Tuesday 3 March 2009

Churches Conservation Trust

The Churches Conservation Trust is a national charity which cares for over 340 of England’s finest historic churches no longer required for regular parish worship. I care passionately about the history, which churches represent, and believe that historic churches are central to the future of our countryside, our towns and our cities. I am regulary drawn to visit churches. They act like a magnet. They represent safety, comfort, peace, love and hope. They were built to last longer than the homes built around them and I believe they should be maintained and cared for to last forever.

Find out more from the Churches Conservation Trust website.

Tuesday 3 February 2009

Finding strength in the face of adversity.

"Life isn’t perfect, but adversity helps to define who we are" [Jo DeMarco, President and CEO of Contessa Knows].

"The next time you are faced with adversity, learn from it and know that you are becoming a much stronger person because of it." [John Boe, Sales Trainer]

"In every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage. In every defeat is a lesson showing you how to win the victory next time." [Robert Collier, author of The Secret of the Ages]

"People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles." [Frank Herbert, author of Dune]

Friday 30 January 2009

Backgammon

I started playing Backgammon quite soon after buying my new Nokia 3600s. It came with Backgammon II as standard and I think I am becomming hooked on the game. So here follows some links about Backgammon:

Backgammon federation,
Backgammon.org,
GNU Backgammon,
wikipedia


Have fun!

Social Networking

If Duncan Bannatyne and Richard Branson think twitter is good then it probably is.

"Twittering is on a roll" said Vic Keegan from The Guardian last week. He also suggested that Social networks such as twitter are "the way businesses will be run in the future" and that "this is the sort of service that could go ballistic in a recession."

Some people may be trying to put their head in the sand with regards to social networking sites but I think those people will have to wake up and realise that this is not going away. I think next months social networking forum at Olympia, London is something worth looking at. For me it started with Friends Reunited, followed by MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and now I have found Twitter. There are loads of these sites, as I discovered using wikipedia.

Last Sunday in the Observer I found an article where Facebook was described as "for the bored, the boring, the unfulfilled". This was about Georgina Hoobs-Meyer's discovery of her husband's online infidelity and she warned users of social networking sites that their lives can be totally exposed.

Some questions I am interesting in finding answers to are:
(1) What is so good about Online Social Networking and why are people so keen on it?
(2) What is to come and what will be most important aspects of Social Networking sites in the near to mediam term future?
(3) What are the social implications of online networking and what are the dangers that we need to protect ourselves against?
(4) What positive things can I personally get out of social networking?
(5) Who are the big making money winners of social networking sites and how do they get their money?

I'll gather opinions, ideas and my own thoughts and post them here.

Already have an answer to (5): Twitter says on their website that they spend more than they make. Unfortunately this has been the problem with most people in the western world and now we are in a global recession as a result!
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Thursday 22 January 2009

Technical Insights

Here follows some interesting links regarding mobile phone technology and software engineering.

Mobile Technology

1. Building Mobile Content presentation
http://www.readygo.com/mobile-overview/index.htm
2. Mobile QoS Monitoring:
http://www.deviceanywhere.com/
3. Earn Money by Testing Mobile Applications
http://www.mob4hire.com/about.php


Software Engineering
1. Agile Methodologies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
http://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html
http://agilealliance.org/
Agile: The changing role of testers

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