Archive

Hopscotch

Published
by
Jon
on February 27, 2008
in Media
. 3 Comments

Compare and contrast.

The school my daughters go to has a terrible website. Not only does it look bad but also it can only be updated by someone knowledgeable going in to the school during school hours and sitting on a tiny chair to do the typing. This means the content is very stale and thus mostly useless.

So I suggested a site hosted on an external server that could be easily updated by anyone. Great, they said, let’s do it. I did it. The site was running by March 2007. I didn’t want to provide the content so a couple of people involved in the school volunteered to take over the actual running of the thing. I showed them how to use Wordpress and off they went.

Time passed. The summer holidays passed. I contacted them and asked them if there was anything I could do to help. Eventually they showed me what they had done. They had produced quite a big report about the site. It said how often various sections should be updated, who would be responsible, how the navigation could be organised. The site itself was unchanged. In fact, Google analytics told me that nobody has visited it at all for several months. The site is still sitting there, unused. I’ve edited a few things - the term dates are correct now. It only took me five minutes.

Fast forward to nowadays. My dear friends at Stan’s Cafe, a trendy theatre company in Birmingham, had a big meeting last week to talk about their future. One of the things they decided to do was to experiment with some kind of private forum for keeping people in the company informed about upcoming shows and maybe to promote more discussion between members. I offered the director, James, a couple of options: A wiki and a Bulletin Board. He went for the latter, it’s already live, the members are being added today. The meeting took place exactly 7 days ago.

The Stan Talk forum might be a success, it might not. If it’s useful it will thrive, if it isn’t it will wither and die. It doesn’t really matter either way because we didn’t spend too long making it and it didn’t cost much. The school site has already had many more words written about it than it will ever contain. Maybe it will serve a useful purpose one day but it won’t be there to impress the OFSTED inspector who is coming on Thursday.

I’m tempted to conclude that this is the difference between effective organisations and ineffective ones. But I know that the school is very well run, the leadership is excellent and they handle the business of schooling children very well. It’s the accompanying bureaucracy that cripples their ability to move quickly and act decisively.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, apart from watch out if you ever get asked to work with a Local Education Authority. Make sure you don’t rely on them to make any decisions and don’t allow them to have any role that could impede your progress because it they can, they will.

Bye Facebook

Published
by
Jon
on February 12, 2008
in Media
. 3 Comments

facebook drainI was spending too much time on Facebook and I was starting to worry about just what sort of place it really is. So I deleted everything and deactivated my account.

You may not know this, but you can’t really delete a Facebook account. It always remains available to be re-activated so that you can return when the cold turkey gets too hard to bear. There is a way of making the account un-useable though. You just have to add the contact email address of your account to someone else’s account. Because the Facebook computers won’t let the same address appear in two accounts your deactivated account will completely lose its email address and thus become impossible to reactivate.

Now all I’ve got to do is find someone who will add my email address to their account temporarily, and I’ll be gone forever. (Having said that, I have just opened up a new Flickr account…)

Cilice

Published
by
Jon
on January 21, 2008
in Religion
. 1 Comment

Nun CiliceOK, now I’m worried. We were talking about cilices last night at work. According to www.cilice.co.uk, motto How Luminous is Darkness, a cilice is a spiked metal belt or chain worn strapped tight around the upper thigh. It hardly needs saying that this is a Catholic thing, in particular they are worn by members of Opus Dei. The idea is, I think, that the discomfort caused is a penance for your sinfulness. The thing that’s worrying me, though, is that I find the idea of a woman wearing one so very intriguing! The concept of someone thinking she’s so sinful that she needs to atone for it by wearing a spiky metal garter-belt, it’s so weird, so revealing. That was what I always used to find so attractive about Catholic girls; they knew so much about sin it was always at the front of their minds. And let’s face it, the upper-thigh, strapped tightly, contrasting with the delicate metal-work wrought by Italian nuns, it’s a compelling image. Mama Mia, Agent Provocateur should be selling them!

Aus Liebe zum Automobil

Published
by
Jon
on January 10, 2008
in Politics
. 1 Comment

Hindu SwastikaRatan Tata, the head of Tata Motors who today launched the world’s cheapest car, is obviously quite a fan of the German motor industry: He described the new Tata Nano as a people’s car, an obvious reference to the Volkswagen, the car costs 100,000 rupees, similar to Hitler’s target for the VW which was 1000 Reich Marks, and the Tata site talks about the company’s blitzkrieg of new products at the New Delhi Auto Show. Still, they played a predictable Strauss track at the launch rather than Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries so maybe there’s nothing to worry about.

Check it again

Published
by
Jon
on January 6, 2008
in Bikes
. 1 Comment

Broken cableI was just looking my bike over before going to bed in anticipation of tomorrow’s ride in to work. I gave the brakes a squeeze and the back ones felt a bit weird. Gave them another one and snick the cable snapped, just like that. So now I’ll have to go on the train, with the suits and squares. Still, at least I’m not DEAD!

More Showbiz News

Published
by
Jon
on January 4, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

Craig and MarkCraig Stephens look-alike Mark Speight, presenter of kids art show sMarT, has been arrested and released on bail after his girlfriend was found dead in the bath of their North London home. Mark had just finished a successful run in Cinderella at the Watersmeet in Rickmansworth, he was playing Buttons. He has been developing a new character for the next series of SmaRT. 

We’ve made it more of an entertainment show. It’s a bit more upbeat and I dress up and play a loud brashy northern woman, who’s a bit like Les Dawson in drag. I’m thinking I might go for the dame next year. I’m very comfortable in that role.   

I don’t know why I’m writing about this really. It’s sad. She was an out-of-work actress, he’d just finished doing panto, on the way back to his TV show. I feel really sorry for him, for both of them.

What was that?

Published
by
Jon
on December 2, 2007
in Politics
. 4 Comments

Have a listen to this puzzling clip of Nelson Mandela that I heard on the World Service last night.

He says: Together we have the power to change the course of destiny. Big ambitious blondes are needed to deal with the pandemic. But what truly matters are the Small Eggs of Kindness and caring that come from a place of real love and commercial.I’m all for big ambitious blondes, we could all use their help, but what are the Small Eggs of Kindness? Kinder eggs? They do come from the place of real love, Italy, and the brand is owned by Ferrero, undoubtedly a commercially successful company. The ‘rainbow’ mix of dark and white chocolate that the eggs are made from is a lovely metaphor for today’s South Africa and maybe what Nelson means is that the answer to the problems caused by the HIV pandemic in Africa may already be inside the ‘egg’, if we can just figure out how to put it together properly.By the way, did you know that Kinder Eggs are illegal in the USA? Yeah, they are, really.

Playmobil meta

Published
by
Jon
on November 23, 2007
in Shopping
. 1 Comment

Meta CastleIf you have children under ten then you’ve probably got some Playmobil in your house. It was my very favourite range of toys for a long time so I’m pretty used to their weird German ideas. This one really takes the biscuit though. One of the most extravagant items they sell is the Fairy Tale Palace. It costs about eighty pounds and it’s enormous; three stories high with loads of columns and staircases, chandeliers, mirrors and rose-tinted windows. Now they’ve made a toy toy castle so that the little Playmobil children who live in the castle can play with a model of their own castle, complete with tiny figures of themselves. You can see where this is going can’t you? I’ll stop now before we all disappear.

Saudi Arabia

Published
by
Jon
on November 16, 2007
in Politics and Religion
. 1 Comment

According to the official Saudi Arabia information site:

To understand the history of the Kingdom and its political, economic and social development, it is necessary to realize that Islam, which permeates every aspect of a Muslim’s life, also permeates every aspect of the Saudi Arabian state.

and according to a story on the BBC News site today

An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.

If I were a Muslim I would consider Saudi Arabia a very poor advertisement for my religion. Have a look at the official information site and click on the section entitled Saudi Art and Culture. It contains a poetry section containing two short poems, and a discussion of the Arabic language which is put to shame by the entry on the same subject in Wikipedia. Saudi screen grabThe site also carries advertising; when I visited it had this advert inviting people to Meet Sexy Arab Girls at the top of the page. So, savage, uncultured and hideously hypocritical then. Nice.

Stupid Sweets

Published
by
Jon
on November 3, 2007
in Shopping
. 1 Comment

Child CatcherMasterfoods, who produce many of the shite sweets that make so many people in this country unhealthy, have started using animal rennet in their waxy, flavourless chocolate. I am mostly pleased about this because now I won’t have to even discuss the possibility of my daughters buying or eating this crap; there’s no way they will want anything to do with something that is extracted from the tummies of dead baby cows. The fact that the chocolate in Mars Bars, Twix, Maltesers and Milky Way was already offensive because it is made from cocoa that is the product of a ruthlessly exploitative and unethical trade that causes suffering and deprivation for many children in Africa obviously wasn’t enough for these scumbags. I suppose once evil becomes your main interest in life you just have to keep trying to push the envelope.