1.30pm: I spent this morning working on a recommendation document for the Corporate Fundraising department, outlining my best solution for improving how companies are displayed in Raiser’s Edge.

The problem is that many larger companies have several distinct records on the database, and it’s not easy at first glance to tell which is the main Head Office record, and which are branches or subsidiaries. It’s possible to get this information by using queries, or just from business knowledge, but the Open Constituents screen doesn’t display this information by default.

The recommended solutiun involves adding some new constituent codes and ensuring that the relationships tab is up-to-date. This way, the Relationship Tree actually displays some useful information.

There’s still a bit of faffing about and it’s not a perfect system, but it is better than it was. One of my tasks, assuming that this idea is approved of, will be to ensure that all companies (particularly Level 1 and 2 companies, which are basically large top prospects and other sizeable organisations) are properly linked together. This may or may not be highly automated. I’d like to think that I can just export a load of data into Excel, with the Import IDs, change or add data as appropriate, and import it back in. That’s the theory, the practice may be different.

One of the slightly ambiguous elements of the relationships tab is which way around the “Relationship” and “Reciprocal” fields go. Get this the wrong way around and relationships become illogical. The Relationship field describes how the record that is being linked to relates to the current record, and Reciprocal is the inverse of this (if this is required, and makes sense to include). I suspect that quite a few of these have been entered in the reverse.

Yesterday I did quite a lot of work on data for an SME mailing for Payroll Givers, ensuring that the bought data was de-duped against our own data. I need to do a little more work on that today, just ensuring that data protection and mailing preferences are adhered to. More Excel work.

This afternoon I’ve a meeting at 2pm to discuss the Corporate proposal, then I will need to continue implementing it. Then I will do my daily import of the data feed from one of our fundraising partners, start working on the Excel spreadsheet for this month’s Payroll Givers import, maybe try to tidy up the corporate database more, or get back to my data audit work which has been put on hold recently.

I sense a saga coming on over why Occam’s Sigma won’t run alongside Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge – an installation of Sigma caused Raiser’s Edge to refuse to load. Fortunately I was able to run a server version of RE via Citrix, but it’s not the ideal solution. Hopefully the technical team at Occam can sort this out, as we’ll be using Sigma on our live data soon.

I’ve decided to start an official unofficial work blog, as part of my personal blog. Readers will notice that I have blogged about work issues in the past, but not to any great length, and (hopefully) not in an incriminating way.

This section will be an insight into what a Data Analyst in a large charity does all day (well, maybe not all day…). I must stress that this is not (currently) endorsed by my employer – however I will be as careful as I can not to drop myself into anything nasty. I won’t be able to divulge anything that could give away secrets or proprietary knowledge about the systems we use. I may have to be vague at times – but that’s not unusual. I may have to break my blog rules and modify posts if I (or someone else) have a justifiable reason to do so (like losing my job). However, what I can say should prove interesting, if only to other techies. We’ll see how it goes. I had better do some work now!

A colleague today told me that she had been reading my blog, quite by coincidence because recently I mentioned a certain supermarket and a rather unpleasant man in it, and her husband writes a blog about said supermarket (I won’t reveal the name as I’m not saying anything legitimate about them in this post) and has been scanning Feedster for the name.

It made me realise again that my blog, like the millions of others in existence, are all linked by keywords in a much more powerful and immediate way than search engines do for general web pages. As soon as an article is written, aggregators and feed sites take the post, strip its keywords, and serve them up to anyone who is searching or subscribing to those feeds.

It also made me think about whether I would change my style of writing depending on whether I knew that particular people were reading (or likely to read) my blog. I don’t think I would, although I’m already carefully considering how much I say about work and personal situations. I suppose my blog is really an online journal, but whereas a personal diary often (or should?) remains unread by anyone else until the author has died, this journal is live, and worldwide. There is a responsibility on the author to those he knows, as to how much he publishes about them.

Anyone who has read previous posts will know that I have spoken about work and home situations that have affected me, but withholding names and very personal details. You will also probably be aware that this blog is not often a purely personal account of what has happened in my days. Sometimes I write more about personal things, and other times I write about general events. I am never sure how this blog will evolve and it depends on what mood I am in as to how often I write, and on what subjects.

