Friday Philosophy – On The Return To Physical Gatherings December 3, 2021
Posted by mwidlake in Uncategorized.Tags: behaviour, perception, user group
2 comments
In my last post I talked about why I had decided to return to attending physical events, even while having reservations about it. The event, UKOUG’s annual conference at the Oval cricket ground in London (a wonderful premises to spend time in), happened at the start of the week. So, how was it? Did I feel safe? How did they look after us?
The Event
I’ll just start with a couple of paragraphs on the actual event and then move on to how I found it all.
The conference itself was very, very good. It covered both Tech and Apps over 2 full days, with a speaker/volunteer evening event the day before the conference. The Oval was generally a nice venue but the number of issues I saw with AV… Boy they need to sort that out! As for the evening event on the roof terrace – great for Covid security, terrible for avoiding hypothermia! I heard a few people who said there could have been a bit more technical content and there were some slots where there were too many “Oracle Names” at the same time or two talks on the same topic, but unless you have helped organise the schedule for a large, complex event like this, you have no idea how hard it is! This was not helped this year by a larger-than-usual drop-out of speakers just before the event due to the new Omicron covid-19 variant. The variant itself was not the problem (there are very few cases outside Southern Africa yet), it was how countries were changing their travel and isolation rules. Coming to speak at a conference than then having to spend 10 days locked down when you get back to Switzerland is a big ask. I used to take complaints about there being too many good session clashing as almost a complement – there was just too much good stuff to see.
I have to take my hat off to the board, office, and volunteers who put the conference together. It’s always been a challenge and that was with an office of over a dozen people and a small army of volunteers, with the board having oversight. To survive Covid-19 and the massive drop in revenue, UKOUG has had to par right down to 3 staff and the board have been very, very hands-on. The conference this year was nothing to do with me, I had to step down from the board last year. For the first time in over 10 years I had nothing to do with the event at all, I was there purely as a delegate. I hope I made this clear to all the people who thanked me for the event! It was strange being just a delegate after over 18 years of either presenting, hosting, planning, or fronting.
Being With People Again
As anyone who regularly reads my sporadic blog output or follows me on social media knows, I’ve been very cautious about Covid-19 from the outset. I’ve kept away from people, followed all the guidance, and actually gone beyond the official rules as I’ve kept abreast of what professional epidemiologists, medics, and virologists have to say. But as I covered in my previous blog I had made the decision to go to the conference despite my general caution. I’m double vaccinated, had my ‘flu jab, I know the majority transmission is via aerosol droplets so I can do some things to reduce the risks. I love the community and conferences, it’s pretty much what I have focused on for 5 or 6 years, so for me I decided it was worth the risk. I utterly respect anyone who comes to the opposite conclusion.
As I said in that post, the part of attending the conference I was most anxious about was getting there. I ended up travelling into London with a friend, Erik van Roon. He had been amazed at how few people on the London Underground were wearing masks, often sat under signs saying it was mandatory. That’s what happens when you have a government that does not lead by example, ignores their own rules, and no one enforces any restrictions. I hate being on UK public transport at the moment. We both wore our masks. The trip in on the train was OK as it had come from the airport. Most of the other people were from other countries and were happy to wear masks. None of them passed out or spontaneously died… On the London Underground is was about 50/50 mask wearing but, thank goodness, it was remarkably quiet and quick. I’ve never done that route so quickly and quietly except at 10pm at night. Despite the pleasant company I had, I really disliked the trip and I was glad when it was over.
We had a gentle introduction to “crowds” on Sunday night when we had a speaker/volunteer gathering at a club in central London, just off Leicester Square. I have to confess that for the first few minutes, as more people arrived, I got a little anxious and had to concentrate on not showing it {standing in a room screaming “get away from me you plague-ridden vermin!!!!” is likely to dent the atmosphere}.
However, the room was waaaay bigger than it needed to be for the numbers there and there was a wide open doorway out onto an outside balcony. I would have preferred more mask wearing but I noticed people were standing in looser circles than normal. Most people avoided physical contact. After the first half hour I found the experience easier than I thought I might, partly I think as I knew most of these people and (utterly wrongly) thus unconsciously felt they were “safe”. That’s an oddity of human behaviour, we tend to treat people we know as safer than strangers, even when logically we know it is not true. Also, of the people I actually knew, I was sure they were vaccinated. I don’t personally know many people who are Covid-19 denialists. One thing I did do is not go for food when it came out. It was platers of stuff with people crowed around them. No thanks. But later on more food came out and people had wandered off, so I had some of that. This might sounds a bit “off” but I’m probably at more risk from Covid-19 than most. If I get a bad spell of it, it’s probably hospital time again and I don’t like the idea…
As the evening wore on and alcohol was consumed, people did relax more and distances shrank, but then so did the number of people there. I confess that when, at the end of the night we moved on to shorts, I totally stopped worrying about how many SARS-CoV-2 particles there might be. The lesson there is that increasing alcohol consumption decreases bio security. Who knew? (sarcasm).
The Big Crowd
Next day came the real test. Would I find being in crowds worth it for the event?
I should say at this juncture that everyone at the event was double vaccinated or had had a negative test prior to the event (or at least should have) and I know checks were made. I could not guarantee to you that everyone was checked, but that was the intent. {update – see the comment by Neil Chandler for more details on the steps taken to keep us all safe}. I had personally also taken lateral flow tests for 2 days before attending and did more during the event. I didn’t want to be Typhoid Mary All foreign speakers/attendees had had to do tests as part of their trip here (though ask me some time how well all of that was handled!!!) so I knew I was safest with my overseas friends.
Even so, walking into the keynote talk I found unnerving. But also really welcome. People, “my” community, lots of men and women with a shared interest and a desire to learn or teach. And not via (excuse my French) bloody Zoom or MS Teams or some other sodding screen.
I noticed that the crowd was spread out far more than normal, people were sat with spare seats by them or between their little group and the next one. The windows were open. The turnout for the conference had been higher than the organisers had feared, especially given the hype of Omicron variant for the prior 2 or 3 days, but we were well below 50% capacity for the venue, I would say 30%. It helped that, unlike most conference venues, all the rooms were in a long row with windows/doors outside on at least one side. Thinking back, it was also nice to be at a conference where there was natural light in every room.
As the conference progressed it remained the case that people kept a little extra distance (though I moved away from some people who got too close) and everyone seemed relieved to be having a fairly normal conference experience. We had coloured badges on to indicate how hands-on we wanted to be. Green was “touch me if you want”, yellow was “I’m happy to be in your presence but no tongues” and red “Keep the hell away from me!”. I can’t remember meeting any reds (well, they should have been keeping the hell away from me) and I was yellow. A few people said they were surprised I was yellow – they can’t know me that well! I hope the colours were different enough for anyone colour blind to work it out as there was no text on the button (kiss me quick/I’m terribly British so no touching/bugger off).
The only times when there were a lot of people together where breaks and the evening event. All the catering staff were masked & gloved, generally they were putting your food on a plate and giving it to you at the end, no finger food or standing coughing over sandwiches. Even the tea/coffee was prepared for you and handed over. Having said that, on the first day I decided not to join in (helped by the fact it was all dry, brown food) and I went out and got something. Again, my lungs are shot so I take extra precautions.
The evening event was, as I said above, in the open air and with lots of space. I did not feel anxious about it at all. The venue was originally booked for June when the terrace would have been stunning. At the very end of November during a cold snap, you were in more danger from the cold than any virus.
The final thing I’ll cover is masks. Very few people wore masks. It’s the one aspect of the whole experience I was not happy with – and yet I was not wearing my mask. Trying to talk with people when you have a mask on is harder. I also personally find wearing a mask for long difficult. I was strapped to ventilation machines for a week, unable to breath enough on my own to keep me alive, and as a result I sometimes get very anxious wearing a mask. I’ve still got poor lung function and, though I am generally OK wandering around or going for a walk on the flat, any incline is a challenge and forget trotting or running at the moment. A set of stairs can leave me gasping on a bad day. A mask makes me breath that little bit harder so it’s tiring. But I always wear one on public transport or in shops. I find people who claim masks “poison you” farcical, given how many people in medical or dirty jobs wear them all day just fine. If I can wear one with my problems, they can. But at the conference I didn’t wear a mask and I am not really sure why.
Something a friends said to me during the conference was that if he heard of someone going off to a big party, especially now with the new variant in everyone’s mind, he’d think they were mad. But we came to this conference. It’s called cognitive dissonance, hold two opposing opinions at once. OK, it was not a party, it was something we do as part of our careers (or in my case my hobby), but really it was something we did not NEED to do.
Was I glad I went? Yes. Was it sensible? Probably not. Would I do it again next week? Absolutely not. For one thing, I count myself as a risk to others for the next week or so. Would I do it next Spring? Depending on unknowns with the pandemic and whether I can manage the flight (or go by land) probably.
I love conferences and other meetings. I don’t take part in the community for my career anymore as my career is over, I do it as I like many of the people I meet in the Oracle sphere and I love the sharing of knowledge. It’s important to me and I will take some risk, if I feel that those around me are going to also be sensible. I would not go on a holiday to the costa del sol at the moment as I know what the average UK tourist over there is like, and I would not go to a night club (but then, I don’t like them!). But another conference? Yeah….
Friday Philosophy – To Physically Meet Or Not? October 29, 2021
Posted by mwidlake in Uncategorized.Tags: behaviour, conference, meetings
1 comment so far
We are seeing a slow return to user groups having physical events, or hybrid ones where some people stay at home and use zoom (other remote networking solutions are available) and other people physically come along along to the venue. Some people are now happy to meet physically, some would like to but their company will not support it, and some people don’t want to come within spitting distance (quite literally, given it is now pretty much established that SARS_CoV_2 is primarily spread in airborne droplets of saliva) of other humans.
Most of us have taken part in virtual conferences or meet-ups since Covid-19 first arose. Let’s face it, though they are better than nothing, remote events are not exactly a proper replacement for being in the same place, chatting with old friends, making new contacts, and seeing people talk about topics in the flesh. And presenting remotely is a very different experience (as I covered in this post on training remotely) and takes a different skill set to live presenting, and many presenters really do not enjoy. I’ll do it but I am not keen and I have mostly stopped presenting remotely at user group events. I know some people prefer virtual events but the majority don’t – which is fine, we are all different.
