Jobs From Home (by sarah)

Obviously due to health problems and the little Jeany I tend to not be able to go out to work as such, even before she was thought of properly and the back problems had flared up so badly I realised that working as a steward at the Student Union was a no go. I headed down to the job center in hunt of a job I could do; I was thinking of envelope stuffing which I was sure would be a job you could do from home.

I explained the issues with needing to do physiotherapy and not being able to sit down or stand up too long and they just told me to go on benefits, which I didn't want to do. And so I began making looking at things I could do at home myself - there was little information then and I went back to college instead.

Then when I got here I was on crutches, so again I went to the job centre when Alaric assured me I would get an interview and they would sort me something out - all I got was rudeness and informed I had to look through all the job options myself and work out what I should apply for - which I did. There was basically nothing. And so I turned to learning web-design stuff and writing my blogs which was a nice sideline to Al's company regardless of the subsequent issues we had with floods and clients not paying.

I feel like I have been stumbling in the dark with a lot of this trying to find jobs I could do from home. Then I found out my friend has as site that covers all the sorts of questions I was asking. Obviously a lot of things have changed in even the last five years but I wish there had been something like this so easily accessible then and even if you are considering setting up your own business with or without the home aspect I think it's a good read.

The site is called Jobs From Home for those who are interested.

User Interfaces for Event Streams (by alaric)

Reading Phil Gyford's post about the reasoning behind his Todays Guardian app reminded me of an old interest of mine - the design of user interfaces that show people streams of events.

I hate the fact that I have several systems that have reason to throw notifications at me:

1. Incoming email (with multiple accounts)
2. Twitter (with multiple accounts)
3. RSS feeds I follow
4. Voicemails/SMSes
5. Notification of server failures and other such technical problems
6. Incomng phonecalls, Skype calls, etc
7. IMs and DMs in IRC, and people mentioning my name in IRC channels
8. People talking in channels I'm following in IRC
9. Scheduled alarms (time to stop working and eat!)
10. Batch processes have finished (I often start a long compilation/test sequence going then browse the Web for five minutes while it runs - then get distracted and come back twenty minutes later)

Many of these event sources are capable of producing events of different levels of urgency, too. It's really quite complex. Some things shout in my face (incoming skype messages cause a huge window to pop up over what I'm doing, for example) while some need to be manually checked (such as email; I get too much spam for the "you've got mail!" noise to mean much to me), and this has little correlation with the relative importance of them.

Obviously, the first thing to do is to have some standard mechanism in the user interface system for notifying me of events. Growl is a start, but it's focussed on immediate notifications, rather than handling a large backlog of events. What I want is something like my email inbox, that has a searchable, scrollable, history, and notifies me when new events come up. But I also want richer metadata than Growl has; I want all IMs, emails, and whatnot from the same person to be tied to that 'source' of events, so I can filter them into groups. I want to have Personal, Work, and Systems events, and to have Personal deprioritised during working and Work deprioritised during personal time. And so on.

The BlackBerry OS goes someway towards this with its integrated Messages system. Any app can register to put messages into the message stream, so when I get emails, BlackBerry IMs, notifications of new versions of software being available, etc. they all appear in the same time-stream and I get a 'new message' notification. I want something similar on my desktop, but with much more advanced filtering and display capabilities. My design for 'user agent' entities in ARGON involves using a standard "send an object to an entity protocol" for all email/IM/notification activities - the same protocol that is used to send print jobs to a printer, files to a backup system or removal storage device, orders to an automated process, and so on; it's roughly the equivalent of "drag and drop" in a desktop GUI. Incoming objects from 'elsewhere' are then combined inside the UA with internal events such as calendar alarms and situations the user agent might poll for, such as things appearing in RSS feeds, into a centralised event stream, by the simple process of translating all internal events into incoming objects like any other; but actually designing a user interface for displaying that is something I look forward to doing...

Phil's analysis of the newspapers interests me, because it's a very similar challenge. You have a stream of events, and the user may want to skim over them to see what's relevant then zoom into particular ones. How do you present that, and how do you help the user deal with an inundation of events, by applying heuristics to guess the priority of them and suitably de-emphasising or hiding irrelevant events, or making important events intrude on their concentration with an alarm? Priority is mode-dependent, too; if you're in an idle moment, then activity in your interest/fun RSS feeds should push out work stuff entirely - apart from important interruptions. And some events will demand my attention to respond to them, in which case they should offer me links to the tools I need to do that - a notification of a problem on a server, ideally, should carry a nice button that will open me up a terminal window with an ssh connection to that server. But some things might require my attention, but I can't give it yet - so I need to defer the task, so it doesn't then clutter my inbox, yet in such a way that it reappears when all higher-priority tasks are done. There are elements of workflow, where events need an initial "triage" to be categorised into "read-and-understood, do now, do later today, do whenever" and maybe prioritised, then later, deferred tasks need to be revisited.

