An extract from an email I’ve just received:
“As we are trying to have a carbon free Christmas this year…”
So, no Coal as a gift this year ?
Bah. Humbug.
Monthly Archives: November 2008
vanilla flapjack
It’s cold, raining and windy, so time for high fat, high sugar food. Based on this recipe, but with some slight changes:
75g Butter 60g Demerera sugar 10ml Vanilla essence 15ml Golden syrup 60g Porridge oats 120g Jumbo oats
Mix everything except the oats together in a pan, and warm until the butter has melted. Stir in the oats until everything is nicely coated and then pat down into a greased baking tin. For a crunchy flapjack cook for 22-25 minutes at 180°C, and for a softer more chewy finish put the tin in at 170°C for 18 minutes.
Mark out into portions (if desired !) whilst warm and leave in the tin until almost cold.
pitching in: apple retail store field trips
This is slightly out of character for me but I think there’s an obvious point being missed here:
Apple Retail Store Field Trip: http://speirs.org/2008/11/01/apple-retail-store-field-trip/
Whilst at first glance this does make it seem as though “Media Awareness” should now become a pre-school activity, take a step back and ask what passes for ICT in the majority of UK primary schools right now. I freely admit that without children of my own in such a situation I might not know, but unsurprisingly it’s pretty much a Microsoft shop – there are some glimmers of hope (some variants of free software have finally been approved for ‘purchase’) but basically you will be taught the MS way of working.
That’s fine, as a start. What is less nice is the drone-like creation of Word and Excel monkeys – nice skills to have, but not one that I feel is the right approach for generic education in Computing. Keep that as an option in “Business Skills” or something similar – what I want is for my children to be exposed to as much generic Computing as practical, so I naturally oppose any monoculture. A mix of Windows, Mac OS and Linux would be great (although I’d prefer BSD, but that’s my own personal problem…) simply to show that there is more than one way of doing things.
So the crux of the matter is that I pay (indirectly) for my school to buy Microsoft products, and be taught on MS packages. Apple provide for free (to me) an alternative view of the world that is arguably more exciting for the kids (it’s a trip, afterall) and appears from Fraser’s post to be a well thought out tutorial.
Excellent.
blog upgrade
Crikey. That was a bit of work – moving from WordPress 1.2 with a huge number of hacks into the latest-and-greatest version, but even though it was pretty much working, software from May 2004 (!) was starting to show in terms of flexibility and general slickness.
I’ve added some static pages for things like my reviews and Aperture hacks as they seem to be the most popular content, and I’m slowly going through the old posts to clean up bad quote marks, odd foreign characters and broken image links. Once that’s done I’ll remove this post from the front page and let it age gracefully…
A couple of my more immediate aims are to have the pages cached automatically so load times are greatly improved, automatic machine translation if you have a non-English language set in your browser (please let me know if this is a bad idea and you’d prefer to manually click on the translation flag), and the ability to open things up for guest posters, as a) it’s all the rage from 2006, and b) the number of posts might actually creep up above 1 per month.
Update: Pooh – Translation is bust 
Working on it…
Page 1 of 11
recent comments: