Work and personal development

OK, it was not censorship that stopped me letting a posted comment get added to the blog. It was sleep! I added a comment of my own to the site, but forgot to click the 'publish' button on the comment that was waiting.

I seem to be involved with so many things at the moment, that access to the computer for my own personal activities is left to late at night, and the occasional weekend. I do use a computer at work, but I would never put it to my own personal use. I am being paid to work, and taking time during work for my own activities is just like stealing.

My employer does allow time for personal development, and even allocates time for the staff to undertake charity activities, but that does not include time to use personal email or social networking sites.

At the moment, at work, I am developing a training program for staff involved in automated testing> At home I am spending time setting up a family archive, going through family history - not just records of births and marriages, but also old photographs, and even trying to convert/rescue some old audio recordings made on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Wonder what digital recording format to use? No question with the written material of course - the paper records and old photos have survived intact for over 100 years.

education - again

Wind forwards over a year from my last post on this topic, but throughout that time I find that education has been constantly in my thoughts. Whether it is my daughter going through college, or the study circles that are a popular feature of Baha'i activities, or the discussions at work on staff performance reviews, I cannot get away from the subject of learning.

What started as a simple question relating to peer review of computer code has moved, through a simple observation by myself, into a discussion on opportunities for staff development and training. All I did was to suggest that it should not be limited to one member of staff review the work of one other member in the same team. Perhaps, said I, that if a group of staff from several teams met together, they could learn from the different approaches to coding and testing that had been taken by other teams.


"Forget your own selves and turn your eyes towards your neighbour. Bend your energies to whatever may foster the education of men." Baha'i Writings