Disclosure checks

(and how annoying they are).

I’m going to put in a disclaimer here - I do not for one second think people shouldn’t be checked before going into certain jobs. I just disagree with the way it’s done over here.

As it currently stands you need to apply for a Disclosure check every time you apply for a job or position which may put you in a position of care of a child or vulnerable adult. (I’m almost certain there are other reasons but that’s the main ones). The form isn’t exactly fun, you’ll need to wait about 3 weeks and may have to fork out £20 to pay for it. Once you’ve done it more than one it’s just plain annoying. Even if you have a clean Disclosure for one job you must get another for a different job (regardless of how long is between them). They expect you, however, to inform your employer if you get a conviction.

My collection is only 3 at the moment although some people have around 5 or 6 of these things. Surely it would be much more efficient if you got a global one (applying to all jobs) that you got reissued every few years. If you get a conviction then the court requests the Disclosure and changes it or tears it up (or something). I’ve heard this is something like the practice in other countries so surely we could make it more sensible.

So long summer

Soon I’ll be back in Glasgow (when I might actually have something to write about). To be honest I haven’t really done much this summer at all and when I go back I’ll no doubt listen to hundreds of fabulous stories about countries I couldn’t find on a map. Not really looking forward to all of that nor my belated birthday present that I’ve been promised (actually have no idea what this is).

I have been back “working” for a bit which is nice, makes me wonder again why I don’t mind children. Thankfully the weather has been good so we’ve been able to get them out and about and let the new staff try and remember the very similar sounding names. Meant to rain tomorrow though which I’m not looking forward to.

Puppy is growing happily. Thankfully we’ve been able to get him out on walks this week which is a vast improvement. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the biting under control soon or we’re going to have problems. Thankfully he doesn’t seem to do this on walks, just in the house when we’re trying to entertain him.

I have been doing my First Aid course over the last 3 Sundays (the final one is next week). To be honest the level of knowledge is so basic I don’t think anyone could not pass it. It would make sense to me to train all medical students (and others if the like) in First Aid before 2nd year. We do a (very) quick CPR course but it doesn’t even include something like the recovery position or infant/child resus. Bandaging is completely ignored in 1st year - I doubt very many of us would be able to put an arm in a sling or immobilise a leg.

I decided to go ahead and join St Andrews as a volunteer after this course is complete. Apart from adding another Disclosure to my pile I get to attend events (even something like T in the Park) to provide First Aid as required. This is something that looks good regardless of what speciality I go into (though particularly so if that’s something like anaesthesia or A&E). Plus when (yes, when, no “if”s allowed) I finally qualify they recognise that and don’t require me to go through another course - result! The problem is the certificate is only for 3 years, which will see my to the start of my final year, so I’ll need to do another one then if I stick with them.

That’s a while away though, need to finish this killer of a 2nd year first. Oh the joy.

Design troubles

Web standards are great. Really, they are. You don’t design a paper or magazine with tables so you shouldn’t use them to design a site, should you? This is what an expanding group of people have been saying for a while now, trying to get us to listen. They advocate the use of divs and CSS to make websites which in theory sounds great - tables take up a lot of space in the markup compared to a simple div.

Practically this isn’t quite so simple. One great example is a site with a column or two. Ideally they should be equal height and have different backgrounds. This is simple enough via tables as the row will expand to fit the largest cell and the background can be changed in no time. The problem with DIVs however is that they will only be as high as needed to fit their content. Thankfully a few clever people have come up with certain ways to almost fix it - a smart border/margin hack and “Faux columns”. The latter only works well on a fixed width which I can’t really live with (especially if I’m on 1280×800 and I need to accommodate for people on 800×600).

The former does work quite well and I’ve decided to go with it for now. I have to sacrifice a fair bit though (I can’t have borders for example) and it doesn’t look as well as it could’ve done on tables. The main point then is whether I should be giving up on artistic aspects to reduce page size and conform to standards or go back to “the bad old ways” as it is often quoted.

The future is bright though with CSS level 3 including multi-column support. Sadly, this has been in development since 1998 and doesn’t look like it’s going to be out for a while. After that we’ll need another decade or so before we can safely use it without worrying about browser incompatibilities.

Sigh.