Here’s a simple spreadsheet I’ve been [...]]]> 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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”).
4. 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.
5. 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.

Download Flexitimesheet.xltx

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 [...]]]>

Global Warming – a big hoax?

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.

Thanks to Jonathan Porrit for the cartoon.

Firefox/Google start page

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 [...]]]> OK, who just loves the default Firefox Google page you get when you just hit Return from the default searchbar?

Firefox/Google start page

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…

So, a big hand for Varun Kashyap’s TechCrazy Blog (Computers and Technology, explained and simplified)!

There are two ways of doing it:

Either

• Copy and paste the text at the bottom of this post into a text editor like TextPad, then save it as iGoogle-en-UK.xml somewhere like your desktop.

or

• Save this file: iGoogle-en-UK.xml.

You can edit the UK-specific bits pretty easily if you want.

Once you’ve got the file, move it to one of the following locations, depending on your platform/operating system:

• Windows 2000/XP -
  C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\string\searchplugins
• Windows Vista -
  C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\string\searchplugins
• Windows 98/ME -
  C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
• Macintosh (OS X) -
  ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/
• Linux/Unix -
  ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/

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…

Happy iGoogling!