A few months back when I was working at Sophos, TechPubs & Translation came up with the magnificent Spudnic for the Sophos Abingdon potato challenge, a beautiful rotating parachute to get a potato down to a target safely.
Unfortunately, other, more glamorous entries won. Anyway, no-one wanted Spudnic after its brief blaze of glory, so I’m planning to launch her from the 12th storey of a tower block where a friend of mine lives and video that. Some repair work may be necessary. I’ll put the video here.
Most sensible employers and clients are happy to allow people flexibility with their work hours. Work can be stressful enough without pointlessly rushing through traffic, tubes and buses to be there on the dot of some arbitrary deadline. Especially when you are lucky enough to have a meetingless morning (bliss )
Here’s a simple spreadsheet I’ve been using since 2000 to keep track of my flexitime hours at work. It’s now in Excel 2010 format, but should be openable by most spreadsheet programs.
Before you start using it, open the template file using File > Open (so Excel doesn’t start a new document from it) and amend your name and usual hours. The flexitimesheet assumes that you work 37 and a half hours in a five day week (a 7 and a half hour day). You can change this by altering the formula in cell N13 (=7.5*N11 [days]).
Then Save As a template, and Excel should helpfully (hopefully) save it to wherever it puts user templates. You might like to change this location so that it’s within your usual data area and your templates don’t get lost (Word > File > Options > Advanced > General > File locations > User templates ).
With Excel 2003 and 2007, you could start a new spreadsheet in a click or two with File > New. Naturally, Office 2010 hides your personal templates away a bit further, assuming that you are usually going to plough through office.com templates every time you start a new document. Great.
You only enter stuff in the shaded cells, with times in hours and minutes (e.g. half past two in the afternoon is 14.30) and it converts the calculated hours to decimal, so for example a 1 hour 45 minute surplus at the end of the week is carried forward as 1.75 hours.
When you create a new timesheet for the week (ideally on the previous Friday afternoon), enter the week number and carry forward the surplus or deficit hours from the old timesheet to the new. If you’re planning on taking a holiday (or throwing a sickie ), reduce the number of days worked from 5 to 3 or something. The flexitimesheet automatically recalculates your contracted hours.
Tips:
If you don’t have to divulge all this detailed information to your client or employer then don’t. It’s an especially bad idea to pre-book sickies if you’re keeping your flexitimesheets on an insecure network share. Keep the flexitimesheets on your local hard drive or a USB drive. It is however a good idea to have old timesheets handy to be able to demonstrate to evil HR departments* that you have actually worked your contracted hours if queried.
Outside the corporate world, no-one has the foggiest idea what “week number” it is. I mean, have you ever said to your significant other, “We had such good Q4 results darling, we really should start thinking about booking a holiday in week 37.” (Perhaps I just don’t move in those circles.) (Perhaps I don’t want to.) So anyway, There’s an option in Outlook, and doubtless any other decent calendar application, to show week numbers (File > Options > Calendar > Display options > Show week numbers… and if your Outlook week numbers don’t correspond with your company’s week numbers, then adjust File > Options > Calendar > Work time > First week of year). So be notified.
By the time your computer has booted up and you have had a coffee and a chat and generally woken up, you will have forgotten what time you arrived, or just forget to do the flexitimesheet at all. So leave it open and hibernate your computer; then it will be the first thing on your screen when you wake it up in the morning. Another useful technique is to make a small list of regular tasks for first thing in the morning and for just before leaving the office (like “stop trying to click on people to select them” and “put shoes back on”).
You can plan ahead by entering expected in-out/lunch times to see what shift plan will work for you in general, and for particular weeks.
Don’t be confused if you change a time by one minute and the carried-forward hours appears to change by two minutes. remember, the calculated hours are decimal, and there is some rounding up and down going on.
I hope that you find the Flexitimesheet as useful as I do.
For some reason, my Chrome downloads this file as Flexitimesheet.xltx.zip. You can either use internet Explorer or Firefox, or rename it when downloaded, truncating the .zip. I’ve tried Ramon Ecung’s hack, but it only seems to work for Firefox and IE, not Chrome.
* with apologies to all the lovely HR people I’ve had the pleasure of working with
There’s been a lot of heat on the proponents of Global Warming over the past year, especially regarding the repugnant tactics of “scientists” (or should that be cheerleaders?) at the university of East Anglia’s Climate Study Department.
Many people remember the 1970s “Global Cooling” scare, and are aware of the notorious inaccuracy of even short-term weather forecasts, let alone long-term climate predictions. They point out the vested interests of those in the Climate Change industry. What about the medieval warm period, when monks grew wine grapes in England, and the Little Ice Age, when people skated on winter rivers? What about dodgy hockey-stick graphs? What about sun spots? What about the coldest British winter in recent memory? What about the urbanisation of temperature sensor sites over the past 100 years? And what about my freedom to go on holiday to Thailand and drive a 3-litre 4×4?
The consequences of this argument are not academic, as anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the past decade will testify. It is not about putting on or taking off an extra layer of clothing. It is not ‘just’ about life and death for billions of people and flooding on a biblical scale. It is about potentially spending hundreds of billions or trillions of pounds on measures to reduce greenhouse gases (There’s a footnote here: Freakanomics 2 devotes a chapter to a bunch of ex-Microsoft geeks who claim they can cool the Earth very cheaply by sending sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through gargantuan funnels. Like an errupting volcano. Hmm.)
I guess we will continue to debate Global Warming until 2050 or so (or civilisation collapses, whichever is the sooner), when its manifestation will or will not become obvious to all. And I’m going to come right out, probably the only Green Party parliamentary candidate to do so, and say loud and clear: “I don’t know what the climate will be like in 50 years”.
So, what’s up? Am I a closet denier? Am I mad, a heretic, a lone voice of truth? None of the above. Let me stick my neck out even further:
I T D O E S N ‘ T M A T T E R.
In one sense, it doesn’t matter whether climate change is happening or not, because the solutions TO climate change (with one exception – carbon [dioxide] sequestration) are just coincidently, the solutions to a whole host of other problems. And that is probably one reason why the whole carbon climate caboodle has such massive support. It doesn’t matter because all these fossil fuels that we are debating reducing our consumption of have reached peak extraction anyway. When people have to spend more on fuel to commute to work than the difference between their salary and the dole… well you do the ‘math’ my friend.
Whatever we do to mitigate climate change, we need to do anyway, for a whole host of reasons. We need to transform our society into one which is not dependant on fossil fuels, one which is not dependant on manufacturing and recycling plants at the other end of the World, one which treats people as human beings, not automatons, one which respects our environment as something to nurture and pass on to our children, not a stinking sewer, “somebody else’s problem”.
Yes, we are at a tipping point. But the point is not just about temperature and flooding. It is about the necessity to evolve. We have been through industrialisation, through globalisation, and now as we are entering the information age, we need to realise that we cannot simply socially notwork into a debt-based future where distant foreigners manufacture our things, our food is grown virtually by machines and chemicals and a self-purpetuating elite rules by casino finance. Our entire economy is going to transition, whether we like it or not, into locally-based structures where the provision of simple sustainable necessities becomes our paramount priority.
Our choice is whether to plan for this transition into a better world, or whether to cling on to an unsustainable model of living which will probably collapse in a violent revolution.
Just had a Skype call from my friend Richard Higgins in the Dominican Republic. He’s leading the Food For Life relief effort in Haiti, and is currently based in the Dominican Republic’s capital, Santo Domingo.
Richard Higgins, Haiti Food for Life coordinator, in Dominican Republic
Richard and his small team are making good contacts with food relief, security and government agencies, preparing the ground work for short- and long-term reconstruction. Just getting into Haiti is fraught with problems, which is one reason why it is so necessary to build up good working relationships with the other agencies.
International Red Cross HQ, Dominican Republic
They have identified a site by a lake 15 miles east of Port-au-Prince, Fond Parisien, where there is land already growing vegetables and a plentiful supply of water.
Richard is also a consultant with New Directions Foundation, and will be implementing dry sanitation systems to hygienically process human excrement into compost for growing crops. Sewage is one of many major problems in Haiti, and if it’s not dealt with ASAP, may cause major disease outbreaks.