So what to do? Keep home and keep safer but continue to miss out on what a physical event brings, or take an increased risk of contracting or spreading Covid-19 and go? It’s a difficult choice for many people.
I’m returning to physical events. But I fully understand anyone who does not want to, especially if they live with (or are themselves) at higher risk, such as having a relative who cannot be vaccinated.
For a different opinion you can go look at this post by Brent Ozar. He sums up a few reasons for still keeping away from physical events.
I’m double vaccinated, I have a good understanding of Covid-19 (as anyone who was reading my blog last year will know), both how it is transmitted and what it does to you. I’m going to return to going to physical events but I am going to take precautions – not just to protect me from the infected hordes but also to help prevent me from infecting the hordes. I will be attending the UKOUG tech 21 conference at the end of November and I am really, really looking forward to it.
The UKOUG Tech 21 conference organisers will be taking many precautions themselves over ventilation, number of attendees etc. I was still on the board of UKOUG in the spring of 2020 and we were the first user group to deem physical events too risky and cancel one, the first I think to make a solid call of having no physical events in 2020 at all, one of the first (if not the first) to organise a proper multi-stream virtual conference. UKOUG have demonstrated a real focus on the safety of it’s membership and yet try to keep the oracle community breathing (see what I did there). I was really proud that UKOUG listened to myself & Neil Chandler, looked at the science, and made decisions that protected the membership to the cost of the user group itself.
I’ll be wearing my mask when I travel to the event. I know, in some countries it would be deemed madness to not wear a mask on public transport but, despite all the signs saying it is mandatory, the UK government have not attempted to enforce such rules at all. And when they sit in parliament in a crowded room, not a mask is to be seen usually. They have failed to govern or lead effectively on Covid-19 since day one. I was not a fan of masks initially, if you asked me 2 years ago I would have laughed at the general public using them as viruses & bacteria are massively smaller than the pores in non-medical-grade masks, most people have not been shown how to wear them (and still don’t know), are useless at not touching the mask or keeping them clean, and often just wear them as a pointless chin warmer. But it’s been demonstrated that masks are very good at catching the droplets of saliva that we expel and so greatly reduce the wearer transmitting SARS-CoV-2, and somewhat mitigate against breathing in tainted droplets. They help.
Once I am there I am staying at a local hotel (I could have done the trip in and out from home each day), walking to the event, basically minimising my public transport usage.
If there is any finger or buffet food offered, I ain’t touching it. It only takes one infected person coughing when serving themselves to massively increase risk.
I won’t be shaking hands (or bumping elbows, a practice I have always thought was bloody ludicrous, especially when we were told to cough into our arm to contain it – “Hey, touch my plague infested arm!!!”) or hugging people unless it seems very important to them. So pretty much no one I know in the IT sphere. Licking other delegates and wild sex is definitely out this year
If anyone is coughing, spluttering, looking flushed, complaining they feel hot but “it’s just a cold” I am not staying near them. If Covid-19 taught us anything it is that we should not regard people who go to work/meet people even when they are ill as heroes but as lunatics. And employers who encourage or force such behaviour are not only abusive but mad. You want all your staff to get ‘flu?.
I’ll probably wear a mask quite a lot as I cough a lot these days, as a result of having crappy lungs. I don’t want to make people feel unsafe and there is always a chance I could be carrying SARS-CoV-2 and not realise.
I’ll be taking a lateral flow test every day and for a few days before the event. They are not desperately good at detecting the virus when you first have it but it’s some indication. If one says you DO have Covid-19 you almost certainly do. If I can I’ll get a proper PCR test a few days before.
I would have already started going to physical events if I felt safe to fly. This is nothing to do with Covid-19 though. I was supposed to be at POUG2021 last September (they had much lower Covid-19 levels than the UK so I would have been safer there than the UK!) but my lungs have never really recovered from my fun with ‘flu a couple of years ago and any demands on them above a steady walk and I can’t do it for long. I might be fine in a plane, but taking a four hour flight and finding out I’m not is not a clever idea. I could get tested to see how I would cope with the reduced pressure and O2 levels of a flight but the UK NHS has been under extreme pressure for most of this year and I see my getting the test as a frivolous waste of their resources, even if they would agree to do it.
Another aspect of remote events is a lot of them have been put on free to the delegates or considerably cheaper than a physical event. This makes physical events look expensive and introduces the complexity of do the organisers have two fee structures, for physical and virtual attendance. You can reduce the costs of your venue by having fewer people actually there but it’s not really proportional. Many user groups, especially those that have any sort of organisation behind them (like most of the big ones such as DOAG, UKOUG, POUG) incur costs just by existing and the drop in income caused by Covid-19 has been crippling. Conferences that delegates pay for, and membership fees for user groups, keep these groups going and if people (or more often companies) stop paying for them… You are going to lose your user groups.
A final consideration is how the UK is doing Covid-19 wise. The UK is doing bloody awfully and has done so for most of the year. The one thing we did, that the government pretty much left our National Health Service to sort out, was immunising everyone who would and could do so. Our case rates are, excuse my language but I am a little vexed by this, fucking awful, about the worst in the world compared to our population size (poor Ukraine and Romania win there as the moment). The vaccines and steadily improving treatment methods are keeping death rates at only terrible. But if we get another large spike, UKOUG will cancel and I would not go anyway.
Joel Kallman, The Heart of APEX, Sadly Gone May 28, 2021
Posted by mwidlake in Uncategorized.5 comments
and nothing I say will dent your faith.
As I said, this blog post is not for you, please go back to your chosen view of the world.
Now, for those of you who knew or cared about Joel Kallman please read on….
News is spreading around the Oracle community, and especially the APEX community within it, of the passing of Joel Kallman from Covid-19, at just 54 years old. Joel, along with Mike Hichwa, created APEX in 1999 and since then he has been passionate about using it for the betterment of anyone and anywhere he could find a use for it. But more than that, Joel has been passionate about community. APEX is the technical product he is known for, but everyone who met Joel knew he was, more than anything, passionate about people and doing the best for everyone.
{Important note – if you came to this post from one of the sites that has tried to use Joel’s death to, in a very twisted way, argue that Covid-19 does not exist, or is not harmful, or that vaccinations against it are dangerous or do not work then please, please, just go back to the echo chamber you came from. I’ve blogged about the science of Covid-19 and the vaccines and suggested you look at those posts instead – and NONE OF YOU DID. You are not here for a good reason so just go away now}.
When anyone in our community passes away there are tributes paid. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many and with such depth of feeling as there have been for Joel. Everyone who met him seems to have their own story of what a supportive and kind person he was.
So why add my own, especially as others knew him better and have better memories to share? Because it’s another candle to the shining beacon of remembrance that Joel deserves.
My story of Joel
I didn’t know Joel very well, we had exchanged a few words at various Oracle conferences but never had a proper conversation. However at OOW London 2019 he came over to me, almost jogging through the throng calling me. “Hi Martin, I’ve been looking for you – I’m Joel Kallman”. As we had briefly met a few times and he is so well known I did wonder why he introduced himself. But then I’m not always good with people, but Joel was brilliant with people.
He wanted to write an article for Oracle Scene, the UKOUG magazine. We (well, mostly my predecessor) had asked him a few times in the past but Joel was always really busy. “I know I keep turning you down, but it’s on my list this year to offer you something – would that be OK?” Well hell yes! He’s Mr APEX and I knew he could write well. It would be a feather in our caps to have him write for us. I was actually on my way to meet someone and I suggested to Joel we meet later but he said no, he had no idea when he would get time again, “ Let’s sort it now, I will walk with you”. And he did, for about 10 minutes, away from where he needed to be. And he was not so much interested in talking about the possible article (that took all of a minute), but more in saying really nice things about UKOUG, how he appreciated me taking on being president, saying it was so good that people like us helped the community and asking me how it was going. That 10 minutes made me feel really good.
In the end the article for Oracle Scene did not happen. That’s not unusual, we are all busy and Joel more so than most, authors often let us down at short notice. But the way he handled not being able to do the article was unusual. Joel was blowing us out with only about 2 weeks before copy date (again, not unusual). But he insisted he have a video call with myself and the editor to explain why he could not do the article and to apologise. The irony? Joel had cancelled the article as he had been working 18 hour days, 7 days a week, for weeks to get a prototype app and the supporting infrastructure together to track Covid-19 symptoms and what drugs people were taking (all drugs, for any other illness, to try and spot a correlation and thus a potential drug target and potential treatments). Some of you may remember Oracle making a huge thing of that app. Joel had poured all he could into it as he thought it might help everyone.
To be candid, Joel looked incredibly tired and he said he’d not seen much of his family for a couple of weeks, but he took time out to do this for us and he must have apologised 4 or 5 times. We were saying “Joel! It’s OK! Go get some down time!”.
Such a nice man and such bitter irony that he died from Covid-19, something that he put so much effort into tackling.
Other Stories And Words.
As I said, so many others have wonderful things to say about Joel. Liron Amitzi has a lovely story about Joel going that extra step for his audience. Connor McDonald shares how Joel explained his ethos of raising up those around him and how maybe some good could come from the awfulness of Covid 19, plus a link to an APEX community page we can all leave our stories on.
And Lauren Cohn has put together a really touching video of Joel, including the personal request he made (which Connor quotes), which starts at 1:38) in his last keynote about us all being part of our communities. I think that video might become his unofficial epitaph
{I’ve had a report (thanks Steven) of the above link not working so try https://vimeo.com/556008201 if not}.
I’ve said a few times about my thoughts on community and being there for others. Joel not only said it but did it, and was an example of kindness and his passion for doing the best by everyone. He was certainly someone to look to as an example. I’m wishing I knew him better,.
I’ve Decided What I Want, Now I’ll Pick My “Science”. May 20, 2021
Posted by mwidlake in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
This post is, I’m afraid, a rant. I let rip on social media (Facebook) about something that has been annoying me about some people’s attitude to Covid-19. A couple of friends don’t use FB and said they wanted to see what I wrote, so I’m repeating (and expanding) it in this blog post. Stuff we put on social media quickly drifts into history and out of sight (it’s often still there but no one looks at it) but blog posts tend to live on, so this post may get taken down in a week or two.
So, what did I say?
