Peter’s Hospital Diary

I had a good weekend away with Leukaemia Care, delivering some training. For those of you that have forgotten, I am a voluteer worker with the charity, which aims to provide support for patients with Leukaemia and allied blood disorders, and their carers and families. The details are on their website here and also on the list on the right. (This website is about to be relaunched, so visit it again soon!) Anyway, the charity is about to offer a training course for its own volunteers and staff, and eventually we hope to offer it to other health care workers. I am one of the trainers, and this weekend we completed the first complete set of modules, delivering it to some of the office staff. Very rewarding!

So it was back home last night, and a quick catch up on the blog. I was delighted to see two new contributors to the comments, Sam and Rowan! I met Sam and Rowan (and also Richard) through a Broadband Campaigning about 3 years ago! With all the adverts for broadband services that you see now, it is hard to believe that only 3 or 4 years ago, high speed internet connections were only available in very limited parts of the country, mainly in urban areas. Living on the outskirts of a small village, I felt a bit miffed about this, so I started trying to persuade people to register for the service, in the hopes that increased demand would spur BT into action. As it happened, a talented group of people in BT also thought that this would be a good idea, and the BT Broadband Campaign started, with a message board to exchange ideas and mutual encouragement.

To cut a long story short, I met Rowan in October 2003 one Friday evening (10th – or 17th) in the BT tower where we had out first gathering to put names to faces and meet the BT teams that were supporting out individual efforts. At a later similar gathering I met Richard, and also Sam, who as a talented programmer, went on to develop the Sam Knows web site that has become one of the key resources for finding out technical information about broadband enabled exchanges. Just to complete the loop, you may have seen some coments by Simon M, who was one of the BT support teams, together with Julie and Alex, who were the driving force behind it on BT’s side.

The campaigning was a great success (there were 3,000 campaigners at one time) but having achieved a remarkable success, the team has disbanded. So good to catch up with you Sam and Rowan – and thank you for your support, it really does make a difference!

I am delighted to see that Elspeth is back on line in her own right (having got her computer back!) Don’t forget to visit her blog!

Later we will be going to Bournemouth to see Kt settled in to her ‘digs’ and then off to Cornwall for a few days to relax. I’m not planning to be online while I am down there, but I’ll be back at the weekend!

Onwards and Upwards!

PS – As Richard has just pointed out, ‘digs’ sounds very music hall and conjours up images of stern matriarchal landladies – it is actually a university owned student house she is sharing with 4 others!