My Generation : the Zimmers

*fabulous*

phew

the Thaab was leaking water - not onto the ground, but into the engine. Mark the Car shook his head this morning, and muttered about "head gaskets".

it turns out to be a broken pipe, which is fixed, and he's sealed the tyre with the slow puncture too. Forty quid well spent, I think.

an opportunity beckons

like idiots, perlmonger and I a) got involved in the Parish Plan committee, and b) offered to do the data analysis. "How hard could it be?" we asked ourselves ... it's just some mySQL and some web forms.

we took it over to the Clerk to the Parish Council a few weeks ago, to show her how it worked, and she got in someone from Community Action to sit in (they fund Parish Plans in the County Formerly Known As Avon). They were both hugely impressed with it, and said that there was almost certainly a potentially very big market for it.

so we bought a domain and stuck some text on it, and ParishplanSurveys.co.uk was born.

we're very slowly developing the software - here in Long Ashton, there are 1600 surveys with 110 questions each, plus the Young People's one, so data entry will take a while, and we haven't done anything about analysing it yet.

but now we must - we have been invited by Community Action to demonstrate it to a group of ten Parish Councils, all of whom are fretting about how to deal with their data. And this is on 24th May [scream].

there are 10,000 parish councils in England and Wales. And these surveys typically get done every five years. If we could get just 10% of that market, I'd be very happy indeed.

[returns to coding]