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.

O Sapientia

After breakfast, a massage came from Julie in the office, puzzled because she was unable to log into her workstation with her usual credentials. Earlier in the week I'd used the machine to try OneNote, which required a different log-in, but after I'd logged in using her credentials. I didn't understand why she didn't have the usual menu of login options, so I left early for the office, to troubleshoot, while she worked on another machine, as a precaution - just in case there was a security issue behind it.

I was able to rectify the situation, but am still unsure why this machine doesn't offer the same full option menu as other Windows 7 upgraded machine I've worked on. At least she now has a way of accessing user accounts she needs. Then, I worked for several hours on completing the migration of the last one third of the user information dataset to OneNote, and making sure it was accessible on the various machines used in the office. One job I was glad to see the back of. My next task will be to look at alternative software apps, to see if they offer more functionality, and if it's possible to interchange datasets between different apps.

I went home early, quite tired with all the head-work, and had a rest before going out to Russell and Jackie's house for their annual pre-Christmas celebration - some stories, some carols, an a mediative lighting of their Christmas tree. There were about twenty people squeezed into their lounge. It was nice and relaxing, with good food and conversation afterwards, and I didn't have to do anything apart from enjoy a quiet evening with friendly people. A lovely respite.

It's a week to Christmas, and tonight, the first Great 'O' Advent antiphon of anticipation is said at the Magnificat, inviting meditation on a cosmic scale. Quite appropriate for a week which has seen the celebration in the media by mathematicians, and astro-physicists of the centenary of Albert Einstein's publication of relativity theory equations,

O Wisdom, 

you come forth from the mouth of the Most High. 

You fill the universe, and hold all things together 

in a strong yet gentle manner. 

O come to teach us the way of truth.

Einstein is understood to be an exceptional human being. His mathematical conclusions are regarded with the kind of awe and wonder resembling idolatry, if it were not for the fact that its apparent perfection is limited to interpreting the macro but not the micro universe (which relies on quantum mathematical theory). Both kinds of mathematics are subject to theoretical testing and scientific verification that treats nothing in the universe of knowledge is sacred, no matter how much it's relied upon. Investigators are still looking for a Grand Theory of Everything - mathematics that will unify the macro and the micro dimensions of the universe. It's going to be the next great break-through when it comes, we're told by the confident. Why be skeptical of such a great intellectual adventure? However much we succeed in explaining of realities we can perceive, there will always be 'things unseen'. We cannot go beyond our selves, our universe, beyond the limits of imagination to see the whole from above and beyond, because we are not the author of our own existence at any level. One alone is above and beyond all things, and is in all and through all things. The more we know, the more the Unknown remains approachable only through openness to awe and wonder, love and praise.

Demands of the information age

Last night before bed, I started preparing a soup of butternut squash and red lentils for the Ignatian meditation group lunch today at our house, and finished it off before having breakfast this morning, in time to head across town to St Germans for the midweek Mass. There were a dozen of us there. It looks like I'm going to continue helping out there in the New Year, with two baptisms on the Feast of Christ's Baptism, and a wedding in February, to prepare for. It'll be the first time for me to officiate at a wedding in UK since retirement. 

Regulation is now more demanding because of abuse of church wedding ceremonies for marriages of convenience. Also people with a family connection to a church can now ask to be married there, even if they don't live in the Parish. Passport and address checks are now required at an early stage in the preparation. Clergy must prove they have no criminal record before they get permission to officiate in a new diocese. Trust and credibility must be legally formalised and kept updated, consequences of ministering in a society where a priest and the people served are no longer known to each other, as was used normal in previous centuries. It means ministry is far more based on the required function than relationships between people. No matter how much effort goes into making the offer of ministry personal, it is far more likely to be transient in nature. I wonder if we've yet taken into account the impact of this on Christian spirituality as well as practice.

There were five of us for the meditation session. As the group meets most months and has done for years, it's an appreciated part of the more permanent aspect of our respective journeys in faith. The same can be said for the small core group of people in each church congregation that's responsible for maintaining services and keeping the building open. Sometimes these relationships are life-long, and without them, something of the mind and heart of Christian tradition would be lost. They often seem to be older people, simply because they are people who stayed in a place to grow up and grow old together. The group always seems to be dying out, but more often than not its membership gradually changes over the years. A small aspect of growth which often goes un-noticed.