Hospital, Dominican republic
Food for Life will soon be cooking hot vegetarian meals and distributing them to Haitians rather than simply giving out raw ingredients such as rice. Distributing raw food staples is all very well, but with the destruction of many homes and other buildings, people have difficulty cooking and thus actually getting food into people’s mouths is not straightforward. There are even reports of large-scale diversion of food relief supplies, so it is vital to provide meals as directly as possible.
His immediate needs are for cash, extremely large cooking pots/woks, gas burners, gas bottles and huge quantities of paper plates.
What, no-one? Bit sucky isn’t it? Especially if you’ve got into the distractions joys of iGoogle, and customised your very own version, with such essential information as Optical Illusion of the Day and local weather forecast.
An example iGoogle home page
I’ve found this a minor annoyance for a long time now, but finally got round to fixing it. The hardest part was not editing the Firefox search plugin, that’s a doddle, it was finding out where the heck to put it amongst all the /Program files/, /Documents and Settings/ and /User/ folders…
Note, as the esteemed Mr Kashyap explains, you may need to tell windoze explorer to show hidden and system files.
Now all you need to do is close and restart Firefox and the iGoogle search plugin will appear. Click on the drop-down-arrow to the right of the existing Google icon and a list of search plugins appears. Click again on the last one, which should be labled iGoogle, and it becomes your selected search tool. Click again in the empty search box and there is iGoogle!
If you want to de-clutter your list of search engines, click again on the search plugin list and again on the final entry, Manage Search Engines… You can now move iGoogle up to the top entry, or wherever you want it, and delete Google. Doing it this way rather than mucking around in /Program files/Mozarella/Firefox or wherever ensures that other users of the same PC won’t lose their Firefox Google search.
Oh, and as this conforms to the latest search plugin standard, you should also be able to use it in other browsers. If anyone has any success at this, or with Windows 7, please leave a comment explaining with what, and how…
Today, in my capacity as Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Hertsmere, England, I received several e-mails from the Breast Cancer Campaign’s Chief Executive, Pamela Goldberg, and various supporters. The campaign is asking supporters to write to their local parliamentary candidates, asking them to support breast cancer research.
Well first of all, I’ve had personal experience, through family and friends, of the devastating impact of breast cancer and early death. My heartfelt sympathy goes out to anyone who is suffering, directly or indirectly from any form of cancer.
However, I don’t support cancer research in general, whether for breasts, or any other part of the anatomy. Why? Isn’t cancer research something everyone can agree is a good thing? Wouldn’t all ‘right-thinking’ people support it?
No. There’s definitely a place, or a need, for research into all sorts of illnesses, especially the worse ones, which cancer is, but a lot of cancer research is either pointless, cruel and/or a waste of money. Why do I say that? Because:
to a large extent, we already know what causes cancer: an unhealthy lifestyle (lack of exercise, stress, drugs and/or bad diet), toxins in our diet or environment, and, to a small extent, genetics,
cancer researchers use animals to experiment on. The Breast Cancer Campaign even try to justify their use. Since different species have different physiologies, you can’t extrapolate a result from one to another. Researchers try to get round this by using animals closest to humans, in other words, chimps, baboons and monkeys. But these species, being closest to humans, also have a high consciousness, and with it, a greater capacity for pain and suffering. Artificially giving cancer, poisons and experimental drugs to animals isn’t going to do much, if anything for human cancer sufferers; it certainly isn’t going to reduce the aggregate amount of suffering in the world. In fact, according to the law of karma, net suffering will increase.
much cancer research is aimed at finding a ‘magic-bullet cure’. While orthodox medicine is excellent at treating some conditions, particularly injuries, its over-reliance on finding cures (“to beat breast cancer” … “researching the cure for breast cancer”) rather than models for prevention is literally fatally flawed. There is no ‘magic bullet’ and there never will be. Good health is not a matter of ’defeating’ an army of illnesses. It comes complete with a healthy lifestyle and an unpolluted environment.
So, with best wishes to you Pamela and all cancer sufferers everywhere, I cannot support the Breast Cancer Campaign in its work. I was going to say that I support its ideals, but as of today, 25 January 2010, its About page does not even mention the word health, and when you get past the fluffy pink ribbons, it’s basically a fund-raiser for scientific medical orthodoxy and animal experimentation.
So, after all that negativity, what is my answer to health problems? Not so much a definitive answer, but I’ve written about what I believe we should be doing here.
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