Something I have noticed over the last 10 years (OK, 15 months really) is that what many people state about Covid 19 and all the rules & restrictions is generally dictated primarily by what they want for them – and is sod all to do with the societal need. They have already come to a conclusion as to what they want to happen and then they will pick “science” (which is often not science but more what other people, with or without any biological or scientific skill, have said) to support it, or cite “well it just makes sense” or “the rule stopping me doing this is just ridiculous”.
If keeping us all safe means limiting personal contact then personal contact businesses don’t agree (how many of us REALLY need a hair cut, let alone our nails decorated with glitter). Yes, you might like going to the gym or want a new tattoo but that’s a want, a desire. Not a need. Compared to increasing the risk of spreading Covid-19 and once more seeing our health services having to yet again go the extra mile (or 10) and cancel/postpone all the other stuff they do, your want is rather selfish.
If we are told not to move geographically in order to slow the cross-pollination of SARS-CoV-2 strains between regions then many people from holiday based companies & venues scream that travel is not the actual problem. Yes. Yes it is. Most of us have never before had real-world experience of epidemics & outbreaks of highly contagious, potentially fatal diseases (like SARS & MERS or outbreaks of other contagious diseases) as this is the first pandemic (world wide epidemic) we’ve had for a lifetime. But stopping movement and isolating the ill is about the only way to stop such diseases, aided significantly with vaccines if available, and is a common when such outbreaks occur. I think this lack of personal experience is part of the problem, most people have not had to go through it before so they struggle to accept it is needed now. It makes it even harder to accept because, on an individual level, Covid-19 is not actually that fatal. And if most of the people you know are young, you don’t “see” the impact. Population wide, it’s awful. Go chat to a hospital worker, they’ll tell you. Or actually look at the articles on what is happening in parts of India. It’s bloody awful.
But a lot of people want to go somewhere, or their income is dependent on people doing so (which is much more significant than a theoretical risk, isn’t it?) so they decide what they want and then pick the opinions/science to suit. It really helps if government helps those impacted financially, which the UK has sort-of done, but could have done better. Doing so helps remove the immediate, personal threat and allows people accept the wider, actually more significant societal threat.
If preventing new variants coming into the country means limits & forced isolation for travellers – travel companies disagree. What a surprise. And the screams when it is suggested people will not just be asked to self-isolate but will be checked up on and punished if not. Let alone made to stay in isolation in a hotel. If you *really* need to travel, so to see to a relative’s medical/care needs, it seems people are willing to accept the rules as, compared to the serious need for the actual trip, it’s just an imposition. Popping over to Tuscany for some sun but then being expected to stay at home to protect the nation is seen as an over reaction to such a frivolous thing. Maybe the problem is not the “over reaction” but the frivolous part.
People living in rural communities that have lower levels of transmission “than those oiks in the towns” want to be excluded from the local towns when it’s decided a region needs local controls. “They” have the problem, don’t include us! Well, boundaries have to be decided and they have to be simple. In the UK we have had at times just too many areas with different rules and no one is really sure what the rules are for where. My area is Uttlesford and it was level 3 when all around was 4. Have you any idea where Uttlesford is? And it’s boundaries? Didn’t think so. I live in it (so I know where it is) but I don’t know when I leave it and go into Braintree. Every time rules are based on an area which is not really well defined (like a national border) it’s confusing and there are lots and lots and lots of borders. Then people scream “Unfair!!!” about the borders. “Why can’t I go to the pub, but that bloke down the end of the road can!” Because the border has to be somewhere, and wherever it is, there will be people on different sides of it under different rules. It’s an unavoidable consequence of local rules OK? And on the topic of the nasty town where all the disease ridden people are and only they should have the restrictions. Where do you go to shop or get the car serviced? That nasty town. And they probably account for a large part of the financial input to those oh-so-pretty villages which the locals want to keep for themselves.
And the one that grinds my gears most is “It’s my Mental Elph!”. It’s replaced “I know my Rights!” as the cry of the unknowing as a demand for stuff they want. “I want to be able to do X as not doing so is harming my mental health”. Well, laying in a bed for a week tied to a mask keeping you alive with high pressure oxygen sort of takes it’s toll too, as I remember.
Mental health is a serious business, it can be utterly debilitating, life-altering, even fatal. Being sad, or bored or not able to do what you want THE VERY DAY you want it is in no bloody way the same as a chronic mental health condition and is not a threat to your mental health. Just stop it. Mental Health has struggled to ever be taken seriously and, now that it really is getting more attention and justifiably viewed as an illness to treat and not a failing, this almost knee-jerk “it’s harming my mental health” is, in my opinion, belittling a serious issue. Or more accurately a set of serious issues as, like cancer, mental illness is not a single disease but many. But every day you will see someone on TV saying it as a reason to be allowed to do what they want. You wanting 2 weeks shagging in Tuscany is not even comparable to someone asking if life can get any more shit and struggling to function in society.
So many people decide on the “science” and “what is fair” based on their personal desires first and foremost. Not what will give most people the best life they can have. I.e they have not read a single sodding article on “the science” let alone checked out if the references even lead to a real scientific paper. It all just ticks me off. Any time you want the rules about Covid-19 to change, ask yourself a question. Do you just “want it” for you? Or do you want it for the people around you? If it is just for you, fine! But be honest! It’s OK, you want it. But don’t try and make out you want it for the common good. As, chances are, you don’t give a hoot about Janice down the road. Go ask Janice. She don’t want her nails painted or to go to the Algarve or have a rave. She’d really, really, really, like to see her daughter for a hug and go to Bingo. But she’ll stay at home alone another year to “protect the at risk”. Which mostly, it seems to me, more and more consists of a people who will bend all rules to suit what they want FOR THEM. Which is where I started…
So why am I ranting about this now? In the UK we are doing really well, cases are down, deaths are down even further, things are opening up and OH BOY am I glad they are. I want everyone to stick to the rules to protect society but what I really want is to be in a situation where we don’t need the rules. And if everyone had stuck to the rules, and our government had brought in the rules when the epidemiologist and medics told them to rather than later, we would have gotten rid of the rules sooner. And less people will have died or been harmed.
World-wide things are generally improving and more vaccinations are being administered, surely it’s all good?
Well, biology is complex and it’s a sod sometimes. Even as we reduce the limitations in the UK, more and more people seem to be behaving as I’ve described above and demanding what they want, not what is sensible. And there is this new variant from India and it’s a bastard. It’s even more infective than the Kent variant and that was a swine, so I think we might see another increases in cases. Hopefully the vaccinations will mean serious illness and deaths will not rise in the same way here in the UK, but I think we are not out the woods by a long way.
I told you it was a rant, sorry.
Running Courses In Covid Times April 23, 2021
Posted by mwidlake in Uncategorized.Tags: knowledge, philosophy, training, work
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I’ve been running courses in I.T. on and off for my whole career – which is getting to be quite a long time now. It’s probably 30 years since I ran my first course, teaching hospital staff how to use the patient administration software I helped to develop. Of all the things I do, running training courses is probably the part I have enjoyed the most. But it is also the task I find most demanding & draining. Doing so remotely, as is the only option in Covid times, is something I find even more of a challenge. For two whole months this year I ran a course a week, all remote. Below, I’ll explain why I find remote tutoring harder and a few things you can try to make it work a little better.
It’s much harder than a conference presentation
I think anyone who was ever taught classes (let alone been a real teacher!) would agree that, until you do it, it’s hard to appreciate the emotional & mental energy it takes – even if you are teaching a topic you know inside out, upside down & back to front. If you’ve presented at a conference or similar, you know how much that can take out of you. Doing a course for a day is like doing a dozen such presentations. Yes, a day’s teaching is probably only 5 or 6 times as much presenting time as a 45-60 minute talk, but it’s the lack of recovery that makes it so much harder. Pretty much anyone can walk 4 or 5 miles. Running it takes some dedication but it’s not too hard to build up the fitness and stamina. Doing a Marathon? Totally different proposition. I really, really respect people who can teach all day, every day for 5 days, then do it the next week, and just keep doing it week after week, year after year.
It’s that lack of Interaction
OK, so I’m saying teaching is hard and you may or may not agree, but why do I say it is so much harder remotely? Because being remote and communicating through a screen removes 90% of the interaction between myself as the presenter and the delegates.
When I am stood in front of 12 varied human beings talking to them about how indexes work, if I am doing it the way I like to do it, there is a constant two way flow. I don’t mean they are talking back to me (although that is great and it does happen more face-to-face) it’s more I can get a feel for if the delegates are understanding the topic, if most of them already know this, is anyone lost.. have I just said something that does not make sense? That’s a good example actually, the power of detecting you just lost some of the audience. Often when I have taught people there will be someone (or someones) who’s first language is not English or they did not grow up in the UK, so if I use a colloquialism or make a reference to popular or historical culture, they may not get it. We all do this all the time, we assume that if we make a humorous reference back to a kids’ program then everyone will get it. Which they do if they grew up in your country, even usually if it was 2 decades later! I’ve tried to coach myself to not do this, but then sometimes these cultural references back to something outside the course material that most of us share helps us all relax and get on. So making the references are generally good – but you have to catch when it fails and “mop up”. Real, physical interaction makes this easier.
With a physical course I can judge if someone is not understanding and I do not need to ask “Phil, do you need me to explain that again?”. I simply would not do it that directly in a physical course, it is putting Phil on the spot. I’ll see Phil is perplexed and I’ll explain to the whole class again and watch Phil to see his reaction. With remote training, that feedback and how you handle it is greatly reduced.
The other part of physical courses is that when you have a coffee break or stop for lunch, you are usually all spending time around the terrible coffee & nasty sandwiches provided and you chat – like normal human beings! It’s a lot easier to communicate with people if you have some rapport with them and those breaks are vital to that rapport. Again, it all goes when you teach remotely. As soon as you break for a 15 minute loo-and-refreshment opportunity all screens & microphones that were on are off. I’ve tried staying at my desk, seeing if anyone else stays to chat, but it almost never happens. Besides, eventually I need to nip off for a pee, make a cup of tea and stroke the cat and if I’m talking to someone 1:1 they can take umbrage at this! When you are stood in a group in a physical room chatting, no one minds when I run off for for 4 mins.
I learnt early that anecdotes, especially if they make me look like an idiot, really help oil the wheels of social interaction – and will prompt at least some of the delegates to reply with their own. And I also scatter in some anecdotes that could be classed as bragging, but I am “the trainer” and it helps if they feel I am someone who knows their stuff via actual experience and I have done things for real and not just learnt training material or read stuff.
But hopefully you get the point. Physical presence allows the trainer and delegates to communicate and the trainer to control the flow of information.
What are the delegates actually doing?
The other downside of remote training is loss of control. With remote training the delegates can do what they want – and most of them think I won’t notice. Of course I bloody well notice!
Of course, it is up to me to make the course as engaging and informative as I can and I do try, but sometimes it’s hard to make some of the necessary material “zing”. I’m sorry, understanding Oracle object statistics is just fundamentally dull, but you cannot understands how to do SQL performance tuning without that knowledge. It’s natural for people to drift off a little during dull-but-necessary bits.
When I have bodies in a room, I can tell very, very quickly if someone is reading email or surfing the web. In such a situation I’ll try to use subtle communication to stop this – looking at them, making a non-specific comment about “you get the most out of training…” or even asking them a direct question, as if I picked someone at random. If I have the control, I’ll make it harder for people to goof off during the course – I do recognise it can start as something people do “just for a minute” or to check something they are responsible for, but it’s opening the door to distraction.
Fundamentally, If you are in my course, someone has paid for you to be on the course. And you either asked to be on the course or it was deemed appropriate for you to be on the course – deemed by your management/employer who is paying for *me* to be giving the course and for *you* to suffer it! Frankly, I don’t care if you do not turn up at all – but if you turn up, blank sessions & then ask questions that you would know the answer to if you had been engaged, you are now not just wasting your time (and the money paid by your employer) but also damaging the worth of the course to those who want to learn. I’ll have to take time out I could spend on the other delegates to drag you back up to speed. People like that f**k me off. Sorry
I have kicked people off my courses if I feel they are detrimental to everyone else, but I’ll maybe talk about that at another time. The key things is, in a remote situation I loose a lot of my ability to spot people drifting off or address it.
So what can you do to improve remote training?
1 – you need interaction
The first thing is to encourage (and then if necessary insist) people have webcams on. You do not need *everyone* to have their webcam on – but I sure as hell now know that if no one has a webcam on it makes you feel like you are presenting to a brick wall. It kills the flow. Many people just don’t want their camera on (some people working from home barely wash or dress, some do intend to goof off and so do not want to be seen doing so, and one or two have become really self-conscious as 8 months in reach of endless biscuits and no hairdresser has had an impact). A mistake I made at the start was not encouraging more cameras on.
Ask questions of them. It can feel a little trite and sometimes no one wants to answer questions like “what do you think will happen if…” but you have to do so and then wait them out, until someone answers! Even better, get a few discussions going. It does not really have to be about the course material, but of course it helps if there is some relation to it.
As I said, no one seems to hang around during breaks or lunch. And some bugger is always late. So alternate between having a little chat for the first five minutes of the next session (about *anything* – “My cat has just thrown up”) to get that interaction going, and starting the material dead on time when the next session is starting, to discourage tardiness. If someone is repeatedly late I stop answering if they ask a question on what they missed.
2 – pretend your web cam is a friend
Most people (including myself) can start to talk in a fast, dull monotone when there is no feedback. And you talk at what you are presenting, the screen with your slides or demo on. It’s not an engaging way to present. One thing I don’t think works (counter-intuitively) is to put the presentation on the screen your web cam is built into or attached to. It’s not like a TV camera, the web cam is right up to you. You might think you look like you are looking into the web cam but you are not, you look like you are staring at the chest of your delegates (if they are in front of their screens). You are presenting in a dull, boring monotone, staring at their chest.
So talk TO the web cam. Look at it, train yourself to present to that black dot. And imagine you are explaining this to a mate in the pub. I did wonder about putting a picture of someone I find attractive above the camera to remind me to look at it, but no one wants to see the presenter drool. When you are describing what is on the screen, it’s OK to look at *your* screen, not at all at the web cam, because the delegates are looking at their screen. But when the focus is not what is on the screen, turn to the webcam, to your mate in the pub.
After 2 or 3 hours of this with no real feedback, your own energy levels will probably drop, no matter how hard you try. Fluctuation in tone, willingness to make little jokes & asides, it all dies off – and your presentation style becomes dull, flat, and (frankly) shit. After 3 or 4 days? Awful. This is another part of why you need feedback. I in effect ended up presenting to those who kept their web cams on or were asking questions. On each course I managed to get at least one person to turn on a camera and I gave THEM the course. The others? Well, yeah, they were there I suppose, but I gave the course to Michael or Cali.
And visual feedback is way better than aural. I would rather have people on mute but visible than people I can hear and not see. Apologies to the blind community, but I sure as hell get more out of visual feedback to sound. With sound there are times when all anyone can hear is someone breathing hard into the mic, someone having a coughing fit, someone eating a packet of crisps. A discussion with a partner about the bins, another about why in hell do we have no milk it was your turn to buy milk…. And, sometimes, sound I think I never need to know the source of, but it should have been muted, OK?
3 – Short days, lots of breaks.
An 8 hour day of training in the flesh is hard work – and that is when you have little breaks when you all go over to the refreshments, or queue for the loo, and chat. 8 hours on Zoom or whatever, as many of us have learned this last year, is a destroyer of souls and any will to keep breathing. When I agreed to do these course I said right up front that it would be done in half-day chunks, I’d learnt the hard way that more than one day of solid remote learning is unpleasant for everyone.
One of the courses was a 3-day course, so we had to do 4 half days and a final full day. But we did not, I made sure we edged a little further into the material each day than I had planned and, except for one week, I was able to make that last, full day shorter. The odd thing was, even though I did end the material early on Friday, most people stayed around after to discuss a few things or would listen to a slightly off-topic, undemanding, final session.
A BIG mistake I made on the first course was thinking we could trim the coffee/tea breaks as there were not going to be issues with the loos (well, not ones I could do anything about!) and everyone had their own source of drinks and snacks. It was a “three-day” course and I was trying to get a little ahead so we could shorten the Friday. So we had 5, 10 minute breaks – bad move. It’s mentally more demanding to take in information via remote training I think, people needed the breaks. If anything, I ended up in later courses giving the delegates longer breaks than we would have a training room.
4 – Don’t give them Anything!
If I was on a remote training course and I had been sent the materials, I know what I would be tempted to do… Especially if, like is nearly always the case, you have more work to do than you can get done.
I made it very, very clear that they would get all the slides and that there were lots of words to explain the diagrams I tried to mostly talked around. But not until after the course. So they had to listen or goof off. If I’d given them the slides, most of them would have just goofed off!
I mostly sent the course notes at the end of the week but a couple of times I sent them at the end of the day. This was usually as someone was forced to skip a session and they asked for the notes to catch up. I generally take a very dim view of people skipping sessions on a course, I design the course with a flow of information that grows and builds over the days, but we live in weird times. Some people were juggling childcare, relatives, stuff simply going wrong.
On the topic of course materials… Don’t you hate it when bullet points appear on the screen one-by-one? It usually makes for a relatively poor presentation. But when remote training and you want to slow down the rate of information you are delivering or make points clearly, they can come back into their own – IF you don’t over-do it. People are concentrating on the screen way more than in a normal presentation, when you the presenter are a main feature, so the point-by-pointy method is more suitable. (A friend did point me at some software that would overlay my image over my slides so I could “present” as normal, but I would have had to re-jig a lot of slides for that and it was an added complexity I wanted to avoid. Maybe next time).
If you can, concentrate on images and diagrams, especially if you can animate them. Even something simple and cartoon-like gives a bit more, well, animation! More visual stimulus and something you can talk around is better than text. You still have the wordy slides, but they are more for the delegates to refer back to or to quickly remind me of things I need to cover.
5 – Odds & Sods
I kind of touched on this earlier, but up the human, interactive side as much as you can. Banter. I do this in physical course too, but it really helped with the remote sessions when I got it to happen. Someone is usually OK for a bit of mild mickey-taking. If you say something self-derogatory people will often join in and you go from there. I also try and tell a few more anecdotes and they sometimes prompt one of the delegates to reciprocate. The more conversational flow you can generate the more people are willing to both listen and speak up.
Do keep track of the anecdotes, especially if you are running a course multiple times. I do have specific points in the course where an anecdote highlights a point, others are more “on a whim”. I remember being a delegate on a course about 28 years ago and the instructor, a very entertaining chap, told quite a few little stories. I noticed that after doing one he would often make a note or something on his paper pad. I asked him about this at a break and he explained that, as he ran training courses pretty much every week, he lost track of which stories he had told. So he made a little note of each one.
Get the delegates to ask as many questions as you can, almost beg them to – and always been keen to answer them immediately, even if you know you’ll cover the point later in the course. It’s good interaction, encourages more questions to be asked, and there is a reason they asked that question then. If it is something that is not covered later in the course, the next version of the course may well have a new slide on it!
My only exception is if someone asks a question about a part of the course I knew they goofed off from or they were late for the start of. I’ll probably answer the first one or two and make the point we covered this, and then I’ll say we don’t have time. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll answer the same stupid question 3 or 4 times if the person is just not getting it, but I don’t condone people skipping parts of the course by re-iterating what they chose to miss. I give the course to people who want to learn.
Numbers. Have fewer delegates on the course than you would in the flesh. With a web cast, a single presentation at an audience, the more people listening the better. The communication is one way. But a training course is actually nothing like that, not if it is a good course. You need to be able to interact in all the ways I have described, and it is harder to do that remotely, and the whole process is just so much more draining via screens & microphones. I had to really kick back on this one initially and I am glad I did. I had delegates numbers from 4 to 12. When there was more than 8 of them, I had to give up on keeping tabs on all of them and those weeks left me shattered. I can handle 12 in a room no problem, but I think 6-8 is the ideal for a remote, interactive course.
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COVID-19: Information And Outlook March 13, 2020
Posted by mwidlake in biology, COVID-19, off-topic, Private Life, science, Uncategorized.Tags: behaviour, Coronavirus, COVID-19, private, science
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Outlook for the months ahead >>
Reducing the need for social distancing by knowing who is immune>>>>
The coming UK Peak and Beyond >>>>>>
I decided to put together some information on COVID-19 purely for my own interest – but then decided I might as well put it on a blog post. I’m only going to link to what I feel are reputable sources, nothing from tabloid papers or people promoting conspiracy theories.
If you know of a good site I should include or there is an area I have not touched on that you would like more information on, please feel free to let me know.
Update. At long last, as of the evening of Monday 16th March, the UK government listened to the WHO and other epidemiologists and accepted that draconian measures to suppress COVID-19 (reduce the R rate, the number of people each infected person in turn infects to below 1) rather than mitigate it (reduce the natural R value of 2.4 towards 1 but above 1) will save thousands of lives.
This paper by the Imperial College London in conjunction with the Medical Reaserch Council & WHO is being cited as the root of this change in opinion. It’s a hard read as it is a scientific paper, but it is excellent. It helps make clear many things such as the local spread rate, infection rate, how it transmits between countries. the likely number of real cases as opposed to tested and verified cases. And the simulations match what we have seen to date.
In summary, suppression, such has been managed in South Korea and China, virtually stops the disease for a while. It does not end it. When the measures to suppress it (very strong social control) it will burst out again. There is always a chance it will escaped to areas it is not suppressed and blow up again. But it buys time to work on a vaccine and develop better treatment regimes.
Mitigation slows the spread down. But it continues to spread. An argument was put forward that this will develop “herd immunity” by letting most people get the disease. It means it would be over sooner – but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, just in the UK. The NHS would be utterly swamped during this time.
I’ll move this down into the body of this post later.
{Update 15/4 – I obviously did not move this down as I feel that change of direction was so key}.
Firstly, for anyone who does not know me or just stumbles over this page via “Google”, I am not an expert in any of this – I am not a medic, I am not a scientist, and I am certainly not an epidemiologist (someone who studies the transmission of disease). I’m a computer professional with a really old degree in genetics & zoology who has at times worked on systems for the UK National Health Service (NHS), the Human Genome project, and some other scientific organisations.
Secondly, although this is a very serious disease and it is going to continue to have a huge impact, most people who get it will not be seriously ill. We are not all going to die!
Most people with underlying medical conditions or who are elderly are also going to be fine
The press, at least in the UK, keeps making a huge point that anyone who dies had “Underlying medical conditions” and it is affecting “the old” more. This is true, but the message that comes across is that if you are old or have an underlying medical condition you will die. This is not true.
Even if you are 79 with diabetes and are diagnosed with COVID-19, you have over an 85% chance of being OK, even if you develop the symptoms.
However, the fact that this disease is eventually going to kill tens, hundreds of thousands of people {Update 15/3: 127,000 worldwide so far and that will be an under-estimate , so hundreds of thousands. I’m sure it will hit the million by June. UK it is 13,000 including care homes} is why saying “I’m stronger than this” or “I’m not letting it impact ME!” is, in my opinion, a highly arrogant or stupid approach. Just as wrong is making it the focus of your life. Most of us, around 90-95%, will be mildly ill at most, or not noticeably ill at all. {Caveat – by mildly ill, you may well feel terrible and spend a few days in bed, but that’s like a normal dose of ‘flu. Take it from someone who has spent a week on ventilators recently, a few days in bed is nothing 🙂 }
Thirdly, though COVID-19 is going to kill quite a few people, the main impact is probably going to be what it does to our health services. It is almost certainly going to over-whelm the health services of most countries, as it has in Italy. Preventative actions, 99% of what we can do, is aimed to spread the load on the health services so that as many people can be treated as best as possible. It is absolutely key that we slow down the rate of cases by not getting together as groups and taking the simple precautions of washing hands well with soap, catching coughs in tissues, things like that. {update 15/4 – THe NHS did an amazing job of preparation. The field hospitals built are not being used very much yet, but the NHS has been sorely tested. Any treatment for other conditions that can be delayed seems to have been deleyed}
This article by The Lancet explains in some detail (maybe too much for general consumption) why social distancing and hand washing are vital to “flattening the hump” and helping the health services cope.
As ever, the best approach is a balance. Personally, I am concerned and I am going to avoid mixing with large numbers of people I do not know. I am actually in an “at risk” category as I was ill with influenza & pneumonia in December, in intensive care getting the sort of treatment bad cases of COVID-19 are getting now. But I am not self-isolating. If I get symptoms, I will self-isolate.
Basics
Names and terms
COVID-19 is the name of the disease. It was first reported in Wuhan in China on the 17th November 2019 but came to general prominence in early 2020 as it spread and infected more people, who then started dying in numbers. The World Health Organisation was informed (WHO).
The disease is caused by a virus called SARS-CoV-2. SARS stands for “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome” which describes what it does to people. It can cause a serious and sudden problem with breathing, which is when it can be fatal. CoV stands for Coronavirus, which is the type of virus.
It is commonly referred to in the media as “Coronavirus”, which is not a very accurate name. It would be a bit like going to a restaurant and ordering “mammal” (beef, lamb, pork, cat). But the name has stuck and is understood to mean the disease COVID-19 that is worrying everyone at the moment.
This wikipedia article describes the COVID-19 epidemic and this wiipedia article describes the disease itself
What COVID-19 does to you
The virus infects your lungs. It attacks the lining of the alveoli, the little “bags” in the lungs which absorb oxygen and release carbon dioxide. That’s why in mild cases you cough and in serious cases you get short of breath while at rest. If you are sitting quietly but finding you are having to breath hard (as if you have just exercised but you have not), contact the health services immediately. And if you pass out due to not being able to breath, call an ambulance (when you wake up, obviously…).
When the alveoli are infected by the virus they fill with fluid and their linings are damaged. This stops them from absorbing oxygen. All the cells in your body need oxygen, delivered by your blood. In a serious case of COVID-19 you have to breath harder and harder to get that oxygen until you reach a point where you simply cannot breath in and out hard enough.
The treatment is simple. Normal air holds about 20% oxygen, so the medical staff give patients air with extra oxygen in it, or even 100% oxygen, via a mask. If this is not enough a ventilator is used, which is basically a pump or fan that blows the oxygen out under pressure and pushes it into the patient’s lungs. It reduces the effort of breathing also. Ventilators come in increasing powers.
If this is still not enough, the patient is anaesthetised to make them unconscious and a tube is put down the throat (this is called intubation) which is used to push oxygen directly into the lungs. Making patients unconscious also reduces their need for oxygen. If even this is not enough the only final step is to use an artificial lung such as is used in major heart surgery. Hospitals won’t have many (or any!) of those.
In these extreme cases where more and more powerful ventilation is needed then the patient is possibly suffering from something called a Cytokine storm. Basically, the immune system over-reacts and causes damage to other organs like the kidneys.
Normal influenza tends to attack higher in the lungs, so is less dangerous. This is part of the reason COVID-19 is worse than influenza.
This article on how it impacts your lungs is quite technical but very good. The article then goes on to explain how the impact on our health services is a massive concern.
What we need to do to slow the spread
COVID-19 can no longer be stopped. To be frank, it could not be stopped 3 weeks ago. Once enough people were infected with the disease, it became impossible to track them all down by contacting all the people who someone diagnosed with the disease had interacted with. What we could have done is taken the advice of the WHO and the example/evidence of what was coming set by other European countries and locked down earlier. {Update 15/4 – I strongly feel that the government had clear evidence to take each step it took at least a week earlier and it would have saved thousands of lives}.
Two main factors control how quickly a disease spreads:
- How easily it is passed from one person to another
- How many people an infected person is in contact with
That second point is not just the people the infected person is physically in a room with. It is, for example, if they cough on a door handle or touch it after coughing into their hand, the live virus will be on the handle. The people who then touch the door handle can be infected.
Washing yours hands with soap and not touching your face is reducing how easily it is passed.
Banning large gatherings reduces how many people are in contact.
Self-isolating will greatly reduce how many people you can infect (or can infect you).
This video describes how exponential growth works and why reducing gatherings and simply hygiene will slow down the spread of the disease, with COVID-19 as the example.
It also explains how you can tell if things are getting worse or could be getting better. It is to do with the “inflection point”, when the number of new cases starts to drop. Until that happens, it’s going to get worse. This is a significant part on what epidemiologists look at in respect of how a current illness is spreading. In the UK, Spain, US, pretty much all countries where you cannot control the population, the rate of spread is staying high and the numbers of new cases and deaths is growing exponentially. This is what makes COVID-19 such a problem and why scientists worried back in January. It spreads really well and sometimes before symptoms show, which is why we all need to wash our hands, keep away from large gatherings, cover our coughs. You might feel fine, you could be spreading this.
Why washing with soap is the best protection
A virus is piece of RNA (very similar to DNA) covered in a coat of fat – called a lipid layer. Soap dissolves fat. That is why soap is so good at destroying viruses like COVID-19. Alcohol can do the same but it needs to be strong alcohol (70% or more) and works best if it also contains a soap or detergent.
The antibacterial chemicals in antibacterial cleaner do nothing to viruses. Bacteria are totally different to viruses, Bacteria are much more complex.
This twitter thread explains in some detail how soap destroys viruses
Monitoring (probably what most people are staring at)
The below are links to pages with info that is updated regularly.
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Update, 19/3. The data on number of cases coming out for the UK has become less unreliable. The official Public Health England page is not being update until later and later in the day – and it is for figures for the previous day. Worldometers figures do not match the Public Health England figures for most of the last 2 weeks now, except the last 3 days. I think the official figures get corrected but worldometers is not picking up those corrections.
I still check both but I use the official public health England figures for my own trending.
Some days, most annoyingly for me the 16th March, have a figure for new cases that is not at all in line with those before and after. In fact, I think unbelievably different.
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I tend to go to this worldometers site as it is updated quicker than the official UK one. On Friday 13th in the evening it showed an increase in the day’s total and the 11th death before the official UK site did. However, it does not seem to be corrected in retrospect like the official UK one is (I am not sure if that is good or bad)
This is the UK government page that tracks UK COVID-19 cases . It is designed for PC. For mobile phones go to this entry point and pick the option Note that it is a day behind. Information is gathered as-of 9am in the morning and is usually published at around 2pm. {this is now more like 6pm in the evening)
{update 24/3 I removed the link to John Hopkins as their figures consistently fail to match the UK government figures in any way, or the worldometers numbers – which are more consistent between them. Also, a JH person was tweeting how it was THE BEST source and did not reply to two response pointing out it is flawed. It might look nice but it is a poor source of data.}
Lots of people have shared the John Hopkins institute site, but I find information drops off it or the list of countries on the left do not match what is highlighted on the map, so I don’t it.