Much of the evening I spent working on migrating CBS user account record notes one by one into a OneNote file that can be easily accessed by all who need to. It's far from being an ideal solution, as the software doesn't offer all that it would be useful for it to do, but once the migration of data is  complete, it'll be easy for anyone with information to add to the common cloud based file. It's quite a dull routine task, but it requires concentration to maintain. I'll be glad to see the back of it, so that I can relax my worries about us keeping an up to date set of working information, easily accessible right back to when the business was set  up, going digital in 2009. 

OneNote disappointment

As the CBS team member who looks after the office equipment and ensures that all our business data is accessible, moving from just using a local area network for work data to using Cloud storage has not exactly been a straightforward journey. Once upon a time we used Google Drive as a secondary back up to our network drive. Then SkyDrive turned up morphed into OneDrive and we had computers on Windows 7 and 8.1, and theere were glitches because they didn't work quite in the same way. Then the big upgrade of everything to Windows 10 took place, but this didn't solve all the problems, but rather masked earlier problems which we thought we'd dealt with, but not quite. 

Eventually, with a little extra concentration and graft, we sorted this out. Also, I migrated our client dataset across to Libre Office Base to future proof its handling with software that has a reliable tested upgrade path. This I felt was necessary, as we've used MS Works database, dating from prior to 2000 since I set about building the CBS database in 2010. Although Works database is perfectly reliable, I don't quite trust Microsoft not to depart one day from its software backwards compatibility policy with an operating system upgrade installed automatically. 

Microsoft, over the years has retained dominance with its various file formats, and imposed changes through various versions of its MS Office software, driving people to spend on upgrading and the inevitable extra learning required that obstructs the flow of business. I'm a fan of the well recognised Open Document file format of the Open Source Software community, and Microsoft's resistance to accepting universally recognised file formats not its own is far from good for a global communications network medium. One could say the same about the many competing audio and video formats as well, but thankfully there are many software engineers worldwide developing workarounds and alternative solutions.

I moan about these things yet again because Julie our CBS administrator discovered a problem which hadn't earlier been noticed with the migration of data to Libre Office. Almost everything works well, apart from the large data fields containing commentary and notes attached to each client record. Some seem to have exceeded limits of which we were unaware, and created a cascade of errors affecting only these large fields, which we'd decided in any case to store in separate records. While the main body of data is completely intact, the notes are a mess, and don't even display well in any form I've been able to desire. No wonder good database engineers are well paid to deliver their product! So, we've continued to update the MS Works file as a repository for notes until we find a solution.

This afternoon, we tried out the Windows 10 app OneNote, which is a respository for various kinds of note taking which can also store links to files and images. Potentially useful but immediately we found its imitations. You cannot import any data into it. If you try cutting and pasting from a spreadsheet or a database it crashes the app. You can search by keyword, but not sort. It only gives information inputted in date order. It looks pretty, but it's not that powerful, and feels a bit like a bright designer idea which is more a work in progress than a finished product, despite its appearance.

After half an hour's annoyance with the app, we gave up on it in the office, but I returned to it later when I got home, to see if I'd missed out on anything. That was when  found it will accept unformatted texts pasted from a text editor, and that you can then add to any time you want, so with a few hours manual labour it would be possible to use this for storage of client notes, though it wouldn't be in a proper database. So, keep looking, I guess. There'll be something better out there to discover.

After supper we went to Chapter for a concert given by folk singer and story teller Robin Williamson and his wife Bina. Both are still going strong in their mid seventies, performing on stage for two hours, very lively and engaging. We met them when I was at St John's. They did a winter concert for us there and I remember it was freezing because the central heating wasn't working properly. The audience was smaller than it was this evening, but they are brave and hardly people, undaunted by the experience, and we've kept in touch with them since then. They had a young teenage daughter performing shyly with them when we first met. Now she's a graduate and a lawyer, working in Bristol. Time passes.