It was actually quite a surprise to meet someone who has read my blog. I don’t particularly keep it a secret, but neither do I overtly advertise it off-line. One of my friends did mention that he had looked at my site, but I think he got the impression that lots of different people were writing. Perhaps he didn’t realise I would want to write on such different subjects as I have.

There are quite a lot of things I would like to write about at the moment, and some of them have the potential to be quite deep, but I am not sure if I have the energy to do that tonight.

I have noticed that an individual feed in Bloglines has a 200 article limit. What this means is that if this space is filled up, new articles are not added to the feed.

It’s therefore important to watch feeds, particularly rapidly updated ones, to ensure that they don’t hit that limit. What would be nice is if it was a rolling limit, so that old articles dropped off the list when new ones became available.

I still love Bloglines though.

Update 27 April 2005: Here’s a very informative introduction to using Bloglines with clear instructions and screenshots. Check it out for learning how to get started and make the most of Bloglines.

I have been struggling this morning with a couple of spreadsheets that I have had to compare value on. The main problem is that my machine has only 256Mb of physical RAM, and it grinds to a halt eaasily, often crashing the application or refusiing to save documents.

I’m used to lots of RAM (by my standards at least). My G4 PowerMac at home has 768Mb and my G3 iBook has 640Mb. Even these are not huge amounts of RAM by today’s damanding standards, but they certainly do the trick. This is a prime example of why RAM is so important. I was ‘upgraded’ from a sub-1GHz machine to a near-2GHz machine, but the lack of RAM means there is little difference in performance speed. The previous machine actually had more RAM.

I’ve put in a request to get more RAM – at least 512Mb – as working with minimal RAM is painful.

According to Liz Hurley, Elton John is one of the world’s nicest men, along with his partner David Furnish. Twice a year, Sir Elton takes Liz and her son Damien shopping and buys summer and winter clothes for them.

Elton has a habit of losing his temper but that is just one side of his character.

Oops! Staff at the pallet maker Chep UK were told that the £1000 bonuses they had been paid were an error, despite Human Resources telling them earlier that the bonus wasn’t a mistake. They will have the money ‘taken back’ by docking next month’s wage packet, leaving many without an income at all.

The company makes £86million a year, but is too cheap to stand by it’s actions. Maybe it made a mistake, but to leave staff without wages now because it can’t handle its paperwork properly is ridiculous. They should let the staff keep their ‘bonuses’ as a gesture of goodwill; I doubt there’s much joy in the factory this morning.

Google sums it up nicely. When I searched to see if ‘Chep UK’ had a website, it politely asked me Did you mean: Cheap UK. On reflection, I probably did.

I was browsing around Alexa and decided to take a look at the Movers and Shakers page, where I found Save Toby website. It reads:

Toby is the cutest little bunny on the planet. Unfortunately, he will DIE on June 30th, 2005 if you don.t help. I rescued him several months ago. I found him under my porch, soaking wet, injured from what appeared to be an attack from an alley cat. I took him in, thinking he had no chance to live from his injuries, but miraculously, he recovered. I have since spent several months nursing him to health. Toby is a fighter, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, on June 30th, 2005, Toby will die. I am going to eat him. I am going to take Toby to a butcher to have him slaughter this cute bunny. I will then prepare Toby for a midsummer feast. I have several recipes under consideration, which can be seen, with some pretty graphic images, under the recipe section.

I don’t want to eat Toby, he is my friend, and he has always been the most loving, adorable pet. However, God as my witness, I will devour this little guy unless I receive 50,000$ USD into my account from donations or purchase of merchandise. You can help this poor, helpless bunny’s cause by making donations through my verified PayPal account by clicking on any of the Donate buttons on this site, or by purchasing merchandise at the Savetoby.com online store.

Allegedly, the owners have raised over 24,000 dollars, although interestingly PayPal informed me that the account is currently unable to receive funds. Interesting? There are better things to give money to.

June may seem some way off yet, but the British Heart Foundationa has just launched its website for Help a Heart Week 2005 (4-12 June). Find out how you can help raise funds for hearts in crisis.

The British Heart Foundation raises money to fund vital research into heart disease, as well as providing care and support for those living or caring for those with Chronic Heart Disease.