Category: Life

What do I want to be remembered for?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life

What do I want to be remembered for is the topic today at postaday2011, and it’s a tough one. Because you’re either saying “I’m awesome at this” or “you should think I’m awesome at this.”

Why are people remembered? They either do great things, such as Don Bradman, or Phar Lap – who accomplished great things in their field during a dark time – or they are remembered “fondly” by their family and friends. But there’s a whole range of people out there who deserve better than being remembered “fondly” but who might not have accomplished the things that will grant them wider-ranging remembrance.

For example, one of my old priests, George Trippe, was incredibly influential on my faith in the short time he wast at St Anselm’s. Or my friend Max Pengelley, who despite being well into his 80’s and losing his eyesight, produces a letter on his computer that would rival the skills of many in their 20’s. Or my violin teacher for a period, Peter Tanfield, who has been a wonderful teacher across Australia and an incredible performer, but won’t get remembered in the same company as Heifetz, Oistrakh or Menuhin. These people all deserve to be remembered more than “fondly”

As for me, I don’t know what my future holds, or what I will be remembered for. But I guess if I can be remembered more than “fondly” then I’ve done well.

Postaday2011 links

Snow? What Snow?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Taken in Megeve, France
Image via Wikipedia

The topic for The Daily Post today is “How do you keep yourself entertained when snowed in?” Well, living in Perth, I have never seen any snow. In fact, I’m not certain but I think Perth has never had any snow since it was founded. Australia doesn’t get much snow – we have some ski resorts in the Blue Mountains, and Tasmania gets snow sometimes, but never enough to be snowed in.

I had a small glimmer of hope that when I went to Hong Kong it might be cold enough to get some snow. It was cold alright – our first day we went to a theme park, and everyone rushed to buy very expensive beanies because we were freezing – but we didn’t get any snow.

So how would I keep myself entertained in the rare situation that I did get snowed in. Well, if it was just me, I have a large collection of computer games that I could play through. Playing through NBA 2k11 at the moment and loving it. Need to get back into Starcraft 2 though. But if my wife was here with me, well we’ve got board games which would be able to keep us entertained, and then we could also watch through the few series that we’ve got on dvd – we’re watching Friends at the moment after Liesl got the box set for Christmas, but then we’ve also got Will and Grace, M*A*S*H, Star Trek the Original Series, I have a couple of seasons of The Next Generation (if anyone wants gift ideas, seasons 3+ of TNG would be greatly appreciated), Big Bang Theory, and I’ve got a box set of all the Gilbert and Sullivan musicals which would take up a fair bit of time as well.

So all up, in the unlikely circumstance that we did get snowed in, I think we would be able to be sufficiently entertained.

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A-ha! So that’s the problem, now what’s the solution?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Lightbulb Sun
Image via Wikipedia

Ever since the Uniting Church had their website re-done back in 2008, they have had an Activity search in the top right hand corner. And it works great… mostly. There was one big problem – sometimes it wouldn’t return results that should be there. For example, if you type in “greenwood” it would return that there were no Churches within 15km of Greenwood. Despite having a Greenwood Uniting Church in Greenwood. However, if you were to search “Kingsley” – the suburb directly north of Greenwood, it would return Greenwood Uniting Church as the closest church.

When I started at the Uniting Church, this was one of the problems I had noticed with the website. But I didn’t know what was causing the problem. Until one day, when talking about it with my manager, she said that if you typed the state as well, you got the correct result. A-ha! my mind went, so that’s what the problem was.

See, our activity search uses the Google maps API, and there’s more than one Greenwood in Australia. Likewise, there’s more than one Mount Pleasant. So what was happening was that the search would find the first Greenwood, which was invariably not in WA. But our users, coming to the website of the Uniting Church in Western Australia would assume that the activity search would search WA first. Having it search other states is completely useless to us, but there seemed to be no setting in the plugin that we were using to set it to only search WA.

