Google Buzz. Groan. Google and their ‘do no evil’ slogan, do they think that its all ok as long as they can still take over the world?

This is really going to hack off Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, TweetDeck, FourSquare and countless other social networking type websites.

Watching with interest although Google will make little hay given they always start something and half deliver on features and support.

Forums are sooooo old skool, aren’t they? With blogs, social networking (Facebook trying to take over the world), collaborative wikis – who needs forums? Especially when there are neat websites out there like Get Satisfaction .

Ok, you might have to register again, get used to a new interface and way of communicating (we are so used to having to do this), but it was about time good old fashion forums had a makeover….

Unbelievable.

The Volleyball England Strategic Plan 2009-13 document is 51 pages long and it looks all good (nice presentation) and encouraging details, apart from they seem to have skipped  whole section on funding and the finances actually needed to help fulfil their goals.  ????!!  Click here to download it.

And we wonder why we aren’t ‘going places’?

Unbelievable.

I wonder how I can get onto the EVA board and contribute?

Good to see the EVA try and be proactive in retaining membership levels with an email like the one below, but annoying to get two in a row one for refereeing and coaching. You would think I would just get the one email covering both.

But its getting better…. slowly.

Dear X

As a previously registered referee with Volleyball England to now carry on your affiliation and to continue gaining all the refereeing benefits you will need to re-register by the 1^st August and payment can be completed either online or by post.  To renew your membership by post please download the referee registration form from the membership section of the Volleyball England website, http://www.volleyballengland.org/Membership/How_to_Join.php

To renew your membership online please login with the details previously provided, if unsure of these details please email r.belton@volleyballengland.org or call 01509 631699. Below is a step by step guide on how to renew your membership online.  If you have changed email address please login with the address you were provided with and amend once logged in by clicking on the click here to amend details on the member details page.

The benefits of being a Volleyball England member can be found in the Membership section of the Volleyball England website.

If you have any questions or queries regarding membership for the 2009-10 season please contact Richard Belton on 01509 631699 or by email on r.belton@volleyballengland.org

How to renew your membership online, a Step by Step guide

1.       Go to the Volleyball England website www.volleyballengland.org.

2.       Click on the Member Services option that can be found on the links at the top of the page, just underneath the header image.

3.       Enter your login details

4.       The first page that you arrive at will be your personal details.  Check that these are correct.  If not, click on the option that says: If any of these details are incorrect click here to make an amendment.  Amend the required details and click on the Update button at the bottom of the page. Please make sure all fields are as accurate as possible.

5.       If you do not have a photo displayed please submit a photo using the link at the bottom of the page and this will be used for the production of your membership card (Coaches and Referees only). If you are an NVL player the photo will be displayed on your Team’s profile page. If you are unable to submit an electronic photo please post a photo to the Volleyball England Office or email it to Richard Belton on r.belton@volleyballengland.org

6.       Depending on your Membership categories you will have a number of links at the top of the page.  To renew a Membership category click on the details page for that category, i.e. Referee Details.

7.       Check that the details relating to this membership category are correct.  If not, click on the option that says: If any of these details are incorrect click here to make an amendment.  Amend the required details and click on the Update button at the bottom of the page.

8.       Scroll to the bottom of the page and from the payment table click on Pay Online alongside the 2009-2010 season.  This will add the membership renewal to your basket.

9.       If you wish to renew another membership category at the same time click on the Member Services option that can be found on the links at the top of the page, just underneath the header image and complete steps 4-6 for that membership category.

10.   Once you have added all of your membership renewals to the basket click on the Proceed to Checkout button and complete your payment.

Once the transaction is complete you will receive an email notifying you of your order

First impression, a great headline GB volleyball article called ‘GB Men Secure a Double Victory‘

So if you’re into vollyeball like I am, you read it (while thinking OMG we actually won!) then you discover that half the article is about the GB Men win and the other half is actually about the GB Women losing and its not even clear because it suddenly switches without any warning!  Check out this extraction from the article:

Coach Dragan Bozic added: “Our reception was better than yesterday but our attack did not play well. But this team has not been together very long and it is no surprise we have ups and downs in matches.”

Romania celebrated a double victory over Great Britain in Edinburgh, this time in straight sets (25-17, 25-13, 25-21) to improve their chances of reaching the Final Four. Head coach Bogdan Paul had stressed to his players that every set dropped could prove significant if they are to qualify for the Final Four and they responded.

Guess what, the second paragraph is refering to the GB Women’s game. Can you tell?! Not really, until you get to this part:

It was a dominant display against a GB team who could not scale the heights of Saturday when they made Romania battle for every point. There was a positive start from the home side with captain Lynne Beattie giving her side the lead for the first time in the match at 5:4 with a crosscourt hit.

Oh, a lady captain….

What gets me is why combine the two articles together? Why did they do that? I think the GB Women should have been a separate article. So we lost, what’s new?! That’s one of the beauty of sport. We need to rally around and support both the ladies and the men and those not so familiar with the sport won’t get confused/lost/annoyed.

Haven’t posted in weeks!

Things have been busy behind the scenes with the day job overtaking most other things.  However, some progress has been made on the outsourcing front and I have a huge list of ‘things to post’ which I haven’t gotten around to writing up… bother. I think that this is a great example of life these days. With work, social, family and friends, the economy, elections, sport, technology advances there is so much going on that if you blink you’re going to miss something, especially in Summer!!

