Keynote article ...
2005 - Come as a student, leave as a friend
"Come as a student, leave as a friend". You'll find this writ on the Well House Consultants mugs that you drink your tea or coffee from, and elsewhere - our "spoken logo" as I read in a book the other day.
One of the most noticeable personal changes in the past year or so has been the our coming out - from a smaller circle of people who inhabit a couple of niches to a much wider range of contacts and friends. 12 months ago, diaries were free many evenings but now I'll often look at scheduling an extra session with a trainee during a course (that's a service we're happy to provide to look at a specific application of the technology we teach) and found that I've only one or two suitable gaps on the week. And we're delighted with this development - not only from the personal satisfaction, but also because it's a chance for us to give something back - be it Lisa on the Bowerhill Villager, or me on Melksham's threatened train services. And we've met some remarkable but quiet people on both of these activities.
Business-wise, it's been a year of gentle consolidation. I can't point back to any big developments but I could come up with a number of less dramatic items - from the opening of our separate dining area in the Spring through to a major web site update in the Autumn, with online booking, further DDA compliance work and additional data mining techniques to help people find - rapidly - the resources that are relevant to them. Web traffic has increased dramatically, and in real life the number of physical visitors to our office has leapt too. On the other hand, telephone calls and faxes have dropped right off - technologies that have been overtaken for many uses, perhaps?
It's probably fair to say that every single course has been updated at least a little during the year. With Java 5 and Tomcat 5.5 and the ongoing "connector story", perhaps the biggest changes have been in the Deploying Apache httpd and Tomcat course. But then there's been big developments too in MySQL - now up to version 5 - and PHP, where their version 5 (with more emphasis on Object Oriented PHP) is easing out the older version 4. These new versions don't change the fundamental principles of programming in the technology, but they do open up new opportunities for applications that need to be mentioned right through training courses. They also lead, at times, to cumbersome ways of achieving a goal being replaced by a more efficient approach that needs to be documented and taught.
Although you'll see me as your tutor when you attend a Well House Consultants course, there's no way that I could do the job without the rest of the team - and that's right through from Lisa putting in far, far more than a standard working week and keeping me on strategic track, through Leah (currently holding the fort while we're away on holiday - THANK YOU) - to the folks who help our with specific areas from cleaning to providing lunches, and from gardening to banking services to delivering the post. I know that almost everyone's fulfilling the particular role they have because it's what they want and enjoy - but I still want to conclude my last post of the year with a huge "Thank you - I really appreciate what you do" to everyone, and to look forward to an exciting 2006 that will be even more of a pleasure for everyone.
(this article written on 2005-12-31) |
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A little more about this newsletter ...
At Well House Consultants, we run niche IT training courses ... and we run a hotel for delegates on those courses and other visitors to Melksham too. And we make a lot of friends - have a lot of ambassadors with whom we want to keep in touch. So every day Graham (that's me, writing this piece) puts together an article or two which might include the latest sample programs that I've written during the current course, new information about
Well House Manor - our business hotel, tips on search engine optimisation,
announcements of upcoming public courses, pictures of local places, and even (on occasions) rants and whimsical pieces to keep those friends up to date and in touch. The feeds are available directlt via the Blog -
"The Horse's Mouth", they're on our
Twitter Feed and you can find me at my
LinkedIn profile.
But most people just want to look us up occasionally - every month or two, and then to catch up on the latest news just for their particular subjects of interest ... and that's what this newsletter is about
You'll find above the titles of ALL the new articles written in the last two months, listed by major subject area, and showing as
(new) with their date of publication. You'll find additional articles in each category too - topping each category up to a minimum of five articles. And you'll find a link at the end of each section which lets you expand that section to show the titles of every article that's been published in that section. After all, "the old ones are often the best ones", aren't they?