Knowing that if you added “WA” to the end of the search it worked correctly, the simplest way I could think of to solve the issue was to append “, WA” to every search that didn’t end in “WA”. Now, while I work on the website, I’ve had no formal training. I taught myself HTML and CSS, and working with WordPress has taught me a bit of PHP, but in terms of coding something like this I needed to know JavaScript. I had a search around the internet to see if someone had a similar problem, or a solution that would work. I think my first effort ended up breaking the search completely. I talked to a friend who actually codes websites for a living, and he came up with some code that he thought would work, but wasn’t certain. It didn’t quite work, so I posted it in a forum and asked for help. They helped me out by pointing out the errors (needed a capital letter instead of a lowercase letter, and a ‘ instead of a “).

So now, if you search for “Greenwood” you will receive results for “Greenwood, WA” and find the details of the Greenwood Uniting Church. All I needed was for someone to discover why it was doing what it was doing, and my A-Ha moment came as to how to fix it.

Postaday2011 links

Job Interviews

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life

I’ve been to a few job interviews over my years. My first was at K-Mart. It was a big group interview thing, they call your name, head to the next available spot and have your interview there. I started as a Christmas Casual, then continued and worked there for three years.

When I started at university, I had a job interview at a Music school attached to a music shop. I must have impressed as they offered me the job and said they’d call me when they organised some students. They never called me back. I wouldn’t be so annoyed had I not gone out and registered a business, bought supplies and music books to teach from.

Apart from that one, there’s only been one other job that I’ve gotten to interview and not gotten the job. It was really a job I wasn’t qualified to do, but after a few months of job searching and not getting even a glimmer, I had put far too much hope on it, and when I didn’t get the job I came down hard.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to anyone going for a job is to be yourself, and don’t put too much pressure on yourself.

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Stressed? Stressed?!?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Stress
Image via Wikipedia

Thankfully, I’m not someone who gets stressed out very often. I’m fairly relaxed in my disposition, so things that might stress other people out don’t generally stress me out. I just go with the flow.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been stressed out before. The 6 month period at the beginning of last year when I was searching for a job was particularly stressful. Getting constant rejections, running out of time before my wedding, and more, it got very stressed.

I also got stressed towards the end of this year as I started to work on the directory for the Uniting Church. Having never done anything like this before, and knowing it was such a big project, it was getting me stressed out as to whether I would have enough time to get it done. I even chose to take the train for a work trip to Kalgoorlie that I have coming up, so that I could have an extra 14 hours to work on it. However, once I actually started working on getting the layout done, and working in access, I got it working fine in no time and am now trying to figure out what I’m going to do on my 14 hour return train ride.

So am I stressed right now? No – because I’ve just finished a nice little break, and go back to work today (for a day, then a three-day weekend). Are you stressed? What’s some of your techniques for dealing with stress?

Postaday2011 links

Text or Talk

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
Demo Cell Phones
Image by djwudi via Flickr

When it comes to preferred method of communication, I far prefer text over talk. The reason for this is that I prefer to be able to read and review what I say before I send it. However, text (and e-mail) does have its limitations.

For example, you can’t put any meaning in text. No Emphasis. For example, a sentence my mum would use when teaching English as a second language: Do I know Elvis Presley? This can be said in a number of different ways. Do I know Elvis Presley, Do I know Elvis Presley, Do I know Elvis Presley, Do I know Elvis Presley and Do I know Elvis Presley. Five different ways of saying the same sentence, each with a slightly different meaning.

I’m getting more comfortable on the phone. My work has me calling some people, and it does make me nervous sometimes, but so long as I go through my head what I’m going to talk about I’m usually ok. When I get calls, I can’t do that, but I’m getting better.

So What about you? What do you prefer to use? Let me know in the comments, or vote in the poll.

Postaday2011 links

What makes me smile

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
"Sharing smile!"
Image by abhiomkar via Flickr

I had a little trouble coming up with something for todays topic. It’s not that nothing makes me smile, but I wanted to pick something specific. See, a lot of things make me smile. Getting a solution for a problem at work so that something finally works the way it was intended – that makes me smile. Seeing weight loss each day as I weigh in on the wii, that makes me smile. Seeing my wife, my family, my friends happy, that makes me smile. I’m heading to my brother-in-law’s wedding today, and I’m sure that will make me smile. Seeing young people stepping out in their faith – that makes me smile.

