Thursday was the last day of this years Blue Fusion event. Friday was clearing and packing up, and the whole week even has left me quite exhausted. I will try and write a few posts to cover the activities we ran, but most of my time will be spent catching up with my day job and preparing to hand over the running of Blue Fusion to the new leads team, which will be chosen over the next few months from the recent graduates to Hursley who organised this years event. There were a lot of things we needed to know about this year- but didn’t, and I hope to make sure that we write all that down for next year’s team so that they have it a bit easier.
All in all I really enjoyed managing the event, and would probably consider doing it again if I were asked. Next year I think I might get involved with the development of an activity, possibly a computer based one…
After spending 11 hours at work on Thursday setting up everything for Bright Sparks and Blue Fusion, the first day of the event (Bright Sparks) for the year eight age group occured on Friday. The day had a bit of a bumpy start with everything just pulling together in time, but once the ball started rolling the rest of the day flowed like clockwork.
Blue Fusion (previously known as Young Visions) attempts to inspire children about Science, Technology and Engineering and is run during National Science and Engineering week. The event is run be recent graduates to IBM Hursley, with 5 of the previous years graduates making the lead team and twenty most recent graduates making the rest of the organising team. The event is run during the week by around 200 volunteers from all over IBM UK, and we have 80 schools, each bringing six children over the week.
Each year develops new activites to be used during the event, and many of the activities are reused for other events in IBM like Bring Your Child to Work Day, and University Challange (previously known as Thinkpad Challenge). We have six new activites this year, and I will hopefully get the chance to describe some of them in depth later.
I will put up some photos later, but for now just wanted to warn you that most posts over the next week will be Blue Fusion related.
So my week off was really nice. I watched films, read books, took a quick day trip to the new forest with a friend down from London.
I won’t mention too much about the films and books other than to say Dune is an incredible book, I will be buying the whole set of them soon, Star Wars IV is far more dated than I remember (i guess it has been ~15 years since I last saw it), Batman and Batman Returns are slightly dated, but the incredible directing of Tim Burton makes them incredible nonetheless.
I have barely had time to do any real work even though I have been back for two days. Blue Fusion is taking up a lot of my time at the moment. On Thursday week we will be setting up for the event to run, so that leaves little time to finish everything off. Expect lots of posts about Blue Fusion after then as I will try to describe the activities we are running.
I just wish I had more time in the day so I could catch up with all the blogs I neglected to read on my week off.
So I have had a few days to start settling in to Message Broker Level 3 Service. So far I have only managed two PMR’s (Problem Maintenance Request – what the customer opens when they have a problem with our product). They have both been customer errors. This is not to say that the error is between the keyboard and the chair, but that they missed something important and hence are not getting the results they expected.
There is nothing like looking at a list of customer problems that couldn’t be solved by earlier support people to make you feel like you know nothing about the software. Most of the problems coming in look incredibly complex to solve, so I will probably struggle for a while trying to learn more about the product. I suppose that if anyone knew all the answers then there wouldn’t be a need for a whole team so I am expecting to be doing lots of new stuff over the next several months.
Once I have my computer set up properly I will probably be creating some code fixes too, which should be fun.
My other piece of work, which I unfortunately cannot talk about the details at this time is also keeping me busy. Presentations are being prepared to show off the product to various IBM teams, particulary Lab Services (these guys go out to the customer and do some complex custom work for the customer, and proof concept work etc) and Technical Sales, and more and more ideas are coming in on how to change/improve the code. I am not sure when I will find the time to work on this so I could be busy for a while.
Blue fusion continues to keep me busy, and with only 8 weeks to go now time is getting precious. The activities are all coming along smoothly, and most are sounding very interesting indeed. I will certainly have to test some of these games, as they should be pretty good fun!
Most other organisation for the event is on track too, so the only big thing to do now is give a presentation to senior management in the labs tomorrow morning. It will be slightly scary to stand up in front of all the high level managers, but it will also be really good to get their feedback on our plans for the event.
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