Communications

Computers at work

New technology had many applications at work for our diarists.

• We have issued 370 County Court summonses this year; this is lower than other years but the Court Service are encouraging issue to be done centrally on-line by a system called "Money Claim on-line".

• Spent afternoon chairing the IT Project Board Meeting by video conferencing for the first time. Main item was, as usual, how to bring high bandwidth Internet connection to rural schools affordably.

• Worked from home in our office upstairs using a laptop with access via the telephone to the main server.

• So many people have mobile phones nowadays but we cannot get reception at our place isolated in the hills so we continue with the land-line. Keep hoping something will improve line speeds soon as emails seem to be coming in nearly always at 14400 bits per second even though my old modem can go up to three times that speed. So the call costs for internet access for me are three times more than they would be in the city.
  
  I switch on the computer and finish off doing some data entry. One of our members has written an accounts package computer program that is better than the commercially available ones, and that saves us having to pay annual service fees of around a couple of hundred pounds. The program is now working smoothly and is a vast improvement on the old one which never fully got over the year 2000 millenium bug problem properly.