I find myself asking “What kind of stupid were these pirates?” Think about it - you’re faced with HMS Cumberland, a Royal Navy Type 22 frigate. Designed as an anti-submarine platform, it’s armed with a whole array of weaponry from the 4.5″ guns to Harpoon and Goalkeeper weapons systems. She also carries a few Royal Marines.

So, there you are, in a small wooden dhow, faced with a Royal Navy frigate and a bunch of Royal Marines in launches coming to board you. Do you think “I’ll take a few potshots with my AK before I turn and run, striking a critical blow to this armoured warship”? I’m sure I can see how that’s going to end so well…

Think we should award these guys posthumous Darwin Awards?

So when I was sat in the office today and one of the managers walked in and said “I’ve got flowers for you Aled.” my initial thoughts were “Yeah, right, whatever.” Failing miserably to spot the punchline I looked up as he put the flowers next to me and handed me the card - it had my name on it. WTF?

Suspecting I knew who’d sent them, I opened the card to find a note from Sean. I won’t regurgitate the whole thing here, but suffice to say it was sweet and thoughtful and I rapidly turned purple as everyone watched. The flowers are beautiful, the thought and emotion behind it far more so. I think that I’m a very lucky man.

Of course, me being a geek, my first thought was “I should take a picture of this so I can blog it…”

Every morning I jog 2 miles, careful to keep my heart rate towards the lower end of the cardiovascular exercise range - around 65%. This ensures that I’m working my cardiovascular system and if it slows down a little I’m into the “fat burning” range, either way it’s good. It’s 2 hilly miles as well which gives me a few opportunities for a few sprints in there just to push things along a bit. So that’s 5 of those a week…

…at work, every Thursday, we play badminton for an hour. It’s fun, it’s energetic, it’s mostly aerobic exercise…

…today I started playing badminton a second time every week. So practice on Tues, play the league on Thursday…

…in the evenings I’ve started doing something - walk a few miles over the hill behind the house, a quick run, test my fitness using a multi-stage fitness test (aka bleep test), even cleaning the house which if you do it right can be aerobic exercise…

Throw into that the fact that I’ve cut down on my tea and coffee, replacing them with water and my eating has become a lot more healthy. Hopefully all this will work wonders and in a month or two I really will have lost some weight.

I do wonder however if I’m overdoing it slightly - I’m not sure if I’m tired today because I do too much, or if it’s because I didn’t sleep until late last night. Meh, early bed tonight I think…

Of course, being away over the weekend and spent much of the end of last week tied up in the evenings, so when I came home tonight, I had a stack of things to watch on TV, notably two episodes of the Bill. It’s quite interesting to watch - a double episode covering an 8 year old girl who goes missing. They eventually find her body and so far, the killer looks like it might be a 10 year old boy. What’s really interesting from my perspective, quite apart from the storyline, is watching the initial process of someone being reported missing. Eventually there’s a big search in an area of undergrowth - very reminiscent of what we do when we search for a missing person. Eventually they find a body and the programme then follows on where we stop - the investigation and arrest. It’s quite interesting - one of the areas of police work I’m most interested in is search management and dealing with missing persons, so with my application to the police progressing, I do hope at some point that I get to be involved in this kind of work.

Anyway, back to the Bill…

I’ve had a few people asking me why I want to join the police, and while the answer is complicated and multi-faceted it boils down to one event. A few months ago I was out third manning with a paramedic. We spent the evening on the Rapid Response Vehicle responding to calls around Bargoed. It was a Saturday evening and most of our calls were to drunk people, although a few of the people we saw really did need our help - like the woman with a third-degree heart block who was rushed in. To top it all off, it was the evening after the day that Wales beat England at Rugby in Twickenham - what a day!

It was late, and we were driving up through the center of Bargoed when I spotted around a dozen young men and woman (mostly men) fighting next to a parked car. We came to a halt and Rich flicked the blue lights on. I looked out of the passenger window at the men who were almost lying on top of the car’s boot and for a second, they all stopped and turned to look at the lights…until they realised it was an ambulance car and they went back to their fight. Richard, calling for police backup on the radio, got out of the car and I joined him as we approached the group. The next few minutes passed very quickly as a woman was accidentally knocked over by the fight and when she went down her head hit the kerb. Rich rushed over to help, keeping her still while he assessed her and tried to keep the group at bay. The police arrived and immediately started chasing the ones running away, followed by a second unit which came over and helped us make the scene safe - by this point, Rich had ascertained that the woman wasn’t injured, just very, very drunk.

What really made me concerned was how I reacted - it was an uncomfortable and volatile situation and I shrank back from it. I wasn’t much use to Rich, and I hated that. I hated being that uncomfortable with that situation.

I’ve faced this before. Most relevantly when dealing with casualties in Mountain Rescue - theory and classroom exercises will only take you so far, and when faced with a real, live person, with complex problems that don’t quite fit the textbook…

So, realising that I needed something that I wasn’t getting - experience - I went looking for it. The ambulance service provided the ideal place to get that experience and meet my innate need to help people - the First Responder scheme. In a very short period of time, I got more experience than I had in my entire time in Mountain Rescue. Over two years several things have happened. I’ve had a lot more experience of dealing with people - sufficiently so that I’m comfortable with dealing with casualties now. The second thing is that my role in the team has changed. I’ve still got my qualification with Mountain Rescue, but recently I (along with two others) started training to be Party Leaders - consider it the management track within Mountain Rescue.

Those two things coupled together meant that I needed experience of dealing with situations where I had to establish control and to lead people - something that working with the Police would be great for. Of course, I couldn’t do all of the things that I do - I’d need an extra 8 hours in every day. Conveniently, I’m tired of the politics of the Ambulance service and had decided to leave anyway.

So there it is.

Me (quietly): Hey, quick question, $other_manager, is he dyslexic?
HR Manager (loudly, not caring): No, he’s just stupid *walks off*

Can’t say fairer than that….

The pager went off again just before the conference call - search for a missing elderly lady in Maerdy. I jumped onto the conference call which didn’t last very long and cleared a few other things off my desk before taking my leave. Heavy showers, torrential at times, slowed my progress but I managed to get there quite quickly. Taking the Landrover out I had a call telling that this was not an immediate (blue light) response. Locking base up I headed off in the Landrover down towards Aberdare for the valley-hop across to Maerdy. Traffic was medium and the road conditions a little wet so I proceeded along at normal speeds until on the way out of Aberdare my phone rang. Pulling over to answer it, my instructions were clear: “Blue-light it and put your foot down, we’ve got another job.”

Flicking the lights on I did indeed put my foot down, overtaking the surprised cars in front of me I headed over the mountain. In Maerdy the crew was waiting for me and after getting everyone on board we headed off. Information immediately started flowing in as I slapped the sired on. We had a woman with a leg injury on the mountain in Llwynypia. It’s a good drive - 7 miles, google maps reckon 20 minutes. It wasn’t that long on blues. We got there to find that St John’s were on scene and our crew went in while I got changed and waited for the two guys from Brecon team to join us. The casualty was on an archery range and before we headed up in the light rain, I turned to the large group of people beside us. Several of them wore green tops with logos of a kangaroo - not surprising since we already knew the casualty was Australian. I turned to a man in a hi-viz jacket and asked them to stop the shooting on the ranges - we’d had a report over the radio that the party ahead of us were seeing arrows flying. After a brief conversation the official with a radio saw things my way and started calling on all ranges to stop firing. Wondering where all these tourists came from I headed back to our group and off we went. Within 10 minutes we were at the casualty site. After a brief discussion over the relative merits of a helicopter evacuation, we decided to “scoop and go” and a few minutes later we were starting the journey back to the control vehicle where the county ambulance was waiting for us.

The carryout was interesting, I ran point trying to find a decent route out. Halfway out the rain got heavy. Very heavy. I had a helmet on in case we were going to call a helicopter in (like most of my teammates) and so I didn’t bother fighting to get my hood adjusted to fit over my helmet - it’s a new coat and I’m not used to all the adjustments yet. By the time we got back to control it was raining heavily and with our casualty in pain, we helped the ambulance crew load her on board the truck before stopping for a few minutes to sort our kit out. Of course, now that the casualty was in the ambulance it stopped raining. I still managed to get a soaking though because as it turned out my coat is very waterproof. I had a hood full of water that covered me when I went to shake it out. Great.

We packed the Landrover back up with sodden kit as the staff from the activity center brought us cups of tea and Welshcakes which were greatfully received, as were the thanks that were piled onto us. At last I took a moment to look around and realised that there were a few different nations and that people had some kind of badges dangling from their necks. The picture became clear when one of our crew came over and whispered to us.

“Do you know what we’ve just stopped?”

“Er…no…?”

“The World Archery Championship. We’ve stopped the World Archery Championships. The woman we rescued was a substitute for the Olympic Archery team.”

We headed back to Maerdy where the search was wrapping up soon after that. It wasn’t long before we were back at base setting our kit out to dry, buoyant in the wake of a job well done.