This page is a global view. I have to confess, I have not looked at it in a couple of days, but it has lots of interesting information
Why certain diseases make things worse
As has been widely shared, a lot of people dying “have underlying medical conditions” or are old. I want to stress that people who are old or have these conditions (and even both) will most likely recover. But it is true that if you have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and several other conditions, you are at higher risk. The advice is to maintain your treatment and to keep as fit and healthy as you can. If you can exercise, do so!
If you are generally in poor health or have a debilitating condition, all disease are going to impact you more. Especially anything that reduces your lung function or blood supply as the virus makes you ill by reducing how much oxygen is absorbed by your lungs and taken to e.g. your brain and liver by the blood. Maybe now is a good time to stop smoking if you do!
I could not understand the increased diabetes risk. A suggested answer is very technical, but it might be to do with the levels of ACE & ACE2 proteins you have. COVID-19 seems to enter cells by using our own ACE2 proteins, but it is unknown if this is a genuine link or not.
This “The Lancet” article describes suggests why diabetes and hypertension make you more susceptible to COVID 19. It’s short but quite technical. To balance that, the European Society of Cardiology claim there is no link (thank you David Harper for that).
This does highlight that COVID-19 is a new disease, most focus is on understanding and treating it and details like this will become clearer over time.
I should stress, never stop taking medicine based on social media guff – including this page! Even *IF* there is a link between drug X and COVID-19 susceptibility, you are taking drug X for a good reason and that reason has not disappeared. If the potential impact is large, it will be obvious to medics who will highlight it as an issue.
What facilities do the UK have to treat COVID-19?
According to announcements by the government on how well prepared we are in the UK for the “peak” of cases (which we are no where near yet):
Apparently in the UK we have 4,000 intensive care beds and “more are being made available” but there seems to be no detail on that.
We have 5,000 ventilators. The government is asking other companies to make them.
Update 19/3 the UK government is talking to companies about the details of making more ventilators and I know of at least one company that is offering to make many more. The issues is that there are stringent tests for suppliers of medical equipment and of the equipment itself. Any equipment used for medical purposes has to be built in a clean environment.
5 hospitals are stated as having ECMO equipment (Extra-corporeal Membrane Oxygenation machines) available for treating COVID-19 patients. These can re-oxygenate blood in the the same way the lungs do. They are massive and complex and they won’t be able to build extra ones for months – and of course every country will want them.
These figures are oddly “round” which suggests they are estimates or guesses. As the only real treatment for COVID-19 is extra oxygen and ventilating patients, then treatment will again be limited by the equipment we have or can be made. I’m no expert on equipment manufacture, I’ve seen no information on how easy it would be to ramp up production but I do know that when our Prime Minister asked companies that don’t make them to swap production to them the answer was “give us a full specification and a set of patterns and we *might* be able to). Medical equipment has to work, no company is going to want to “give it a go” and, if the machines don’t work or break down or harm the patient, face being sued into bankruptcy once this is over.
There is no vaccine and there is no known drug treatment that has anything but sketchy “it seems it might help” evidence.
Vaccines take years to develop normally. This can be fast-tracked by reducing the level of testing and precautions, but that means risking creating an ineffective vaccine at best or even killing more people. On the plus side, scientists already have targets for creating a vaccine – the RNA of COVID-19 has been sequenced (read), we know some of the proteins involved, it looks like the main target to infect cells is known (ACE2). The trick is to develop something that looks like one of those elements and that prompts the human immune system to develop antibodies against it (without harming the human) that then attacks the COVID-19 virus (without attacking anything else in the human) and that can be created in huge amounts (there are a huge number of humans).
There is no existing drug that seems to work very well. Existing antiviral treatments are being tested. Anything with any hope at all are being tested. If they worked well, we’d probably know already and the international medical community would be making it known. ANYthing you see on the internet about a miracle cure or “In India they have discovered that vitamin C, Ibuprofen and Tamiflu taken in large quantities together cures 76% of cases” is utter bullshit. Spreading this bullshit on social media is extremely not-helpful as some people will believe it and start demanding a treatment that does not work.
Medics and scientists will continue to work and they will get something eventually, but almost certainly not in the next few months. Sorry.
There appears to be no natural immunity
Like most viruses that attack us, the only way to be immune to it is to either catch the disease and get better, or be given a vaccine (which, in effect, is the same to the body as getting the disease but without most of the illness). This means that, given how well COVID-19 spreads, we will all get this eventually until herd immunity slows it right down. At that point, everyone who has not had it will still be at risk of getting COVID-19 if they meet someone with the disease.
Bottom line, until a vaccine is created and everyone takes it, COVID-19 will continue to spread until most people have had it. The key thing is to try to slow it down so that our medical services can cope with the number of people it makes seriously ill.
Predictions
Before reading any of this, remember – I am not an expert! I’m a computer programmer with a smattering of some relevant experience.
However, about 3 weeks ago I felt I knew what was coming and I’ve spent the last 2 weeks being “the voice of doom”. Sadly I think I have been mostly right. So I thought I’d put somewhere how I think some things are going to play out.
I’m not trying to scare people. Well, sort of I am. I want people to be aware that it is going to be bad for a while, that as nations and individuals we need to take the right, simple actions. And that governments will lie to you about some of this stuff. Look for scientific/medical information.
(predictions made on 13th March 2020)
- In the UK we will have about 250-350 new cases on Monday 16th March.
- By the weekend of the 21st/22nd we will see 1000 new cases a day in the UK.
- Numbers of deaths will “take off” around the 18th March and will double about every 3 days for at least 2 weeks.
- Deaths as a percentage of known cases in the UK will be between 0.8% and 1.8% by the end of the month and will escalate.
- The rate of new cases will stop growing so fast, but the rate of deaths will continue to grow as a faster rate. This is due to 2 factors – (1) the delay from getting ill to dying is on average a week or so (2) the UK is no longer testing everyone, buggering up the figures.
****
Update 19/3 – how did I do prediction-wise. Well, on the 16th March there were officially 152 new cases. But on the 15th there were 330, and 407 on the 17th. So I was wrong in both directions! On the actual date, I overestimated. But for the 3 days around the 15th and going on the trend, I had underestimated. I was not pessimistic enough.
The deaths did take of in the middle of this week – 16,33, and 41 for the 17th, 18, &19th March.
And we are well on track to hit 1,000 new cases by the weekend, but given the ever changing information on who is being tested, I’m not sure that confirmed cases is very accurate. I think the percentage death rate will have to be increased to take into account the lack of testing.
So, sadly, I seem to be still predicting quite well what is happening. BTW I base my predictions by stealing the work of proper, real scientists and mostly ignoring the UK government. I’m not doing anything more “clever” than choosing my sources and a simple spreadsheet.
Update 21/3. We hit over 1,000 cases – 1,035 today. So “my” prediction (really I just use a simple calculation based on the work of the real epidemiologist) is sadly spot on.
Deaths reported, 56. It’s taken off but not doubling every 3 days. It will.
Update 15/4 – Death rates did indeed double every three days – actually 3.3.
23/3 54
26/3 115
29/3 209
1/4 563!
4/4 708
Thankfully, the various distancing measures started to slow the rate in the first week of April, as self isolating and then pub etc closures kicked in
As predicated, the slowdown of new cases predicates the slow down of deaths, but the UK’s poor testing numbers make this connection weaker and weaker
*****
19/3/20
- Daily deaths in the UK due to COVID-19 will exceed a thousand in the first week of April.
Update 15/4 – thankfully I was wrong, but we hit 980 on the 8/4. If we include the 10% of care home deaths missing from the figures, we did hit 1,000
- I’m not so sure about this one – I think we will have a slowdown of new UK cases in about a month and than after a gap of about a month it will take off again.
- COVID-19 will reach every country by April
Update 15/4 – pretty much true
- China will have a second wave of infections in a month or two.
I think this because although they managed to control the first outbreak (by taking measures most western countries would not entertain), the virus has not spread through the rest of the population and it will get re-introduced from another location.
Update 15/4 – I’m not sure on this. Their figures are really good at them moment. They have shut down and quarantined another area but there has not been a second large outbreak we know of.
- This is going to hit the USA very hard indeed.
This is because:
They initially had little capacity for testing (it is still poor despite political promises – and they have been having a damned argument about which commercial company gets to set up a new, Invented In America test to make a few people very rich indeed)
Their health service is far more about making a profit than treating people, so ill people will not get treated (or tested!);
The percentage death rate is going to look terrible, maybe 3 or 4%, as the number of cases actually tested will be low (if they “guess” at the infected numbers this might not happen);
Ill people will not self isolate as most US employees have little or no sickness pay.
Update 15/4 – The US has been really badly hit and when it took off, it took off large. I think a large part of this is because President Trump was a bloody moron and spent weeks downplaying this. As he likes to say “it’s all on tape” – he claimed this would be finished by Easter, was not as bad as ‘flu etc. The only thing he can claim to have done (and has done so repeatedly) was to stop flights from China. But he was advised then it was not going to have any impact as it had spread. And was already in the US.
I think it will continue to hit the US really hard, not just for the reasons I cited before, but because the president seems determined to do exactly the wrong things to contain this, such as “opening for business” very soon and sacking anyone who disagrees with him.
I was wrong on the % death rate as they have massively increased testing, which was an amazing achievement.
Preparing A Device for Someone New To I.T. April 26, 2019
Posted by mwidlake in Perceptions, Private Life, Uncategorized.Tags: behaviour, hardware, perception, private
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In my previous post I covered what I felt were the main considerations on deciding how to get someone with no real experience of I.T. online, for an example an elderly relative like my mum. In this post I’ll cover setting up the device. Set-up is actually quite complex and there is a lot of assumed knowledge, like how the keyboard works, what spyware you leave turned on (none!) etc. So I am setting it up for her. First I’ll just recap the main points on why I decided to use an Apple iPad for my Mum:
Keep the main screen as simple as possible
- A small tablet – but not too small.
