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City College Norwich FE Awards

Hal

Last night I was at the FE Awards ceremony run by City College Norwich to celebrate the achievements of the young people going through college.

This sort of awards cerony generally happens at university graduations, and I’ve never seen a ‘FE’ version until now. Even better, Cleveratom were one of dozens of companies sponsoring the awards, so I got to stand up and present a trophy, certificate and small cheque to a couple of students.

The event was excellent! Well organised and run and cheery in just about every way! It was held at the Forum (nibbles and dinner) and St. Peter Mancroft church just opposite. It was a delightful feeling to see the look of joy on the young people’s faces as they collected their awards, and to know that Cleveratom played just a tiny part in it all.

We sponsored two awards, and next year I would hope we sponsor more, but I am reliably informed that we can’t do more than three, no matter how much we want to!

Well done to Harry Greiner – an admirable Master of Ceremonies, who had to keep on top of just who was collecting the awards as many students couldn’t make it and were represented variously by families or members of the students’ union. A quick handshake for all was followed by a few rapid photographs – a copy of which I should get to put on the office wall. I can’t wait!

Pictures show the ceremonies inside St Peter Mancroft, and the evening at the Forum. What I didn’t get a picture of was the dance group from the college performing at the Forum, or the Norwich Youth for Christ Gospel Choir, who performed flawlessly.

L’Oreal can’t spell

Hal

Walking through a well known cosmetics and pharmacy, looking for products to take on holiday… and saw that even those who think you’re worth it can’t actually spell.

These two products, side by side, have very different applications!! I wonder what course hair actually is?

If you look very closely at the label on the right, at the bottom in the black bar it clearly reads ‘course’… oh dear – that’s a pretty large error for a multinational company. Strangely, the label on the left, in yellow, spells it correctly as ‘coarse’.

Art awards, BP Portrait Awards, Art for Art’s Sake

Hal
Award winning portrait of 2009
Award winning portrait of 2009

I like art – I enjoy a trip to the National Gallery, Tate Modern and many other places besides. I must confess though that I never really understand what I am looking at.

To me, a piece of art is good because I like it. Like a good wine – there may be plenty of people able to tell me why a cheap wine is no good, but when I taste it, if I am not offended, I carry on drinking and possibly enjoy the flavour and how it combines with my meal… to me a cheap bottle of plonk could be every bit as good as a fine wine hailed the world over. It depends on how I am feeling, the circumstances surrounding the moment, the company I am with and so on. Finery, it seems, is within the taste buds of the drinker!

Art is a complex issue for me. There are days when I enjoy looking at a painting, and days when the same painting seems to draw indifference from me. I love portraiture, for example (probably because I enjoy photography and particularly capturing emotion in people’s faces). I don’t tend to think too hard about it, I look and see the qualities I have captured and consider it a photo worth keeping and showing, or one to sit deep inside a folder somewhere on my hard drive, probably never to see the light of day again. Occasionally I delete them too.

What has baffled me ever since I began looking at art is the language surrounding the subject. This is what I never really understand. To me, it is as inaccessible as the jargon that surrounds many professions, often guarding the divide between being a lay person and being in the profession. Academics are good at this, talking with a high level of language that mere mortals can’t usually follow very easily. This protects the status of the profession, by making sure that only those who can access the language are able to rise to the highest levels. In many ways, the language used is a tool of the trade, and seems to get further away from the way most people talk. Perhaps it will soon be recognised as a different language entirely, when only a minority can master the complexities.

So it seems to be with art and me. I am unable to understand the language of the artist and struggle to see the relationship between what is often a beautiful image and the short sentence or two that goes with it. Take for example the announcement of the BP Portrait award on the BBC news web site today. Fantastic image, lots of detail and interesting lines that keeps me looking at it, and enjoying it. The artist, a 44 year old art teacher (uh oh… mixing art AND academia now), has this to say about his work:

“I challenge the fixed notion of an idealised image of childhood and substitute it for a more unsettling, complex representation that exists in its own right as a painting.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but this baffles me. I don’t have a fixed notion of idealised childhood. I am not sure that there is one – yet here is the winner announcing there is, and so I am lead to believe there must be, and that I have somehow overlooked it. I then look at what is unsettling in the image – perhaps that the age of the person is slightly imperceptible – could be 12, could be 30. It’s the clothing, the stance, the look in her eye, perhaps. None of this is unsettling really. If you met the person in context you would know the age more readily, but in the abstract world of portraiture, we have to rely on clues the artist gives us. Perhaps this is why it is unsettling – there are few clues. The clothing certainly seems to suggest an older person…

But it exists in its own right as a painting? What does it mean? It certainly *is* a painting, and it certainly exists. Could it simply mean that even if it wasn’t trying to challenge or unsettle you, it is still quite a nice painting? Is what he says reminiscent of the way I critique my own photography? It’s a nice image…

And how I wish this was the only example of such tom-foolery that seems to adorn the world of art. Why not simply say something along the lines of “A lot of people may not see the age of the child in this image, which can be confusing, and start to challenge your ideas about what your stereotypical child might look like. However, it also is a nice image, so enjoy it for that if you don’t want to think about the deeper meanings that you can draw from it…”

I suppose even that is going to cause concern with some folk. I just wish I could understand art a bit better, or more specifically, the language that artists use to explain their work to those of us without a clue.

