File hunting

We woke up this morning to the sound of children's delighted voices acclaiming fresh snow, as parents looked on and wondered if they'd be able to get to work. Only two cars left the street all day, which was a relief to me, as I was able to re-park my car within sight of the house. Last night when I got back from my Tai Chi class in Penarth the street was full and I had to hunt for a space in our vehicle congested area.

Bloom Street, next to our to the north had been emptied of cars for over past three days for re-surfacing work, and this meant displaced vehicles adding to competition for space locally. We're about to have imposed on us street parking regulations that will require us to buy a parking permit. Already there are more cars than houses, and fewer available street parking spaces to make possible the issue of one permit per house. 

Buying a permit, won't guarantee a space when needed, only the right to ring Civil Parking Enforcement to complain and get them to send a traffic warden around to give a ticket to an offending car. If only the Council would put more imagination and effort into public transport network improvements that would make it easy for people renounce car ownership altogether.

Yesterday morning I went to the monthly RadioNet Users Group meeting. Unusually, it wasn't held in a conference room around a table, but in a stylish cocktail bar furnished with a couple of sofas and stools for perching on. It felt rather strange. During the meeting someone mentioned that the Users blog link on previous minutes published didn't work. If fact, I'd noticed this the day before and re-printed extra minutes with the corrected link. 

When I looked at the blog site, I found that I hadn't updated it since I created it fifteen months ago, despite having minutes of all meetings and other publications to post there for convenience of users. This led me to inspect the CBS office blog as well, and found that it too needed updating. It's routine stuff I'd simply forgotten to do. I had plenty of free time when I was in Spain and Sicily, and could have done it remotely, but it never occurred to me. So, the time was overdue to get on with the job, as the omission has now been noticed!

I went up to College for lunch followed by a meeting with a student, then started on the task in hand. Most of the material I had to hand and posted quickly, but just a few key files proved really elusive. They were files I'd worked on mid November last, so why they were missing was a puzzle. When I returned from Tai Chi, I made an effort to track down the information, which simply wasn't where it should have been in any of the copies of the office file-system I use, either on hard drive or in the Cloud, so I had to work my way through various email accounts I use, looking for copies attached to messages, and that was where my search paid off.  

Then I remembered the last time I'd used the missing articles, they were on paper! I'd even scanned and sent them digitally, but forgotten to put them in the right place with suitable names for easy finding in the file system. It's isn't all that often I get caught out like that, but when I do, I pay for it in lost sleep, that's for sure.