- Simple, intuitive interface.
- A Smartphone or iPad mini was too small.
- PC/laptop ruled out as too complex for her.
- Apple device as her main potential contacts use Apple devices.
- A lack of remote access by me was less important than the above considerations.
On of the first things I did was to ask my friends (via Twitter) what they would suggest or had found worked when they had a similar task. Thank you to everyone who replied. If you have further advice, add a comment or contact me and I can update this post. The main suggestions were:
Keep It Simple
Mum has never used a keyboard, never used a smartphone and is not very technically adept. Everything she is learning is almost new to her, from what the enter key does to what an icon is. The closest reference I can use for her is the menu of options on her TV recorder – and she has some pretty bizarre ways of using that (but if it works for her, that’s just fine). So using the device has to be very, very simple. I want the main screen to be simple and non-threatening:
- Remove every App that is not for something she needs to use (or I need to help).
- Move any icons I need but she does not (or at least not at first) off the first screen.
- Be brutal, delete as much as you can – you can add back anything you later find you need.
- Only have one app for a given task. Choice in this case is probably just confusion.
- Include one or two (and only one or two) key things she will want to use.
I’ll just cover some of those bullet points in more detail:
Remove every app not required. My mum has no interest in stocks & shares, in monitoring her health, in maps of where she is (she knows where she is, she does not go anywhere else!). She certainly has no interest in “iTunes Store”, “Photo Booth” or any of the other “free” apps provided by the vendor. They will just be confusing clutter at first.
If there are 2 dozen icons on the screen, Mum will worry about what they all do or what will happen if she clicks the wrong one. And she will click the wrong one. It is a worry we don’t need.
When she first starts, she will struggle to find the right icon – even from a simplified list (and she did). The fewer choices the better.
So I deleted absolutely everything but the half dozen things she needed. If in the coming weeks, months or years she wants anything a deleted apps provides, they can be added back. When she is comfortable with the first lot, I can introduce more.
The very basic “what the buttons do” help sheet
Move Icons I need to the second page. There are some things I need to get the device all set up for her and then tweak it. Two of them are “Settings” and “App Store”. You could argue that “Settings” will have things that Mum might like to change. But she won’t know how and she could mess up things if she changes her settings. So they are moved to the second page – and I told her to leave that page if she ever gets on it! The chances are she will not find the second page of Icons. (I did show her how to get off it, but stressed she call me if in doubt).
I also put a couple of things on the second page that I think she might want to use soon.
Only One Way. I was advised to provide Mum with e.g. two ways of getting hold of me, in case one fails. Well, no. I do NOT want to have to show her two messaging apps and teach her the differences, I want one method that she can become confident with. It’s part of keeping it simple. Mum will be challenged to learn one interface, if I try and show her a second she will get confused over what works in which app. She can call me on the phone if the new way of communicating is not working, she is happy using a phone (as in just a phone, one that only makes and receives calls).
If Mum decides she does not like the app I choose (e.g. BBC News for, well, news) we can swap later. But right now I pick what I think she will like. And for the sake of simplicity, I chose a set of apps that are from the same provider, so work the same way.
We in the I.T. profession often love that we can swap between programming languages or have 4 or 5 social media apps to choose from. But we live and breath this stuff. This is all new to Mum. When you learnt to drive a powered vehicle you learnt to drive a car. Or a motorbike. Or maybe even a tractor. You did not learn to use all three at the same time – and also an articulated lorry at the same time!
One or Two things she wants. I got a lot of advice of things to add to make the device fun or interesting, such as games, picture editing, or puzzles. The principle is good – but the reality is you need to think about the person and what they want from the device. And the keeping it simple aspect.
My mum loves jigsaws – but she loves the physical side of them! She has her tables set up, she talks about the manufacture she likes as the pieces fit together so well, she likes to glue together the occasional jigsaw she really likes. Maybe in the future she will look at Jigsaw apps, but right now she wants to keep her physical jigsaws.
What she wants is (1) a way to communicate with me (2) information on cycling and Formula 1 (3) the weather. So I gave her them. Nothing more, I’m keeping it simple. So that is Messenger, BBC sport and BBC weather. BBC news completes her intro to the web.
(Note, I also tried to introduce searching for things on google, but it did not work well – google does not understand “I want to know about him, that cycling chap, the one who’s not got side-burns”. We will come back to google in a month or so).
Make it Big and Bold
I don’t know about you, but the last time I changed my smartphone I got one with a slightly larger screen as I was having to hold the old one further and further away from me so I could focus on it. And I set my new smartphone to have larger Icons.
Add pictures they will like to their social media and the device. Keep personal information to a minimum to protect them.
If you are new to I.T. and you are starting to have issues with vision or hearing, there are options for any device to make it easier to use. Check out the “Ease of Use” or “accessibility” options of the device. Ironically, they are not always the easiest to find. For iPads they are not a main option but under “General”. That’s not very helpful, Apple!
You maybe don’t want to bring up the topic of failing faculties with an older relative – so don’t. Just set up the device to have large icons, big text. and loud messages. Big and Bold.
Also, think of adding pictures and sounds the person will like. I changed the iPad wallpaper for a picture of our cats and when I created her facebook account (hmmm, I’ve not covered that…) I added a background of myself and my brother up some hills and a picture of our last cat as her image. I would have made it a picture of one of her cats but I did not have one. And that will be a nice thing to do with her sometime. The main thrust is use images the person can relate to.
To make the device easier for Mum to use I considered the following:
- Increase the text size.
- Increase the icon size.
- Bold text & increased contrast can help if vision is poor.
- Set the volume loud and make sure one of the first things you demonstrate is how to increase (and decrease) volume.
- When you start messaging, send pictures. It’s more interesting.
- Show them emojis. My mum seemed to really like emojis. Less Tyoing!
- Put pictures they will like as their wallpaper and social media images.
I think I could have done more in this respect. What I should have done was got pictures from her and scanned them, or looked back in my old photo collection. I could have set the wallpaper to a picture of my Dad (long gone) or of all us kids or something. And any social media you set up for the person, think what pictures you can use for backgrounds and avatars.
Reference Material
The online help on tablets etc is pretty good – once you are able to look for it and learn what you can ignore.
For anyone who is really new to technology, reference material is going to need to be a lot more basic.
Keyboards Confuse the Uninitiated
I prepared several sheets of information for my mum, like how to use a keyboard, which I show here. I also did some pictures of the iPad and annotated it – and left space for Mum to add her own notes!
My Mum found these really helpful, especially being able to scribble on them herself (which sometimes was replacing my helpful text with her weird description on what a key did!).
As well as this, I got her one of those “a senior citizen’s guide to the iPad” magazines. They are a good place to go to once the real basics of how to turn the device off and on and how a keyboard works have been learnt. BUT, they have a big drawback – they try and show lots of things in order to address a wide audience, and they usually have a long section at the start about “setting up your device”. I already set it up, Mum does not need it. So, edit the magazine!
I went through the magazine and crossed out in big, thick, black lines the bits she did not need. I also crossed out those sections on an app I had not given her but did a similar thing, and wrote at the start of it “do not read, Mum! Yours works differently!”
Random Other Advice
“Tell her not to clean the screen with a brillo pad! :)”
Well, it was a bit of a joke but it leads to a serious point. Explain how to look after the thing. I made the point that she should not get the iPad wet and to dry it immediately if she does spill things on it. And, if she drops it down the loo, take it out immediately, turn it off if it is on and put it somewhere warm – and call me!
“Yes, you can leave it plugged in, it will work for several days between charges. No you can’t damage the screen by tapping it with your finger, but do not use a screwdriver. Hitting it harder will not make it work more.”
We should (and will) get a cover for it so Mum can hold it more easily. Her house is carpeted throughout so dropping it (which she does, but she is close to the ground) is not such an issue.
“tell her how to get rid of Siri when she accidentally starts Siri up.”
I have turned off Siri as much as I can. And this leads on to the general topic of telling the person what they can and should ignore.
I told Mum to ignore prompts she will get (“You have not backed up your device for a week, kittens will die!”) or requests for feedback or surveys; how to shut down advertising boxes; do not respond to anything that ask you to provide information or download anything. And, just because you now have a “computer”, you should still ignore any telephone calls you get offering to help you with your computer problem. They were a hoax before you had a computer, they still are – keep telling them you don’t have a computer.
“Be patient…”
That last one is key. This is all new to them and if you are a regular visitor to my blog you are probably an I.T. expert. It can be very hard for us to understand how new this is for non-I.T. people and we assume knowledge. Like, what the enter key does in different situations and using the shift key (a single press of the shift key is different to a double press – and undoing the ALL CAPS of a double press only take a single press, which my Mum rightly pointed out is not logical!).
My mum really, really did not understand the keyboard very well to start. But touching the screen and dragging things around she took to straight away. I guess different people take to different parts more easily.
Be prepared to be very patient (*) and do not be surprised if some things take them an age to understand and yet other things they seem to get immediately. At some point, probably very early on, they will find out how to do something you don’t know!
(*) as my wife comments (in the comments section) alcohol may be required for post-training de-stress!
Learning About Oracle in Belgium February 11, 2019
Posted by mwidlake in Uncategorized.add a comment
It’s always so good to see a user community growing. Last week was the first ever technical conference for obug (or is it OBUG) – the Oracle Benelux User Group. It was an excellent couple of days, packed with a fantastic range of presenting talent and an enthusiastic audience. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the presenters.
A smorgasbord of talking
technical talent
The event was held in a cinema, which lends itself well to a conference. Riga Dev Days use a cinema also and it works because every seat in the room has a great view of the screen. the screen is large, the projector is (of course) pretty good, and if you want sound it is top quality sound. The icing on the cake is that the seats are padded and comfortable. Poor seating is a real pain (literally) at an event where you are sitting most of the day. One potential drawback of a cinema is ensuring you have areas for catering and coffee, but the chosen venue was able to provide that as well.
Belgium Speakers
I have to tip my hat in deep admiration to Philippe Fierens, Pieter Van Puymbroeck, and Janny Ekelson for the organisation of the event and how well they looked after all the speakers. I don’t think most people have any idea how much hard work, stress and energy is involved in organising these things. I certainly didn’t until I started helping helping organise conferences for the UK Oracle User Group and we have the support of staff who have done this a dozen times. These guys were doing the whole thing and doing it for the first time. Well done!
