Ross Goodman

Blog

  • Scary Traffic Levels


    Creative Commons License photo credit: pbo31

    I recieved an e-mail from PlusNet the other day informing me that my site had exceeded it’s traffic allocation.

    I should have known better, I had not even investigated what the limit was until that point!

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  • Financial Statement

    As you may have read in a previous post here the company I work for was sold by Glen Group to Maxima at the beginning of the year.

    As I had shares in Eclectic, these were transferred into Glen Group shares. Unfortunately, as the purchase was a cash deal, I did not get Maxima shares but am left with Glen shares. As such I still get copies of the annual financial statement. Imagine my surprise to read on the front page.

    Eclectic was the biggest company in the group and sat at the heart of the business in terms of turnover and profit. However, Eclectic performed below expectations, particularly in the second half, and when the opportuity arose we elected to dispose of Eclectic and inGroup and completed the sale in early January 2008.

    Nothing “too” bad there.

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  • Real Time Stalking

    LinkedIn

    Fact

    I rarely “surf” to random sites any more, any site that wants my attention must have an RSS feed that I can put into Google Reader.

    Fact

    I am intrigued by the social networking sites, a few are listed here. LinkedIn is one that I can see the point of.

    LinkedIn have recently introduced an RSS feed for my network updates, so it ticks both boxes. What’s the downside? I’m not sure what it is. It could be that LinkedIn is a work/professional focussed network rather than personal. It could be the immediacy of the updates from my colleagues. It’s strange but I feel crossed between a stalker and a voyeur in a way that I just don’t get from feeds from other sites.

    View Ross Goodman's profile on LinkedIn

  • Uncluttering My Office

    Bags A Rubbish Shot !

    I have been widening the range of sites that I keep an eye on through Google Reader; my reading list is here if you are interested.

    One of the recent additions to my daily reading list has been http://unclutterer.com/ a site that does what it says on the tin!

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  • Google Documents – Gadgets

    I have found myself using Google Documents more and more over the last few months.

    One of the areas that was severely lacking was the ability to share parts of that content.

    That is all changed now with Google Gadgets.

    For example, for my training I had resorted to n HTML table on my training page https://rossgoodman.com/fundraising/training/ whilst not difficult it is not exactly elegant.

    Now I am recording my times in a Google spreadsheet and using two gadgets, one to show a tabular list if the data and another to show an interactive time series chart, the same as is used on google finance.

    Cool Huh !

  • More Media Exposure

    Pick Me Up Logo

    A while back my daughter; Emma Goodman, was interviewed by a researcher from The Press Association who was interested in her story.

    She has just called to say that Emma will be featured in the Spring Special edition of the Pick Me Up magazine that goes on sale this Friday.

    I have just picked up my copy: 14th march edition, page 27.

  • Guest Author


    Creative Commons License photo credit: Yelnoc

    I have had my first request for a guest author !

    Ryan. one of my colleagues from Eclectic, or should that be Maxima now, has asked if he can use my blog to share some of his wisdom.

    Look forward to seeing some articles from him in the near future !

  • Modelling Change In Your Dimensions

    Money

    You use dimension tables to hold the descriptive attributes that you want to use to analyse your measures.

    This is fine but what do you do when this information changes? There are three common ways that you can handle changes in your dimensional model.

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  • Ideal Working Environment

    My Home Office

    I have just fine tuned my working environment and have come up with the ideal setup.

    OK the monitor heights are a bit wonky but I very rarely span monitors, I like to have discrete items open in each and focus on one monitor at a time.

    In this picture I have outlook split between monitors 1 & 2, thunderbird between 2 and 3 and firefox crossing all 3.

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  • Scary Mary !

    Scary Mary !

    I treated myself to an external flash for my camera, specifically a Nikon SB-800.

    This allows me to play around with having the flash off camera. Mucking around produced the photo above, which also gives a sneak preview to the “face fungus” which I am currently cultivating.

    As you may or may not know, i love the concept of openid which allows you to have a single authorisation location for multiple sites (including this blog). It also allows you to have a single profile page. It has just scared me the number of places where my profile photo may be, I’m going to spend the next hour seeing how many places I have put it!

    OK, in 1 hour I have found 16 discrete sites, and I have not even started with the forums that I frequent !