yes, it’s Official Tuesday October The 17th Day and the National Trust is encouraging people to record a diary of their day on a website to be stored by the British Library to enable future generations to look back and see what normal day-to-day life was like at the beginning of the 21st century. It’s not meant to be particularly exciting: it’s just meant to be an accurate reflection of your life on that day (unless of course you live a really exciting life). Basically, you’ve got until the end of the month to log onto the history matters website, and record a diary what you did on Tuesday October 17th 2006, anywhere between 100 and 650 words long, and encourage other people to do the same. So off you go and record your own then. I’m also sticking mine here (650 words bang on) in case anyone’s interested…

My Diary Entry For Tuesday 17th October 2006

Okay, here goes. I’m got up, had a shower, my wife and I got our two children ready and we took them to nursery and we went off to work. We both work for a Local Authority as IT developers, which means various different things — we’re belong to a team of about twenty people who fix problems people are having with their databases, write new database systems, write web applications, and project manage the integration of new systems into our own. That sort of thing. Anyway, one thing that made this day slightly different to usual was that I noticed this British Blog Day thing, which as a regular blogger anyway I thought I should take part in. (If you’re interested, my site used to be on http://www.thepickards.co.uk). Maybe it still is.

Having been out consuming several pints of Marston’s Pedigree bitter last night (are you still allowed to drink beer, there in the future?) I decided to start this morning at work with a bacon sandwich. Yes, yes, high fat and cholesterol and all that, but I was hungry, okay? And a cup of coffee as well. And then on to my day at work, which was a particularly quiet day — some days I barely have time to stop and think, but other days I end up reading about the latest technological developments on the internet, usually while I’m waiting for people to get back to me on what they want me to do next. In this case, there are three major projects I’m working on, each of which currently require input from someone else before I can progress.

I’ve more or less written a system to allow residents of my employer’s Local Authority area to be able to search for Births, Deaths and Marriages records online (this will presumably also include Civil Partnerships at a later date) but I’m now waiting for the data to be transcribed to load into the database and go live with the system. I’m about to start development of an intranet system so First Aiders can record instances of first aid given, with the data appropriately secured against unauthorised access. The other thing which is pretty much complete is our intranet telephone book and search facility, which I again wrote, although the system administrators want to discuss allowing users to have more control of making changes to their own data, so that might require additional development work.

Beyond that, I’m looking up on the internet trying to find out about the release dates for Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0 so that I can download them and check that my websites etc all still render correctly and are accessible to users of these browsers. But on the whole, one work day is pretty much like any other: get up, get ready, take the car to nursery to drop the kids off; myself and my wife go to work; finish work; pick the kids up; go home and have tea; play with the kids for a short while; bath them and put them to bed; carry out any housework that needs doing then collapse in bed/in front of the telly as appropriate. I bet you’ve got some sort of telly implant or at least some sort of holographic telly by now, haven’t you? Bah!

And that’s about it, really, other than the fact that if I’ve still got the energy to do anything, I may either decide to post something on my blog either about what I’ve been doing, something about web accessibility (a personal interest), or something that’s caught my attention in the news recently. Or I might play games on the computer. And then I’ll go up to bed, stick a comedy DVD on (with the TV set to turn off automatically after a while) and fall asleep next to my wife. I’d guess that’s pretty much the usual, really.