing a Planning Session which made me cringe. On returning from my vacation, the Project Director was insisting more and more publicly that I will be standing up in front of his client and C-Level board members at his company and say how great the plan was. As good as the daily rate was, I never have and never will stand up and knowingly lie. On the morning of June 4th I wrote an email on the train and sent it off to the guy from their “Capability & Enhancement” group. I needed to speak to him, but it never happened.

The problems on the programme run much deeper than a non-existent PMO. It is deep in the culture of the client. Changing systems and process is relatively easy to changing culture. It’s a big task for someone.

Final Fling

Not one to let go easily, I submitted my conclusions to the vendor which included a brief statement of the commercial risk (very high) and the likelihood of success (very low). I also provided observations around the People, Process and Technology that is part of the programme. Finally, I outlined some steps that needed to be taken.

Another guy from the vendor has gone in to observe and report back. He was supposed to be contacting me, but hasn’t. I am interested in seeing what his conclusions are.

The Situation in December 2009

I spoke with the vendor only last week and he told me their man had been in there since just after I left. He described him as being a crutch for them to lean on, and he just rushes around filling in the gaps and isn’t allowed to address the real issues. A new guy joined their client as an employee in the PMO Manager role, who the vendor and consultant know very well. He says they still need the consultant in there running round for them. The consultant is at another client at the moment – “having a break from the chaos, he needed to get out for his health and sanity” as the vendor said.

Herding Cats

2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Glen B. Alleman’s site of his ideas, comments, and resources about project management from field experiences and resources of www.niwotridge.com.

Well that's annoying!

2009-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

What Just Happened?

It looks like you have come across a problem with callenb.org, and I’m sorry that you’re having a bad experience. I am fiddling with the site at this time, and certain bits aren’t working:

There is no searching
The Contact link hasn’t been implemented yet
Neither has the Links
~~or the Archives for that matter.~~ – just done v1.0 of this

Then again you might have typed in a wrong URL – though highly unlikely.

What should I do?

My advice is click on Home I know that works.

Why Such a Mess?

I’m working on getting rid of the standard Textpattern style and bringing in one of my own. I know I should do it in a development environment, but it’s a new site with very little on it (all backed up) so I thought I’d do it live – always wanted to take this risk. trying not to feel too bad about it.

It shouldn’t bee too long now, and errors like this will be because of wrong URLs or dramatic issues with the webserver. I’ll also put a contact form on here by then.

Anyway, I hope you find your way back home and have a better experience.

Thanks

Barrie

Contact

2009-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

If you wish to contact me directly then please feel free to email me at barrie@callenb.org

Alternatively you can just enter a comment to any article which uses Disqus.

Thanks

Barrie

About callenb.org

2009-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

callenb.org is the personal site of Barrie Callender. I have worked in and around Project Management since joining Artemis way back in November 1987. I stayed there for 13 years before leaving to join Pinnacle Management Systems. Now I am working in partnership with Kinley Consulting.

Over the years I have learnt a lot about Project and Programme Management and after spending 13 months working at Bell Helicopter am well versed on what proper Earned Value Management is as opposed to what passes as Earned Value here in the UK.

From November 2007 up to the end of October 2008, I was working through Primavera as an Engagement Manager, including working with Primavera Contract Manager on a rather large construction site near Stratford in East London. It’s been a good experience, and the people I was working with, both clients and Primavera are a great bunch. I’m still in regular contact and things are looking good.

I have also added Deltek to my list of major PM vendors, and enjoy a good professional relationship with them.

Over the years I have found myself involved in some development work, including the Primavera to Oracle Projects interface at Network Rail, which continues to work some two years after it was released. That was written in Java and had to work on IBM WebSphere for no good reason. It involved all sorts of technology including JMS, XSLT, XML, J2EE and even some Oracle PL\SQL. Apart from Java I have also dabbled in Ruby and Ruby on Rails as well as Erlang. The last out of curiosity.

This site uses Textpattern which is a lovely CMS. At the time of writing I have just loaded the new version 4.2.0 with the default style. I intend to add my own style and blog about it as I go along. I am not a web designer – in case that wasn’t obvious so feedback is most welcome.

I hope to write about other topics that interest me, and will hopefully be of interest to others.

Fixing Database Unavailable For Textpattern

2009-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

A Bit Of History Catching Up With Me?

In my previous article called First Quick Look I mention that my ellfin.org site was displaying a Database unavailable message, and so was some of the sites linked to from the initial Welcome to your Site! article. I have just taken a look at this problem and fixed it.

When I first started to mess around with Textpattern it was at a time when Linux and all it stood for was new to me. If truth be told it still is, but I’m slowly learning more and more. At that time I created my textpattern user as follows:

GRANT ALL ON database.* TO 'username' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

When I installed version 4.2.0 of Textpattern I created a user as follows:

GRANT ALL ON database.* TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'new password';

So this latest user was more specific as the hostname was specified and my older Textpattern site at ellfin.org was failing because it was authenticating with a different user now. Now I see what is happening, I know it is bad practice to not specify the hostname for users in MySQL. Without further ado this is what I did to fix it.

