Recently in work Category

My business trip to Hong Kong gained another six days thanks to the Eyjafjallajokull volcanic ash cloud and the closure of UK/European air space. I got quite excited at the prospect of rerouting to Spain and sailing back on the Ark Royal, or getting the Trans-Siberian train, but in the end the lovely ladies at the BA office in Hong Kong got me on the second flight back that left once the skies reopened. I landed at LHR at 6am this morning, and spent a fair chunk of the day completing expenses and insurance claim forms.....

The only downside about the extra time was that it meant I didn't get to spend my birthday as planned.... no family brunch at The Diner in Shoreditch! But Simmons & Simmons friends in Hong Kong and London made sure that I had a great day on Sunday.

Getting a big bunch of flowers from S&S at the hotel was a great way to start the day and after a lazy lie in with newspapers and tea, I strolled down to central HK to meet Adam and family and Kelly and his wife for a lovely ("mostly veggie") dim sum lunch, complete with a card and gift, cheesecake birthday cake and candles! I feel very lucky to know such lovely people in HK and in London.

Then over to Kowloon on the Star Ferry to explore the sights and shops. I phoned Phil en route and he told me one of my birthday presents is a "driving experience" - Silverstone Aston Martin here I come!

Strolled around Kowloon taking in the prom, park and night markets - and got a call from my dad and brother and families as I was perched on the prom taking in the harbour and the ferries, all lit up in their evening finery. Them singing Happy Birthday over the phone to me was a *lovely* end to my birthday.

Very glad of the BlackBerry too! Not to mention Twitter and Facebook for keeping in touch with friends, and tracking developments following British_Airways and HeathrowAirport on Twitter.

I didn't do a round robin letter this year, but as I always enjoy reading the ones that I receive I've succumbed: here's a very brief round up of my 2007.

Reading

68 books read - from S is for Silence to The Closers; mainly the usual mixture of fiction (predominantly modern / historical / crime) and autobiographical travel.

Travel / Holidays

Big trips

• Iran - on a Wild Frontiers recce tour, in May. Fantastic.
• China - an October fortnight travelling with Hazel from her dad's Shanghai base; plus a week of work.

Short trips and weekends away

• Brecon Beacons - bringing in the New Year with Phil's Bristol crowd.
• Forty Acres - for the annual birthday parties weekend.
• Saltaire - to catch up with Cat in early June
• Seville - with Fiona and Catherine in mid June.
• Walton on the Naze - twice (May Bank Holiday weekend and the week leading up to the August Bank Holiday weekend); both times a bit on the chilly/wet side.
• Bristol - for Tim and Helen's wedding on the SS Great Britain. Glorious.
• Milan - for Jess and Mike's wedding. We travelled there/back by train. Altogether very lovely.

Work

Still at Simmons & Simmons where I spent the first nine months of the year as the elexica editor and the last three seconded to a new role of Knowledge Management Business Manager.

Home and family

Still happily esconced in the Barbican with Phil; still happily doing Aunty Mary duties to Barney (10) and Rosa (8). Dad and Jean both well. I'm off to Hereford for a relaxing weekend with them in January.

Plans for 2008

Currently only features travel - 2008 is the year I'll finally get to see some of the Silk Road in Central Asia. Nothing booked yet, but it's The Trip for the year. Hoping to squeeze in a week in Libya too to maintain my one a year quota of visits to countries in the Axis of Evil. Luckily work have introduced the option of buying additional holiday.....

I'm mooching around websites that are produced using the various content management systems NR are looking at, and on the Cathay Pacific website I spotted their Viewing tips link at the foot of the page..... and I think it is a really nice, general user-oriented page of information. One to remember....

Painless Software Schedules, from Joel on Software, courtesy of Phil.

SingalongaPatate

Tis just lovely, and it's on it's way to my french classe right now, mes p'tites patates.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for November 11 landed in my inbox today - discussing Intranet Usability, and the costly implications of the lack thereof.

Nielson's Summary:
The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more.

On my To Do list is the plan to review the S&S intranet against the findings of the Nielsen Norman Group study

Personnel still have a bee in their bonnet about not being able to type in names and addresses with accents etc. Their ideal solution would be to have a keboard with all the foreign characters and accented characters on the keys. - see entries passim.

It came up again today in a vendor presentation, so I decided to google "Alt Key Codes". First up was David R. Wilson's cribsheet (Google HTML version)

So now I'm going to test those key codes in Oracle.....

As part of my analysis into using email to circulate newsletters etc, I went to talk to the elexica editor, Jonathan Maas, yesterday. He mentioned that he subscribes to LegalWebWatch, so I've just emailed their editor asking to be added to the mailing list(s) for the IT / TMT sector. On verra.

I did another search on our quest for personnel's international characters, and found a site dedicated to International Accents and Diacriticals, featuring:

"Theory, Charts, & Tips for the QWERTY keyboard (mostly Windows) - Platforms, software applications, operating systems, versions, and user preferences influence how one works with accents and international characters"

The MS Word functionality was news to me, but makes perfect sense! Not quite as simple as having a keyboard with "letter+accent" keys, but more logical than alt codes, and faster than resorting to the character map.

Xara3D support have a useful crib sheet for typing accented and international characters.

One of the online resources I find useful at work is TechoLawyer. I subscribe to a few of their newsletters, and rate TechnoGuide and LLRX as good sources of information on IT issues in the legal environment.

TechnoLawyer is predominantly a US legal community at the moment. That's still useful, given that the old dotcom adage that, where technology is concerned, looking at the US is a bit like looking into our own UK future a couple of years hence. In any event, I've not found any comparable source of information for UK Legal IT, although uklit, a yahoogroup for IT Managers and Directors from UK law firms, comes closest, but still no cigar.

Prompted by a question from Tom, I dug out this article about wirelss (in)security in the City.