We’ve had success with F1, cricket (no mention of losing to the The Netherlands please!), relative success in Tennis (wohoo!! Murray won Queen’s!).

Not doing so well though on the political ‘you spent how much, on WHAT??!’

Microsoft vs. Google war continues with Google IMO winning the last round of Wave vs. Bing and Google now on the attack with aggressively wanting to take over from Exchange.

All of these are nice distractions…. and the good weather…

If you don’t focus then you have no chance and I have to remind myself to take heed of this statement. On that note, I’m off to beaver away.

Whilst its fresh in my mind, here’s my checklist to remind myself when I next need to post a project for outsourcing:

• Leave a few small holes / gaps in the proposal on purpose and see if the provider picks up on them
• Are you going to communicate solely via written communication? If so, interview both the commercial and technical people via skype – see how quickly they type, the content and chat about non-project things – try to get a sense of the person.
• Watch out for culture differences and be sensitive to them
• Work out the time difference, discuss how the project is going to work from a management point of view, do they work weekends? 
• Set expectations by stressing the expected turnaround time for replies
• Who’s providing what supporting project tools? 
• Scout the available provider list and send personal invites if you see any potentials, don’t wait for them to come to you.
• Reject any providers you don’t get a warm feeling about – first impressions are usually right
• Do they answer the question or avoid it?
• Communicate with at least two people from the organisation, have them on the same conversation so you can see how different they really are
• Ask the same question in different ways, do you get a different answer?
• Find out who will be working on the project
• Agree project pricing milestones BEFORE awarding the project
• Try and get at least 3 different bidders to quote to (self-)check their estimates
• Ask for a project plan with milestones for delivery which includes code reviews
• Get a NDA signed if you want to and feel it necessary (I don’t normally as there has to be trust in the beginning)

Reminders when posting project work

• What’s the scope? To make it easier to understand can you compare it to something that already exists?
• Estimate the work yourself as a starting point
• State what date you hope to award the project to.
• State when you want the project work to start.
• State what you want to see in their proposal. Example work, code samples? cvs, references, work plan? Proof of experience, feedback from others on the outsourcing website, rating?…
• State what technologies you expect to see
• Who’s uploading to production site?
• Fix bugs for free and for how long?

Finally remember, you’re the one spending the money, only award the project if you are 120% ready to.

Companies House charged me £15 to fill in my Annual Return form online?!!!  Ok, its £30 by paper and post but £10 for electronic? What do they do at their end? Probably click to review, read (all of 10 seconds), click to accept and oh, look at that all done. If they have to re-key it all in from one system to another how stupid would that be?

http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/toolsToHelp/ourPrices.shtml

In classic start-ups, there’s a technologist (the code) and the manager (everything else). Unfortunately I’m the manager with no in-house technologist so I’m currently busy elancing (elance.com) a couple of projects and I’m amazed at the true nature of globalisation in action. I’m finding the responses very interesting and wide ranging. These responses are of course extremely important first impressions and if a poor impression is gained, mountains must be moved to change it.

• Getting a generic reply – nothing personalised
• Getting a generic reply with reference sites that aren’t build on the technology that is needed for the project
• Avoiding answering the question
• Suppliers placing bids when they should be pre-bids
• Being asked if I would consider PHP instead of rails – er, no, that’s why I stated RoR in the project briefing.
• Suppliers bidding for fixed priced work and then turning around after they have understand more details about the project which normally include sight of the spec, saying that we don’t do fixed price work!!
• Not asking the right questions nor enough of them

Replies are only one of the major things to help me cut down the bidders and hopefully award the project.

References can also be helpful but I personally class this as ‘minor’ as the view is skewed from the start as the bidder is only ever going to pick glowing reference sites. I would like to see ‘dull’ references included, but they are most likely not to want to talk about their poor experience!

Another major thing is buyer feedback but half of the projects completed on Elance do not have any detailed feedback from the supplier which is pointless. We sometimes forget that we need to help each other especially when the outlay can be hundreds if not thousands of £ / $.

Once I’ve closed the bids and hopefully chosen a provider, I’ll be posting my top x checklist on how to pick a provider.

Programming is like art, its a creation. I create, but I’m not always sure what I’m creating! I start with an idea, sketch it out on a piece of A5 (normally a few words, pictures and reminders) and then go for it. Some might call that PPP (piss poor planning).

In rails terms, that means I start scaffolding, create controllers and models, the core ones anyway. Then I start thinking about what database fields I need and end up adding to the nnn_create_<table>.rb migrations and re-running rake commands as I haven’t really done any ‘proper’ hard core coding yet to get to the basic database structure needed.

The rake tools are excellent in giving me a helping hand and if using Aptana I don’t even have to leave the dev environment. Nice for a lazy person like me. Here’s what I do – the long hand version:

1. rake db:drop  (as I only need to drop the current RAILS_ENV which is development)
2. rake db:create
3. Delete schema.rb in /workspace/<projectname>db
4. rake db:migrate

A clean database schema and a new shiny looking schema.rb is automatically created for me. Now I can go test some more and tweak as needed. Of course, I don’t advise this once you are in full coding swing just perhaps maybe at the very start, or plan better!