1. Granted access to my old database (called txp) to my new ’username’@’localhost’ user in MySQL.

GRANT ALL ON txp.* TO 'username'@'localhost';

2. Removed the old user ’user’@’%’ from the MySQL database because I think it’s a bit of a security risk.

DROP USER 'username'@'%';

3. Edited the config.php file for ellfin.org and made sure the lines specifying the username and password were correct for the new user as follows:

$txpcfg['user'] = 'textpattern';
$txpcfg['pass'] = 'password';

Lesson One - RTFM - Read The Fabulous Manual

2009-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

My Bad!

I’ve never been that great a completer finisher, more an initiator. I think I could avoid the issues if I had just completed the installation steps. I just jumped to the Admin tab followed by the Diagnostics and got the following displayed in red.

.htaccess file is missing ?
/var/www/textpattern/textpattern/setup/ still exists ?
Site URL preference might be incorrect: admin.ellfin.vm.bytemark.co.uk ?
Clean URL test failed. ?

With all my excitement I simply forgot to continue the installation from Section 3 onwards. Once I did there were still some issues and here is what I did to sort them out and what you will need to do as well.

Copied .htaccess from the Textpattern root into both my public and admin directories. I also copied it into the site1 directory as I will use that as a template in the future.

cp .htaccess sites/callenb.org/public
cp .htaccess sites/callenb.org/admin

Went into Advanced preferences and set the File and Temporary path to point within my Multi-Site and not the directories I’d just deleted from the Textpattern root.

I’m now left with two errors but I think they are because the Diagnostics isn’t Multi-Site aware and I’m not getting any unexpected errors. The Welcome to your site article is not written for Multi-Site and so returns 404 – Page Not Found Errors. I’ve hidden it to get it out of the way.

The remaining two “errors” I am currently happy to live with are:

Missing files:/var/www/textpattern/textpattern/../index.php ?
Site URL preference might be incorrect: admin.ellfin.vm.bytemark.co.uk ?

The first is missing because it is no longer where diagnostics is looking for it. The second one is because my site url is “www.callenb.org”, but the administration url is admin.callenb.org. The diagnostics are reporting the fact that the url stored in the database (www.callenb.org) is different to the url where diagnostics is (admin.callenb.org). Small insignificant issues.

First Quick Look

2009-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

A List Of Issues

When I finished with my first article Textpattern 4.2.0 I found some problems.

Clicking on the article title presented an Internal Server Error, which I suspect may be some modsecurity configuration.
The link to my ellfin.org displayed “Database unavailable” as did some of the links in the default article. This is probably something outside of the installation as different web sites on different machines have the issue.
Any link to my site such as the article list returned an Internal Server Error.

I have no idea what is going on, hopefully I soon will, and it may be useful for others.

Before I do that I’ve added a Category called Textpattern and another called Installation to use for all these Textpattern articles

After Adding callenb.org To Nameserver

2009-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

My callenb.org has been added to the Bytemark Nameserver. I update the Apache2 config file I was using before which pointed ellfin.vm.bytemark.co.uk at the site and replaced ellfin.vm.bytemark.co.uk with callenb.org.

Then I could browse to the site. At first there was no style attached to it. All I had to do was go to Admin > Preferences and set the Site URL to callenb.org.

Textpattern 4.2.0

2009-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Fast and Simple Installation

Less than half an hour ago I downloaded the Textpattern 4.2.0 release from the Textpattern site and here we are up and running with the default site.

I am configuring it using the new Multi-Site functionality.

Somewhere between downloading and finishing the install I registered the domain www.callenb.org with Bytemark who are my trusty hosting company. At the time of writing this article I haven’t updated the nameservers to point here, but that will come soon. In the meantime the real name of my machine http://ellfin.vm.bytemark.co.uk will point here. In fact I might leave it to point here.

So What Now?

Once callenb.org is pointing here I will have to update the URL in Textpatern and will probably start transforming the site. I can honestly say that as I write I have come straight here and published this note. Over the coming weeks and months I will be making changes to the site and will document just what it is I have been doing. Hopefully I will learn a little bit about Textpattern along the way, and maybe some of it will be useful to anyone who reads this.

As well as discussing the development of this site and others, I will write about other stuff, that may attract a different audience.

My Textpattern Experience

I first used Textpattern on my hardly touched Ellfin.org where I shamelessly used the White and Wild theme from Wilshire:One . (I’ve just checked both my site and his and neither are working for some reason).

I also put together the Kinley Consulting site which I enjoyed. It’s still on 4.0.7 of Textpattern.

So I would describe myself as a Novice Textpattern user with an awful lot to learn. I only hope it can help others over time. One thing for sure, it will be an adventure.

TXP Resources

2005-07-20T00:00:00+01:00

A directory of plugins, tutorials and other resources for and by the Textpattern Community

Textpattern

2005-07-20T00:00:00+01:00

Textpattern is a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system. It is both free and open source. This site just so happens to use it too.

Textbook

2005-07-20T00:00:00+01:00

Online documentation for Textpattern