We actually took quite a lot of photos but I’ve uploaded them to flickr account and can’t be bothered to upload them again so pop over there and take a look at anything tagged “scotland”.
I’m hoping to learn some new things from the various talks during the 2-day conference, and to come back itching to try out new stuff! I’ll be meeting lots of new people as well, some of whom I’m “met” online already, and some of whom are completely new. Other than that I’m really not sure what to expect at all.
If you’re going to IPC, then pop over and say hi, I’m the tall, loud one in a phpwomen t-shirt :)
Firstly let me say that serendipity has a fabulous import feature which brought in 90% of my content about 30 seconds after I saw the button labelled “Import Data”. This is a real hurdle-remover for new users and definitely clinched the deal for me. Having done this I found that:
The images hadn’t been transferred and I also realised that the custom tags that textpattern uses, such as:
hadn’t been handled by the import script, so I kind of had two problems to solve. I started by transferring all the images across and renaming them to something more helpful.
This is going to be a really long article, but do read on if its helpful – I’m posting the rest as extended content so the disinterested need not scroll past it! Continue reading
The group has brought me friendship, direction, and moral support in quantities I never dreamed existed. Long may it continue :)
show processlist;
If you’re a phpMyAdmin user, then there’s a link for “processes” on the front page of your installation. Give it a try when things seem to be taking longer than they should!
Mentors come in two flavours – official and unofficial. An official mentor is part of a formal agreement and may even be regulated by your employer, and an unofficial one is someone you adopt and turn to for advice; I have one of each.
My offical mentor is Lig. my “Big Sis” from phpwomen.org where we run a Big Sis, Little Sis scheme. I expected this to involve a lot of technical input but the biggest thing I’ve got out of this relationship is moral support and an introduction to the wider php community – who in turn provide more of the aforementioned moral support in addition to the raft of technical information you’d expect, and serveral more rafts that you wouldn’t!
My unofficial mentor Mark is an ex-colleague from Snowdrop. Whilst we’ve only met a handful of times in person I took over the Oracle DBA stuff at Snowdrop from Mark and spent a lot of time on the phone/jabber/email with him with that and various other projects. Although we’re both now working elsewhere, live far away from one another, and have other distractions in our lives we still stay in touch. Mark is my “professional” mentor – although we work in different fields of technology, I tap into his business experiences to inform my own choices and deal with situations that are new.
Models are people whose behaviour you learn from or emulate in order to extend your own skill set, either by being actively coached by that person or by learning by observation. I have learned from a senior manager that to stutter endearingly while delivering bad news can work surprisingly well (not an approach to use every day!). When I worked as an administrational temp one summer, I was told to smile when on the phone – something which came in very handy when I worked on a technical helpdesk a few years later. I’ve also learned numerous tricks and techniques from the old hands in the technical departments in the various places that I’ve worked. These battle-hardened geeks can be hard nuts to crack, but they have so many stories to tell its worth it – and some have grown to be real-life friends.
Sometimes you have to ask to be taught something, this can be tricky to do if the person is busy or you are shy. On other occasions you may be able to learn from observation or the other person may mentor you of their own accord. However it happens, I try to make the most of the positive role models and coaches around me. From these people I have learned so many of the skills that I use day-to-day to perform my role and I’m grateful!
The jumper one was supposed to have sleeves but I ran out of time and enthusiasm at about the same point so it’s staying as it is :)
It was actually much more straightforward than I expected so here’s a quick rundown of the changes:
The scores default to 0-0 and show as 0-0 when there are no results – netball doesn’t really finish with no goals scored so its safe to assume that this means no result in this case! Last weekend our match finished 40-28 which is about average.
Hopefully this is interesting or useful to someone – if nothing else it will remind me what I changed next time I come to do something similar or further modify this!