boblog

end

Phew, finally reached the end of term.
It was quite an emotional day, partly because of the recent exhausting work-frenzy, partly because the class are moving on (although at this end of the year they tend to get quite crotchety and I'm usually relieved to be rid of them) but mostly because [drum roll]... I sold the Mini.

Heather's reaction: Oh your baby!
Colleague's reaction: Oh your baby!

We don't really need two cars. These past few months have proved that I can walk to work (when I wear the right shoes and get out of bed in time), the clutch has been a bit dodgy for a while and the exhaust had started to rattle and the runflats were getting a bit close to needing replacing. Then there's the price of insurance, MOT, road tax - and, of course, petrol these days; when I went to Brighton in May it was cheaper for me to get the train than drive, even excluding parking.

But I loved that car, cherished it. It was only a car, I know, but it was my first from new and I looked after it.

Some consolation; the guy who bought it got it for his girlfriend as a surprise, so it might have another proud and careful lady owner. And I still get to drive Husband's newer, flashier Mini.

Regardless, I was very sad to see it go.
Husband was good at trying to cheer me up afterwards, steering the conversation away from cars and on to my day and the lovely cards and thoughtful gifts from the kids. My favourite was a lovely butterfly bush with clever home-made butterflies. I'll post a pic tomorrow.

lark

On the downward slide to the end of term now, I actually find myself with time to spare. Imagine that!
In fact, I had an entirely work-free weekend - the first one in over a month.

Went to Husband's aunt's 80th birthday party, which was quite pleasant - sitting outside in the sunshine with drink, good food and good company. His aunt is doing well for 80 and, to my eye, seems pretty much unchanged over the nigh-on 15 years I've known her.
There's something about reaching a certain age and telling people exactly what you think but in the nicest terms. Is it something you grow into with age? She told me I look better and better each time she sees me because, 'like me, you were too thin when you got married', then she walked off.
I took what was essentially, 'you've put on a bit of weight' as a compliment.

Spent most of yesterday evening (after a nap) and this evening reading a book. Don't faint; it was, of course, a book from which a recent television period drama had been concocted (I'm a lazy reader - can't get into books without an element of knowing what happens in the end and if the effort of reading will have been worthwhile). The TV series of Lark Rise to Candleford, which I had praised up above Cranford, it seems has been equally hugely embellished and elaborated to the point where it bears only a slight resemblance to the original story. Flora Thompson must be turning in her grave. Still, as a book it was much more interesting than Cranford, but just as devoid of 'story'.

4th

England and America used to be together, but they had a big war - and today is the day they remember their first day without England.

L, child in my class who has a parent from the USA, explaining what the 4th of July is all about.
S-weet.

is it a jay?

So, my Green Balloon Club obsession is worsening after spending all day listening to 'All Earth's Creatures' whilst report-writing - and I've taken to scouring Google for more information.
Haven't managed to uncover anything about any of the other kids, but it turns out that Jay (Jake Pratt) was on Britain's Got Talent last year:

A Yorkshireman too. I like him even more now. Surprised I couldn't tell from the accent - must be losing my touch.

green

Huge, massive apologies if you've e-mailed me in the last month or so and haven't had a reply - I've been either asleep or working. Seriously. It's become so bad it's affecting my health; I had another panic attack and I've started getting the same kind of stress-related numb patches on my head that Husband did after his eye problems began. The panic attack wasn't as bad as last time, perhaps because I knew I wasn't dying of a heart attack this time, so 'rode out the storm' in bed with bad work-related dreams.

However, having said that I've done nothing but work and sleep, I'm about to write a blog post about how much television I've watched lately due to the amazingly wonderful BBC iPlayer. Must've watched these shows when I was eating or something ;-)

The BBC iPlayer has introduced me to lots of programmes I'd never normally watch. I'm currently enjoying Summer Heights High, which fascinates more than it amuses (the three main characters are played by the same person).

Anyhow, I can't remember how come I ended up watching 'Easy Peasy Eco Beebies' a couple of weeks ago, but it was essentially a trailer for CBeebies latest environment/eco programme, 'The Green Balloon Club'.

