The spotting brain?
Now to many, the above is an oxymoron a bit like military intelligence. If you don’t understand the finer points of what it is they do, you’ll never understand the people. The same train of thought can be applied to just about any hobby like watching Cricket, Golf, Darts, Football, Bird Watching and the list goes on. Plane spotters watch planes, recording some statistics against the unique identity of an aircraft.
A master log is just made to be moved into some part of the digital realm, the questions bouncing around in all the spotting brains is what way of doing it is best and where to keep it. And here is where it all gets pretty messy, ask five spotters the same question about their master log – you’ll almost certainly get five distinct answers.
Your requirements.
We have already looked at requirements, you are the person looking to move to a digital master log. You are the person who best knows the requirement, you are the person who has to spend the time using the application or web site. And you are the person who has to live with the decision and pay for it all.
Your requirements are what you consider essential, these will determine your choice of offline or online. Whether it is a custom application costing £50 or £100 for a years worth of updates, or a home built spread sheet using Excel where it costs £20 for the rest of your life and you provide the data.
You will decide based on the research that you do, the choice will be based on what you learn. But there will be people that you know from your local spotting group, they are a valuable source of knowledge – is the vendor responsive, do they fix things promptly, are there regular updates and these are just a few of the questions to be asking.
If you get to the stage of considering a couple of vendors and or web sites, join the forums and ask questions in the forums. Ask people about their experience overall, the more information that you have the better the choice you will make.
Change for change sake.
Don’t be tempted to change just for the sake of change, or if the benefit from changing is just marginal. The benefit from a change should be significant, do not assume that just changing will fix something that is not broken.
My data is everything.
Not a statement to be made lightly, if you have a large quantity of data managed on a web site that yoi don’t have full access to. Or in a commercial application, where it is dificult to extract – effectively someone else controls the data. If you are happy with a Word document and it covers your need, way to go – I’d say you’ve won a watch. So if you see a way of maging everything in a PDF, Text File or even an Excel spread sheet – then go for it!
Next Post
In the next post, I will look at some of the decisions that I made when I was creating my master log. How, some thirty years ago I actually want kind of minimalist in my view of a master log. Then made changes abit at a time, allowing the system to evolve to where it is now.