New projects in sight

Yesterday afternoon, after going through the mail and filing or dumping content, I visited the CBS office and met with Ashley, having researched and put together a complete history of events in the life of CBS and the BCRP, for briefing a consultant about the present situation of the company, a story reaching back over twelve years. We have a huge amount of documentation, perhaps because Ashley and I are rather acquisitive, but our file system is somewhat complex and of late, a little disorderly. 

When asked to produce digital versions to support the briefing, I was able to, but it took longer than anticipated. It's all there, but must be hunted for. Search routines can't easily guess file names poorly recalled, so now there's another task to be done, creating, sooner rather than later, an easy access document database tailored for our purposes. I set up an account and used Evernote satisfactorily before, but first have to find the relevant access details. I suspect it's hiding in plain sight in my record of passcodes, not properly labelled.

This morning, Father Mark asked me to celebrate the Eucharist at St John's. It was good to be reunited with nine of the regulars, and tell them a little about Semana Santa in Malaga. Afterwards, a trip to the bank, then to Stavros' next door for a haircut. That was enough really, a certain tiredness engulfed me once I began to relax on arriving home, and just from the demands of early rising and travel. It's not just a matter of adjusting to the hour's time difference either, I seem to live with a different pace and rhythm when I'm away from here. It can take a week or ten days to re-balance. Or else, I'm starting to feel my age.

I also had time to catch up on the first two episodes of 'The Bridge' series four today, plus the first in a new Inspector Montalbano series. It wasn't possible to view any of these on catch-up while in Spain because of digital rights restrictions. Luckily, these time expired episodes were still available before tomorrow evening's third episode of The Bridge.

  

Keeping track

In between routine tasks, I must have spent an hour on the phone this morning discussing forward plans with Ashley. We cover a lot of ground in these exchanges, and they are backed up by exchanges of text messages, which is just as well, since he is so busy we don't get much time face to face. Recently, I started tinkering with the Evernote app, which comes installed on phones and is there on some of our recent PCs as well, and have now started to use it in earnest to keep track of various issues we need to stay on top of. 

Having developed our office file system from scratch I navigate through it much easier than Ashley. He will sometimes call and ask me to find and email a file to him as he's too busy to hunt, or can't recall a near enough file name to benefit from available search facilities. I've realised lately that when I start a record on a particular subject in Evernote or OneNote, I can attach copies of relevant files to the note for easy access. I guess I tried software of this kind years ago but didn't stick with it because it was slow and crash prone. With faster internet speeds and search facilities, making Cloud storage that much easier and reliable, this kind of free-form database is much more of an asset. 

We've been using OneNote to keep notes on subscriber accounts since last autumn, as it was the first app to offer a solution to the limits of text entry into a highly structured database of user accounts. It's less resilient and more limited than Evernote in my opinion. If I could swap data to the latter easily, I think I would - something to look into when I have time on my hands, maybe? 

When eventually I did go into the office, mid afternoon, I called at the Central Square building site and took some photos on my way, interesting to see the ever deepening hole being excavated for a car park basement, on top of which two buildings will eventually sit, as a lorry dispatcher told me. There was one simply job to do, updating and preparing notification templates, drawing upon a file first created the purpose five years ago. It was a slow dull laborious task, which took me ages as I found it hard to retain focus on so many similar documents in which there was little to change. I didn't expect it to take me quite so long, and it was quarter to seven when I arrived home for supper.