Also, some event streams are shared. Perhaps an event should be handled by the first member of a team to be free, such as a shared office phone ringing, or a bug to be fixed or feature added to a software product. There needs to be some system for shared event pools, with support for events to be "claimed" from the pool by a person, or put back. Perhaps personal event systems should be able to contain proxy objects that wrap events stored in a shared pool somewhere, so they can be managed centrally as well as appearing in personal event streams along with events from other sources. Standard protocols would be required to manage this.

Looking at the relatively crude support for this kind of thing in even the supposedly integrated and smart combined email/calendar apps, I think there's a lot of fun research to be done!

June’s Challenges (by sarah)

June has already been a bizzy month but I feel it is not too late to set myself some challenges. One of the things I want to do this month is focus on art type stuff - so that is illustrations, fimo sculptures and the like along with updating the art and craft blog. I have already started with some of this 🙂

You can now buy prints and things with some of my seascapes at Point Defect. I'm also looking for outlets for wiggly pets and things which seems to be going ok.

So my aim is to spend 30 hours over this month on art - I have already done about 12 hours 🙂

But I always have a second challenge right? I think it is going to have to be blog posts! I will be attempting to write at least 30 posts this month - this shouldn't be too hard actually but we will see 🙂

I'm a bit sad that I didn't get my writing game rolling properlly last month but at the moment money is being the stalling point with that one :/

Economic Crises hits the Public Sector (by sarah)

I'm very happy with Jean's school but yesterday we get a letter say that they do not have enough money to replace the teacher who retired nor to keep all the current stuff on full time. So the teachers have had to take an hours cut and the afternoon will see two classes instead of three.

They do not think there will be an increase in funding and infact there are cuts and expenses will continue to rise. Friends who are teachers are finding they are loosing their jobs as departments in secondary schools are honned down to a minimium. Graduate teachers are being employed as they are cheaper but as soon as they become experienced they to will find there are no jobs.

It would appear that 20 years experience is not needed and everybody will be fine with inexperienced teachers who though maybe good teachers are still very much going to be learning the ropes and now those colleges that could guide them through it are being turffed out of the system. Am I the only one who sees this as dangerous and damaging to our children's education?

More - if class numbers are rising in the village then what of the already stupid class sizes in the towns and cities? Are they going to be doing the same?

Large classes means that children can be lost in the mass and struggling or excelling get lost and not noticed. The children themselves see the school and teachers as a system around them rather than being apart of it - this leads to disruptive behavoiur as they develop the old US and THEM complex. Then we come to the safety issue - more children means more furniture cramped into the rooms and this means that regurdless of the fire door not being obstructed - there are more things to crash into, less room to move about - more territory disputes amongst the kids.

And of course the larger numbers results in a breeding ground for bullying - I am talking about education in general here.

I thought it was telling that the school can't see a change to these circumstances for the next 3 odd years.

I am wondering how Nurses, police and fire departments are fairing? I have already found out that most of the fire fighters are sort of part time hobbyist - ie they do it because they want to save lives on top of their actual job 🙁

Surviving the Curse (by sarah)

Recently we have been living in Interesting Times more than usual - first off we still don't have a working vechile as the car we bought died on the first long outing we did in it. This has resulted in us going to the small claims court etc...

Of course Alaric spent all he could spare of his bonus on the car - using the rest to pay things off. So until he either gets another bonus or we get our money back we can't get another car.

Then due to this we hired a car for a weekend trip I had booked ages ago - everything seemed fine when we returned it and about two weeks later the office in London was broken into steeling Alaric's laptop for the second time in a few months. Alaric walked in on the pale, pimply behooded youths who made a quick get away.

Fortunatly Al is quiet good at backing up.

On the way home from this debacle after having had to cancel cheque books and the like that where in the laptop case, he discovered that our account was empty.

However this turned out to be due to the car rental company and not the brake in - who had on the Tuesday removed some £800 odd quid from our account leaving nothing there. I recieved a letter on the day of the break in saying there were dents on the car but no mention of money.

Letter is dated after they took the money from the account, it was a further week before we recieved the invoice saying they were going to take the money. We tried to sort it out with them but they said it would take weeks/months to sort out - mean while we had no money for food, rent etc...

So we re-contact the bank and have to fax them stuff though they are helpful and know of the company as a royal pain. But then we find our fax doesn't work, nor do any of the others we have tried so we re-contact bank and get an address.

And mean while everyone is now contacting us to say they haven't been able to take payments etc... Ulrike has been very kind and is getting me a Tescos order which I hope to be able to give her the money for next month but at this rate we are going to be short next month too now as it doesn't look like that money will reappear in our account any time soon :/

The old Chinese curse strikes again me thinks!

(Other friends have been helpful too such as Stephen who brought us round some food plants - I am so glad we grow so much of our food and get stuff delivered from the diary at the moment.)