Google Calendar and iCal, sync calendars, team calendars

Hal

Way back in 2001 I was introduced to TeamSoft’s ‘Team Agenda’ which was the calendering application of choice for the large team of 50+ people I was working with. It was lovely – I ran my own calendar, could check other people’s availability, ind free slots for groups to meet, know where resources were, who was using which room, and so on. And then along came Mac OSX and iCal.

With a far sexier interface, iCal promised to be the next best thing since… well, since Team Agenda. But it wasn’t. Not even close, unfortunately. At the same time, mobile phones were becoming the de facto standard too, and we needed a calendering application that did it all – team collaboration, phone integration and looked sexy. And by then, it also needed to integrate with iCal!

It seemed a little bit too much to get it all, and we tried several possible alternatives. The rather excellent Oracle Collaboration Suite (pretty sophisticated, way too complex for simple stuff) and even PHP iCal (which worked well, to a point).

Just recently I have been trying Google calendars and synchronising them both ways with iCal. That is, I can enter a date in Google online and it appears in my iCal, and I can enter a date in iCal and it appears in Google online. Doing this is actually very simple indeed!

You first need t export your ical calendar from iCal (use File/Export…) and you will get a .ics file in the location you choose. All you then do is import that into Google calendars and you’ll get a copy into Google. But the story doesn’t end there. So ar, all you have done is make an online copy, but the two are not yet linked.

You next need to download a small application called ‘Calaboration’ which you’ll find here – find the download link on the right of the page. What this does is link your mac to Google and let you know which calendars are available for synchronising. Simply quit iCal itself, and check the calendar in your google account that you’d like to link with. Re-starting iCal then takes a little longer as the information is passed back, but when done, your online Google calendar will appear in your iCal desktop client.

The downside is that your original calendar is also there – you now have two versions. Just delete the original.

What this is doing is using the Google calendar engine as the synchronising tool – you can add events in your desktop and they will appear online, and of course you can go the other way too. This is particularly useful if you need to share your calendar with other people. Simply go to the online calendar, go to the settings and set the sharing for it as you want. Other people using Macs can then use Callaboration to do what you have done, but they will also see your calendar in the list of those available.

The biggest issue so far is not the method of sharing or the permissions, but the way different people like to work. For example, I prefer to split all of my work based activities into different calendars and use different colours to visually differentiate them so that at a glance I can see which work events are coming up. In iCal, without sharing anything, I simply set up a calendar group, call it ‘Work’ (or something equally unimaginative) and set up my calendars within that. Other people, however, may only use a single calendar to put all of their activities into. The problem is that I actually run about 8 different calendars in my calendar group, but Google calendars doesn’t handle groups at all. Instead, I need to now have 8 separate calendars in Google, but worse… so do all my work colleagues if they want to see what I am doing!

What I am waiting for is a neat way to group my calendars for others to import as a single ical file. That is possible if I manually export my calendar group each time, but that’s no good when in a busy workplace the calendars are changing all the time. Right now, colleagues can add events to my diary, I can add to theirs, we all see what is necessary to keep the company up to date, but we have to compromise on the user interface slightly.

It’s a shame Google can’t yet handle groups. The sooner they do, the better life will become! At Cleveratom we have already been using Google mail, calendars, and other apps for some time. The collaboration tools will make such a difference to small team working, they just need to come along soon!

National Express Versus Virgin Trains

Hal

Today I was treated to a journey to Leeds on a National Express train. The thing is, I booked the tickets through the Virgin web site, and half expected to travel on a Virgin train. It turns out that Virgin don’t ‘fly’ out of Kings Cross, and so it was that I ended up on what I now consider to be the wrong train entirely.

A Virgin train ride (in First Class) includes access to the lounge area at the stations (unless it is Euston, which at the time of writing is undergoing refurbishment), all food, all drink (including alcohol) and a pendolino train with free wifi (no need to register). More subtle benefits of Virgin include more pleasant announcements and less of them, too, but more informative, somehow.

Compare and contrast that with National Express…

No lounge access unless you pay full fare (so no advance single ticket holders allowed), no food included, trains that lean unexpectedly as if on an adverse camber, wifi that is slow as slow can be (and frequently drops out), and needs you to divulge too much personal info for my liking. On top of that the announcements are at many decibels more than they need to be, and repeated at least three times at every station. Something about needing to have a ticket and if it’s the wrong ticket having to pay full fare to get the right ticket… ad infinitum.

Given that advanced tickets on Virgin cost the same, and you get so much more, and working on the assumption that VIrgin trains also make a profit (which they may not, of course), how can National Express justify their level of service?

Now don’t get me wrong – the staff on NX (!) are pleasant and polite… but so are they on Virgin. And it may be that I’ve been particularly unfortunate in that each NX journey (East Coast) I’ve taken has been spectacularly similar. I can’t help but come to the conclusion that NX are overpriced, underserviced and not particularly the best experience of rail travel.