Figuring that time was running out for Sean and I to have a break this year, I booked some time off (just a few days) and we packed the car and left. We had a vague plan - some friends in Betws Y Coed and my sister on Anglesey, but beyond that we could do anything. We packed a tent and everything we’d need just to pitch up for a few nights, filled the car up with diesel and headed off, L-plates stuck on the car and Sean firmly behind the wheel (and me in the passenger seat feeling very nervous).

We started off well with Sean driving quite well. However, it rapidly became apparent that we had to get to Sean’s mother faster than he could reasonably be expected to drive so we swapped quickly and set off up to Llangorse where she was attending a singing camp. Glorious sunshine greeted us as we arrived at what was in fact a very waterlogged campsite but the sunshine boded well for our trip. Toddling off up towards Brecon we hit the A470 and after stopping for tea and scones at Builth Wells, Sean drove us up to Betws Y Coed where we stopped overnight. Over dinner we made our plans for the morrow and the plan we’d decided on was something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time - Crib Goch. However, it wasn’t to be. As part of The Plan, I decided that a weather report was in order. The MetOffice however scuppered our plans (well, I suppose they didn’t themselves…) with a report of 55mph gusts on “exposed ridges”. I think Crib Goch qualifies as that. So we changed our plans and headed into Betws Y Coed instead. It turned into quite a nice day and we ended up taking a drive up through Pen Y Pass and down into Llanberis. A quiet bite at the famous Pete’s Eats and we headed back up to Pen Y Pass where I took the two pictures above. The top one is of Crib Goch from the back of Pen Y Pass. The bottom one is of the weather report as it was at the entrance to the cafe. Standing there taking the first photograph, I have to admit, I was glad we hadn’t attempted the ridge - I had to use a nearby wall to steady my hands in the wind and it would have been significantly stronger at the top.

After a few days around Betws, we headed up to see my sister. It was good to see the kids again, although my sister ended up feeling quite ill, so we spent some time around the house. Despite the lack of walking, Sean and I had a great time. We spent the entire time with limited internet access - at some points with limited access to any kind of communications at all. I barely fired up my computer - no work for any of the organisations I work with. Absolute bliss.

We drove home today - well, Sean drove a fair bit of it. He’s getting pretty good, though he’ll need some more practice before he goes for his test. I’m relaxed, unwound and ready to get back to work tomorrow. What more can you ask?

Taking everything back to first principles, we got a bunch of people together and tried to work out what we actually want from a website. It rapidly became very clear that the website was key to how we communicated not only with team members, but with external organisations. With that in mind, we decided that a complete redesign of the site was in order, with different sections of the website for different people - members, other 999 services, the press, the public, prospective members etc. That’s a whole lot of work and more importantly, is a layout that isn’t compatible with one person doing all the work. So we need a CMS of some sort.

Over the past few days I’ve been trawling through some CMS software. Specifically I’ve been looking at Open Source ones in order to provide flexibility and keep costs down. It has to be easy to use so that people can publish content. It has to be customisable and templates fairly simple to play with. I’ve looked at over 20 different CMSes and several names stick out as software that’s competent, well-written and easy to use while at the same time being flexble:

• WordPress - technically not a CMS, it is nevertheless very popular and has an extremely simple interface. It isn’t however powerful enough for some of the things we want to do.
• Joomla - this is currently one of my top runners. Very competent CMS from looking at it, it’s one of two going forward to the trial stage.
• Mambo - Very close 3rd, it just lacks a few features compared to Joomla that I wanted.
• TikiWiki CMS - This was recommended to me, but following reviews and comparisons, it’s probably bottom of the shortlist
• Drupal - Currently the top runner. My once concern is its complexity, but if the complexity is limited to the admin side, that’s fine - I’ll be the admin so I don’t mind learning my way around.

I suppose I’m fairly lucky that in my last job I worked for a company that wrote a CMS so I’m familiar with certain concepts and principles relating to CMSes - personalisation, taxonomy, navigation, content types, etc. That will probably hold me in good stead as I set up Drupal and Joomla for trialling. Hopwefully a clear winner will emerge from the two, though at the moment, Drupal is almost a full head in front of Joomla after just reading the docs.

I use screen lots - for example, my IM client is a command-line curses-based client (centerim) running in a screen. This means that when I go home, I can log into it by attaching to the screen instance from there, but it allows me to keep it running in the office. It’s ideal for doing major work when you’re on the road, as 3G is still flaky in most parts of the country and screen allows you to just reattach and get on with it.

It’s got quite a few options for using - well worth reading the man page to find out some of the more unusual ones, but one of the places I’ve used it a lot is for training - showing people remotely how to do something. You get them to log in and run a command that connects to your screen and you can then demonstrate while they watch. Thing is, I’m forever forgetting the multiuser options of screen, so when I found this page today (thanks Google), I figured I’d better remember it.

Have fun!