As this was obug’s first technical conference, Pieter & Philippe followed the example of the Polish User Group when they organised their first conference – they went and asked lots of speakers they knew if they would present. (That’s a nice thing about User Groups too, you learn how to run your own group better). It helps that they are both accomplished presenters themselves and part of the speaker circuit. It’s an odd thing, if you ask one us attention-seeking, self-opinionated, egotistical speakers to present – we are inclined to say yes :-). (I should point out, some speakers are not egotistical or self opinionated. Some). I did hear the odd muttering about a call for papers not happening but, if I was organising my first conference, I would not want the hassle and risk of C4P. I would be pestering my friends and contacts in the same way.
It was a very sociable conference. I mean, we were in Belgium which is renowned for beer and chocolate, it would have been wrong not to partake in them. I’m of the opinion that the social side of user groups is as important as the presentations and workshops. There seems to be a strong correlation to me between those who socialise during a conference and those that get the most out of it. You can learn a lot by spending time with people who have suffered the same issues with tech as you, or who know more about some aspect of Oracle. I got into an interesting chat about potentially pre-checking the second table in a join before you bother scanning the first table, as a cheap – if -rare – optimisation. And I met a guy who’s partner was thinking about making hats, just like my wife does. Oh, and the obligatory discussion about making bread.
As well as the excellent talks and socialising there was also the access to Oracle product managers and experts. There were several at the conference, a couple of whom who I had never met or only briefly. I can’t tell you how much it can help to be able to contact the person in charge of SQL Developer or Exadata and ask “can you find me someone I can chat to about ‘Blargh'”.
There was one final highlight of obug. We had the classic “4 I.T. experts clustered around a laptop that simply won’t run the presentation”. It’s one of those eternal truths of working in the industry that, no matter how good you are in your chosen field, presentations make it all break and you can’t fix it quickly :-). We got there.
It was an excellent conference and I really, *really* hope they do it again next year.
{Oh, I should add – I do not know who took the photo of Roger, Flora, Frits and Ricardo, I stole it off the whatsapp stream we speakers used. Thank you to whoever and let me know if you want crediting}
OUG Scotland – Why to Come & Survival Guide June 12, 2018
Posted by mwidlake in Meeting notes, UKOUG, Uncategorized, User Groups.Tags: Meeting, UKOUG, user group
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The UKOUG’s Scottish conference is on the 21st June in the centre of Edinburgh, at the Sheraton Grand Hotel, not far from Edinburgh Castle in the centre of the city.
Picture from viator.com, who do tours etc
The Event
There is a six-stream agenda covering Database, Apex & Development, Platform & Services, Coud Apps, EBS Apps tech, and Business Analytics/systems & EPM, so pretty much the whole breadth of Oracle Tech, Apps and BI. We have a keynote by Oracle’s Caroline Apsey on the Bloodhound Project, the UK-based group trying to smash the world land-speed record with a 1,000mph rocket car – and solve lots of engineering challenges on the way. And uses the Oracle Cloud. I’ll be sure to see that one.
With 6 all-day streams there are a lot of presentations to choose from, but as a taste of what is on offer I’ll mention Jonathan Lewis talking about stats, Heli Helskyaho explaining the basics of machine learning, and from Oracle we have Grant Ronald on AI-driven chatbots, Hilary Farrell on the new features of APEX 18.1, and Keith Laker on JSON & SQL. The talks are a nice mixture of end-user experiences, recognised experts and Oracle themselves. UKOUG is independent of Oracle so although we are very happy to have Oracle support us, we have talks that are not just what Oracle are currently pushing. This is what I love about user group meetings, you get the whole story.
As a member of the UKOUG this event is free, counting as one of your SIG places. If you have run out of SIG places, you can buy an extra one at £85 – or upgrade your membership of course 🙂
If you are not a member you can pay £170 to attend the event, which is pretty cheap for a day of Oracle conference when compare to many other events of the same size around Europe. However, if you become a bronze member of the UKOUG – which comes with a SIG place, so you can come to the event – that will only cost you £165! Contact the UKOUG office for any help.
(note, all prices do not include VAT, which is 20%. A UK company can usually claim this back).
Social
I’m sure there will be a good few people travelling up the day before the event so there is a social being organised. This will be in the Shakespeare Pub from 19:00, which is not far at all from the Sheraton hotel. I’m afraid that you will have to buy your own drinks etc, but I’ll be buying a round at some point.
I have to run away back home before the event itself ends, but there is a social event in the hotel after the presentations, in the exhibition area, starting at 17:25.
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is one of my favourite cities in the UK – and actually in the world. I’ll be turning up Wednesday afternoon so I can have a wander about the city before joining the meetup the evening before the conference and, if I had the time, I’d be going up sooner or coming back later. If you have time, a wander up Royal Mile to the Esplanade gives fine views over the city. Having looked at the nest of roads and alleys of the old town in front of the castle, it is only a few minutes to the New Town with it’s contrasting, rectangularly laid out, Victorian grandeur. In the old town I love the camera obscura just off the Esplanade, the Dynamic Earth museum at the bottom of the Royal Mile/Holyrood road and, if I have a couple of hours, I’ll wander up Arthur’s seat – a small “mountain” (the remains of an ancient volcano),180+meters of ascent in the centre of Edinburgh. Views are spectacular. Unless it rains.
Getting There
Train
The venue is about a mile from Waverley train station in the centre of Edinburgh, half a mile or so from Haymarket. Intercity services go to Waverley.
It is not as expensive or as far away to get to Edinburgh from London as you might think. At the time of writing trains from London Kings Cross are 4-5 hours from about £42 each way. And the route is gorgeous, running up the East coast with views out to sea. Sit on the right side of the train on the way up! To get travel at that cost you do need to pick your exact train and book ASAP. You will end up at Waverley station right in the centre of Edinburgh.
Travel from other cities in the UK will be similar, but cheaper. Apart from Birmingham maybe. I don’t know why but there seems to be a “tax” on leaving Birmingham!
Getting to the Sheraton from Waverley is still easy, there are buses and trams. If you have time, you come out of Waverley, cross North Bridge, go up the Royal Mile and down Johnston Terrace. It’s a one mile walk and you can take in the view from the Castle Esplanade on the way.
Tram
If you are heading to the Sheraton hotel by tram, you should get off at West End stop, take Canning Street then bear left onto Rutland Square. Walk past the horse statue and across the footbridge to turn left on Exchange Square. The hotel entrance is on the right.
Car
Even though I live in the South of England, if I had a day to do it I’d drive up to Edinburgh and stop off at places along the way. If you are local-ish to Edinburgh and the trains do not work for you, I’m told it may be best to head for the multi-storey carparks at Castle Terrace or Semple Street. But driving into Edinburgh can be a bit of a pain.
Plane.
I’ll be coming in by plane as I live very close to Stansted Airport. It is costing me £21 each way with Ryanair (Ack!) and there are several flights a day to chose from. You can also fly from Luton (£48), Gatwick (£60) or Birmingham (£70).
The Edinburgh tram system now runs out to the airport so getting in by tram is quick and easy, in shiny, modern trams. If my memory of the roads is still accurate, a taxi will take a lot longer, as well as being more expensive.
I hope some of you can join me at this great event in this lovely city.
Friday Philosophy – If Only I Was As Good a Programmer As I Thought I Was Aged 22 January 29, 2016
Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions, Programming, Uncategorized.Tags: Humour, perception, system development
6 comments
I saw a tweet that made me smile a few days ago:
Like many of you, I started out my working life in IT as a computer programmer. Like some of you, I still am a computer programmer from time to time. I don’t think I’ve had a year of my working life when I did not do either some application development programming or some database infrastructure programming. I am constantly writing small (or not so small) SQL or PL/SQL programs to do what I do in Oracle.
I started programming in school, I did an “O” level in computer studies (the exams we sat in the UK aged 16, up until 1988!), and I was pretty good at the programming as compared to my fellow class mates. My first “real” program played Noughts and Crosses (tic-tac-toe to our American cousins and maybe others) and version 2 was unbeatable. Which at the time I thought was pretty cool.
but Wikipedia now tells me is pretty easy :-). I also remember someone in the year above me unrolling some huge printout of the role-playing game he was writing (you know, the old textual “you have walked into a room where there is a lion, a bar of soap and a chandelier, what do you want to do?” sort of thing) and telling me I would never be able to do it. I just looked at the code and thought: Why have you hard-coded every decision and used all those GOTOs? Some sort of loop and a data block to look up question, answers and consequences would be much smaller and easy to extend? I don’t think he liked me voicing that opinion…
I did not do any programming of any consequence as part of my college course but after that I started work as a computer programmer (sorry “analyst programmer”) in the National Health Service. Again, I seemed better at it than most of those around me, fixing bugs that others had given up on and coding the tricky stuff no one else wanted to touch. And after a year or so, I was convinced I was a programming god!
I wasn’t of course. Part of it was my juvenile, naive ego and the other part was that, fundamentally, many of those around me were bad programmers. Anybody decent either did not join in the first place or got a better job elsewhere that paid more than the NHS did. I eventually did that myself and joined Oracle. Where I realised that (a) SQL confused the hell out of me and (b) when I started using PL/SQL there were plenty of people around me who were better at traditional programming than I.
I think it took me about a year to feel I was damned good at both of them. Guess what? I was wrong. I was simply competent. But after a year or two more I did two things that, for me, finally did make me into a good programmer:
- I went contracting so I worked in a lot of places, saw a lot more examples of good and bad code and I met a lot more programmers.
- I think I hit mental puberty and woke up to the fact that I needed to listen and learn more.
Since then, I think my own opinion of my coding skills has generally dropped year on year, even though I would like to think I continue to get better at actually constructing computer programs and suites of programs.
So yes, I wish I was as good a programmer now as I thought I was aged 22. And after 25 years at it (actually, pretty much 35 years at it on and off!) just like Rich Rogers (or is it John D Cook? I can’t quite decide if it is a quotation or not) I think I am finally getting moderately good at writing programs. If I continue to follow this trend, on my 65th birthday I will be convinced I can’t program for toffee and yet will finally be a Good Programmer.
I wonder if anyone would still employ me to do it by then?
Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog 