Early Morning Thoughts

Submitted by James Purser on Fri, 30/01/2009 - 21:15

Well I've been up for a little while so I thought that while the kids were occupied I would jot down a few notes.

Firstly, let's tackle politics for a moment (I know, shocked aren't we). Can someone please figure out a way to force the NSW government to go to an election early? There were two running themes this week that really drove home how completely broken the whole situation is.

Firstly, the ongoing inability of hospitals across the state to pay their bills. Looking at it locally, the South Sydney/Illawarra Health Service is in debt for a total of $24 mil, while the Western Area Health Service has reduced their debt to something like $23 million. When doctors and nurses are having to purchase things like bandages from local chemists, something is very wrong.

And while this whole mess is going on, what are our political servants doing? Fiddling while Rome burns. At a time when the state resembles the Titanic after meeting the iceberg, our representatives (the people we put into power) are arguing over who's going to be captain.

Sigh.

On the tech side of things, I've been doing a fair bit with django/python over the last few weeks and I think I'm finally getting to understand the way it all works.

The main project I've been working on has been a hosting managment app that allows for easier creation and managment of CMS such as Drupal or Plone. The idea is to make it easy for the clients to be able to manage the basics of their site without needing to muck into the back end that much. It's getting there, and I should have something ready soon.

Lastly on the business side of things I've made a couple of new years resolutions.

  • Become more organised: I need to get more organised in how I deal with things, so at the moment I'm testing a couple of the Open Source CRM systems. Right now I'm looking at CiviCRM (More community based but can be made to work for small businesses) and vTiger.
  • Not to run away from Marketing: Probably my greatest weakness when it comes to running the business. I need to become more pro-active, however I refuse to synergise my existing synergistic synergies.

So in keeping with the second resolution I present to you dear reader the first in a series of monthly web presentations I will be doing this year:

Local Government and Cost Effective Online Collaboration

"Building and running an Online Collaborative project or Online Consultation need not cost tens of thousands of dollars. In this one hour web presentation I will be going through some of the options available to Councils to reduce the costs while at the same ensuring that there is no sacrifice of features."

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Comments

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 01/02/2009 - 20:55.

Although being employed as a research assistant at a NSW hospital, I found myself trying to implement a financial system as a favour.

To my shock and horror the whole system is simply a "rum trade" of access databases. I was the 3rd person who had inherited this task, and I cut loose after the favour began to turn into a serious liability.

Last year, I shared my experience with a business manager who worked in QLD health and quickly realised that NSW was a sinking ship.