I’m thankful for so much at the moment, and they all make me smile.

What makes you smile?

Postaday2011 links

Most important thing I did in 2010

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life

I did a lot of important things this year. From becoming a Senior Soldier in the Salvation Army, and starting the application process towards becoming a Salvation Army Officer, getting a job and starting working essentially full time (across three jobs), moving out of home, and probably most importantly of all – getting married.

It was a wonderful day in September, but I would rather talk about my super crazy week at the end of June, where everything fell into place.

The story to this week actually starts back in January 2010, when a week before the school term started, I got an email from one of the schools that I taught at saying that they didn’t have any students for me and my services were no longer required. That made things very difficult – the mental jump from three days to five days work was no where near as hard as the jump from tow days to five days. I started applying for jobs everywhere. I would apply for on average 15 to 20 jobs a week, but wouldn’t get even an interview. I asked my contacts, and got an interview for a job with the Salvation Army, but didn’t end up getting the job. I went for a job at the Uniting Church that I thought was perfect, but didn’t get that one either.

Through all of this, Liesl and I had started looking at houses, as our wedding was fast approaching and we needed to find a place to live. I went to look at this one place that was in a great location, with cheap rent. It wasn’t anything great, but I really liked it, and when I showed photos to Liesl, she liked it too. We did our sums and figured that we would probably be able to afford it, just. So we applied. We handed our application in on Wednesday morning, and Wednesday afternoon I got a call saying we’ve got the place. It happened so quick, and they hadn’t even called any of our contacts.

Then on Thursday, the next day, I got a call from the Uniting Church asking me to come in as the selected applicant for the job I’d applied for had fallen through. So Friday, in the morning we signed for the loan on the Bond, then we signed the lease and got the keys to our house, then in the afternoon I went to a short interview and signed my job contract. Within three days, I went from no house and little hope, to a house and a job. I moved in on Saturday (Liesl wouldn’t move in until after we were married), and then started my job on the Monday. It was really quite incredible.

And apart from getting married, that was the most important thing that happened to me. While it wouldn’t have been an issue, there was a big sense of pride in me in being able to provide for my wife – and working two days a week didn’t do that. So having that job now allowed me to be the provider for my wife, and be comfortable in our new house.

Postaday2011 links

Who deserves more credit?

by Ben Clapton, posted in Archive, Life
91.365 "Tell them to remember hope. We ha...
Image by ashley rose, via Flickr

When thinking of people who give so much to society, but don’t receive enough credit, I couldn’t single out a single person. I could only think of an entire industry – the Not-for-profit industry.

Why not-for-profits are necessary

The not-for-profit sector is sometimes referred to as the third sector, with the Government and Business being the other two. They fill the area of projects that are necessary to society, but the Government doesn’t want to (or can’t afford) to pay for them, and it isn’t going to produce a profit so business isn’t interested in it. They’re projects such as domestic violence refuges, rehab centres, refugee support services, and more.

Why they don’t get the credit they deserve

Essentially, its due to the type of work that they do. More often than not, it’s work that society is slightly ashamed of. We don’t like admitting that there are people whose lives get utterly destroyed through domestic violence. We don’t like admitting that there are people who get addicted to dangerous substances. So while many of us, when questioned, would say that having the not-for-profits is vital, they probably wouldn’t say they need recognition, or money.

So what can be done?

Well first of all, we can donate to these not-for-profits. Money isn’t everything,  but every cent helps. Find a not-for-profit that you like what they do, and donate to them. And not just a one-off donation, but regular donations. Secondly, the business and government sectors should host a yearly awards night, where they recognise the efforts of the not-for-profit sector. Industry hosted awards are important, but for the Government and business to recognise the work of these programs, that would show significant credit and recognition to these people who so often receive none.

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