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The quiz went incredibly well on Tuesday night and we raised a grand total of £430.
I’ll admit to being pretty nervous before the start as it was a pretty miserable night as well as Belfast’s Christmas tree light switch on. I needn’t have worried though as around 60-70 people showed up to give their support and we had a great night together.
Once again I want to call out the generosity of the local businesses who donated to our ballot especially at their busiest time of year and to Carrick Sailing Club who hosted the event for us.
My youth club Carrickfergus Junior Gateway is holding a fund-raising pub quiz at Carrick Sailing Club on Tuesday 24th November. All are welcome to attend and ticket prices are £3 each with maximum team sizes of 5 people. The quiz starts at 8pm and I would love to see you there.
In other youth club related news we currently have places available for membership to the club. More details can be found on the site or by contacting me directly.
I had the pleasure of attending a workshop by Scott Guthrie this week where he discussed the MVC (Model, View, Controller) design pattern within asp.net and the new additions to the .net framework coming with the release of C# 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.
The first session on MVC raced by and before anyone in the audience had noticed two hours had passed by. The content was aimed at people who had never seen the MVC pattern before and brought us from a brief definition through to creating a full website. One of the highlights of this pattern for me was the ability to fully control the html output of the site as well as applying validation to the Model layer of the site and having that carry through to all aspects of the application including client side validation.
The second session focused on the soon to be released .net 4.0 framework and Visual Studio 2010. There are a lot of really interesting features being released not least the inclusion of jquery and a lot of editor improvements. An audible gasp went up from the audience when Scott demoed a new multiline selection and editing feature.
Overall it was a fantastic workshop to hear of new approaches to application development and something that I believe we will hear a lot more of..
The two sessions were videoed and I believe will be available from the Channel 9 website soon. In the meantime here’s videos from the Netherlands branch of the tour:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/matthijs/Scott-Guthrie-ASPNET-MVC-2/
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/matthijs/Scott-Guthrie-Visual-Studio-2010-and-NET-Framework-40/
When Goto doesn’t go when you want it to
When working with server side events I have found it common to reroute the workflow to a different activity within the workflow. Perhaps a user has decided to end the workflow and I want to send them to an End Workflow activity first. I would normally use the following code to do this:
K2.GotoActivity("NameOfActivity");
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background-color: #ffffff;
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.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
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.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }However to my surprise instead of the workflow moving to straight to that activity what actually happens is that the pointer linking the end of the current activity to the next changes to point to the activity entered in the GotoActivity code above. This means that if you have additional server events and potentially client events within the activity listed below the code containing the Goto they will still be processed leading to all sorts of errors further down the line.
The solution for me was to set a flag once the Goto had been called to skip out any further code execution. Messy but safer than allowing the code to execute. One to watch out for in your own code.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
I had a situation where I needed to email a user from within the workflow process using a mail event with a dynamically built url generated from a stringtable entry detailing the start of a url and a datafield value containing a reference id in the email body. I found that no matter what way I concatenated the two values together or added href anchor tags to the body of the email, the email would be received showing the link but without it formatting itself as a hyperlink.
The resolution to this was to concatenate the values together along with the html tags in a server side code event and store this value in a datafield before the mail event item was reached.
The code ended up being:
K2.ProcessInstance.DataFields["Hyperlink"].Value = string.Format("<a href="{0}{1}">{0}{1}</a>", K2.StringTable["UrlString"], K2.ProcessInstance.DataFields["Identifier"].Value);
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.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
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.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
Hope this helps someone else out there.
After seeing Andrea’s mini Moo cards at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper the other week I decided that I needed to get some personal business cards done up and went for Moo’s mini card range.
The idea behind them is that you can have up to six lines of text for your personal details and choose various pictures for the card backs either from a range created by various designers or from a photostream on Flickr. I must admit I had great fun in selecting and cropping various pictures to use on my own cards.
For the personal details side I finally decided on including my name, phone number, email, website and twitter address. Most of the people that I will ever hand them out to will be online and if they ever need my postal address they can easily request it. Twitter name was an interesting one for me to include as I’ve only been using the service for a few months but has already become a keystone in my communications so it was a must to include.
The cards arrived this morning and I’m completely delighted with them. The card quality and print clarity is incredible and I’m really glad that I went with them. They’re already causing a stir to everyone that sees them and lots of people on twitter are already asking to see pictures, and no I haven’t been paid to write this post- just one happy customer.
I was up at Ballyhome residential centre this weekend with the guys I went to South Africa with and we went for a stroll around Portstewart to clear our heads. It was bitterly cold but the sun was shinning and we got some cracker views around the cliff path looking onto the rocks below. Truly beautiful:
Looking back that fourteen year old doesn’t seem like me, so much has changed in my life and I find it hard to believe that the decision I took eleven years ago- to stay with a youth club, could have played such a major role in forming who I am today.
The leaders in Gateway became role models and mentors to me, encouraging me to try the unknown and to be just a little more daring than I naturally would have been. By doing this they increased my confidence and knowledge more than I will ever know.
My experience at Gateway has opened up many doors for me. Every job interview I have ever taken part in has raised my time at the club, always in a positive sense.
I was able to complete a youth work qualification that allows me to run any youth club in Northern Ireland (OCN lv2 & 3 in Youth Work and Programme Development) and while completing the course became involved in a project that saw me spend three weeks in Johannesburg learning how South African youth leaders work with young people. While there I also ended up on a local radio station talking about youth work and various aspects of Northern Ireland. It was a surreal experience to be talking about our small country to goodness knows how many people at the other end of a radio.
More recently I ended up on the BBC Community Bus website talking about my experiences within Gateway and how it has changed my life, prompting me to write this very post. It’s incredible how one thing can lead to another.
I wonder what opportunities this year will bring?
In November 1997 a shy fourteen year old girl noticed a poster in the corridor of her school advertising volunteer vacancies at a youth club for children with special needs. She was curious about the idea has she had never done anything like that before and with a friend agreed to go to a talk about the club. The day of the talk dawned bright and clear however the girl was too ill to go to school that day and missed the talk entirely. Fortunately her friend had gone and liked the idea of the club so they agreed to visit. The fates conspired on that day as well and the club was closed for Halloween. Not to give up though they agreed to try again the following week.
The next Saturday got off to a better start as the club was in full session when they arrived. They were introduced to the Leader in Charge of the day, Joe Burns, and were given a guided tour of the club. It all seemed like great fun with a social area, art and craft room, pool tables and a sports hall but slightly overwhelming as well as there was a lot of people in the club but everyone seemed really friendly. It was also the first time that anyone had shortened her name, she’d never been called Jackie before and it rang strangely in her ears.
Over the following weeks they settled into the club routine and began enjoying themselves, helping out in the art room but still keeping to themselves. After about a month or so, the girl’s friend decided that Gateway wasn’t for her and decided to leave. The girl found it strange that all of the members continued to ask after her friend even a couple of weeks after she had left, as she hadn’t thought that they had made much of an impact, they had mainly kept to themselves. The girl was in two minds- to stay and try and help out even though she knew no one there, or to leave as well. It seemed a decision was looming…
After a couple of days mulling it over the decision to stay seemed like the right one to make. It seemed daft to leave just because her friend had and being on her own was forcing her to make friends with the other leaders and the members. As time went on her confidence grew and she knew that she had made the right decision to stay.
The years at the club started to pass and the girl, who was nearly always called Jackie now thanks to Gateway/school cross links, developed as a stronger person. She went on first aid courses, volunteer training weekends and spoke about the club almost everywhere she went. Her experience even helped her gain her first part time job as she was able to talk about her time with the club.
Many things changed in Jackie’s life: her education continued to expand as she studied her gcses, a-levels then graduated from university, her part time jobs changed from Eason to Tesco, but Gateway remained a steady constant in her life. Sure leaders and members came and went but it became an escape from the rest of life. To think that all those years ago she was going to leave. Think what she would have missed out on.