The first proper episode (only available for a few more hours on the iPlayer) was last Friday and I was automatically hooked. In fact, I spent the whole week (panic attack aside) in eager anticipation of yesterday's episode and have heartily recommended it to my class.

It's presented by 'Sky' (Debbie Korley) from her green hot-air balloon, with her small gang of kids.
The children are particularly interesting; a range of ages (I'm guessing they range between five and ten years - but I'm useless at gauging TV kids' ages), skin colours and accents (well, there are some northerners in it at any rate). My favourite is Jay (Jake Pratt), the bird expert. He's got a certain sparkle about him - and he seems to get the most lines too. Then there's Cat, the animal expert (Thai Murray-Edwards) with her dog, Skipper; Ant (Adam Wells)  - the insect/creepy-crawly expert and Lilly-Rose (Isabella Blake-Thomas) the youngest of the bunch, she's into flowers and plants.

There are a few regular sections; a musical moment (wildlife footage set to music - last week: The Carnival of the Animals, this week: Louis Armstrong's Wonderful World); a 'user submitted' segment (last week: a boy who films the wildlife in his huge garden on his own video camera, this week: sisters with nocturnal hedgehog visitors); spot of the week (something for the viewer to look out for in their own environment); a 'finding out' segment voiced-over by one of the children (best one so far: Jay's 'Is it a jay? No!') and the obligatory encouragement to visit the website (you'll need to have watched this week's show to know the 'password' - or... you could just guess), but Sky tempered this with a warning not to spend too long online because one of the aims of The Green Balloon Club is to get the viewer to spend more time outdoors.

Each show ends with a song. Now I'm not one for songs on TV shows, but The Green Balloon Club songs are upbeat and unbelievably catchy; the theme tune (bar the lyric, 'when we fly we're higher than the moon' which I hate for being factually incorrect), Let's Go Play Outside and All Earth's Creatures. Not quite sure why they sing some of it in American accents - and the pitch-shifting is rather obvious in places, but I suppose it's quite hard to find children who can act, present to camera, dance and sing.

My only reservation is that, so far, it's been rather middle-class. Will this alienate the audience that could potentially benefit the most from viewing; the average working class inner-city or suburban dweller?

Still, it's on every Friday for the next twelve months - it'll be interesting to see how it develops.

ff3

So, after encouraging everyone to download Firefox 3, I've got it - and am not impressed with it.

Yes, it's quicker, but I am a creature of habit and easily get annoyed at any change to my usual browsing routines.

There seem to be lots of unnecessary buttons and arrows everywhere. Next to the folders in the bookmarks sidebar (spent about an hour trying to edit userChrome.css to remove those, to no avail), 'recent pages' arrow next to 'back' (isn't that what 'history' is for?) and the 'list all tabs' at end of the tab bar (my eyes tend to perform that function for me).

My so-called compatible add-ons have fcuked with FF3. I love the 'undo closed tabs' button so was glad to see it in the add-on updates when I restarted Firefox this morning. But I don't like the x it automatically adds to the end of my tab bar. Firefox knows I don't want it, I've fiddled with the  about:config settings, so why the hell does 'undo closed tabs' think I need it? The Qute theme has removed my scroll-bar - a must for anyone working with a mac mighty mouse (the scroll button needs frequent cleaning to keep it working properly).
Then the del.icio.us tag extension I loved so much has been changed to completely control the bookmarks sidebar. I don't need or want it to do that. So that add-on lasted about 10 seconds before deletion, I didn't even try to fix it myself. Probably a case of waiting for someone to make a better extension.

These might sound like insignificant changes, but combined with my current high stress levels (new classroom to kit-out and organise, reports to write, assessments to collate and analyse, assessment moderation meeting to prepare for, data to collate for important school management meeting, get to know 30 new children and their parents) I really don't need anything else to add extra stress or annoyance.

I'm sure these are all things that a couple of hours' browsing for tweaks could probably correct, but I haven't got the time or inclination right now. Apologies to anyone who downloaded it on my recommendation who has also been having problems with it (hides from Lynne).

Firefox 3: 2 out of 10.
Lesson learned. Am sticking with FF2 at work.

Oh - and forgot; it was boblog's fifth birthday yesterday.

revolution

I am braving the almighty crap-ness of TypePad to urge you to watch 'A Revolution in Childhood', part of the Child of Our Time series.

This series of CoOT has been the best so far. In fact, I cried almost all the way through the second programme ('Age of Stress') because of the pressures many children feel in their lives, particularly those from school tests at age seven. Then the death of Eve's mother's at the end finished me off.

The third programme, '24 Hours' showed the variation in expectations of children's independence; one child  was dressed by his mother every morning versus the child who washed and dressed herself every morning, then got her own breakfast, which involved microwaving her porridge.

I don't have any kids of my own (my 30 'cherubs' [cough] at work are enough) but I have fairly strong views on parenting from being in almost daily contact with small children. And I'm sure it is much harder than it looks, so I know I'm opening myself up for a fair bit of criticism there.

'A Revolution in Childhood' was a one-off discussion programme with a panel of childhood experts, peppered with relevant CoOt clips. It yelled out to me on so many levels. I agreed with just about all of it - including the part revealing how teachers rarely have quality conversations with their pupils - it's certainly had an immediate effect on the way I speak to my class.

In case you can't watch it on the BBC iPlayer, there are far too many highlights to share (I'd end up quoting the entire programme) but my particular favourite was this statistic from RoSPA;

'"Six times as many children are killed by as a result of television sets and other equipment falling on them in their bedrooms than die as a result of playground accidents."

Get them outside, it's safer.

BBC iPlayer: A Revolution in Childhood - available for the next 3 days.

three

So, Firefox 3 is coming.
Mozilla want us all to download it on the same day to set a world record. The thing is, they don't seem to have decided when that day is going to be yet. If you click on the cute firefox there, you get whisked off to their 'pledge to download' site. You have to give 'em your e-mail address to pledge, but they use it to e-mail you the release date - when they've made their minds up when that's going to be, of course.
As I type, there have been 2,262 pledges in total; 68 from the UK, 96 from the US and, bizarrely, a staggering 462 from Spain.

Anyway, I am assured that Firefox 3 is amazing, fantastic and brilliant with-a-cherry-on-the-top. Husband has been using one of the beta versions and raves about it, particularly the resize-ability of pages and images, its stability (although I can't say I've ever had a problem with Firefox crashing) and is less of a drain on the memory.

In case anyone reading this is still on the prehistoric IE6 or the bloody awful IE7, the arrival of Firefox 3 is the ideal excuse to switch browser. Firefox is the best thing since sliced bread, mostly because you can trick it out with all kinds of themes and extensions / add-ons.

Here's what's on my Firefox:
Qute theme - with small icons.
Adblock Plus - gets rid of annoying adverts.
British English dictionary - automatic spell-check. Excellent!
del.icio.us - 'social bookmarking'; much easier than ikeepbookmarks and hopefully much more reliable.
Research Word - highlight word, right click, search YouTube, Google images, dictionary.com, Wikipedia, IMDb, Amazon, etc.
Undo Closed Tabs button - tabbed browsing is possibly the best browser invention ever; closing a tab accidentally, not so good.
TubeStop - stops the automatic playing of YouTube videos. Now you can open videos in several tabs at once without having to go to each tab to stop them all playing at once.
URL Link - allows navigation to broken or unlinked URLs.
ChromEdit - along with about:config, it lets me tinker under Firefox's bonnet.

But you probably knew all that already.

via A Welsh View

wait

I was going to upload the pictures I took on Thursday evening's walk home, but I've lost the will to blog after wrestling with TypePad's new compose editor. It is monumentally crap.

So the pictures will have to wait until TypePad fix the mess they've made. Which might be some time.

Eurovision

So, Eurovision was last night. Unsurprisingly, we came joint last.

My favourite, Spain, didn't do as well as I'd hoped (still, much better than the UK), perhaps because the performance on the night wasn't as good as it could have been:


The voice at the start of the video is Terry Wogan. He reminds me of my Dad. I think it's the crap jokes.

There was the usual block/political voting, this year ensuring a win for Russia (which is NOT part of Europe as far as I'm concerned), despite the fact that their act was rubbish.

So, Moscow next year then.
Sigh.