No child left behind ?

Life is not fair but in this bbc article (china cannot read this)

We are having a meeting with Michael’s teacher to discuss his progress and what we can do about his unusual behaviour. Michael displays characteristics of high functioning autism .. Annabel is a pretty, intelligent 11-year-old, but her performance in school is very poor and she has no friends. Her mother is an alcoholic and I suspect she has been sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends. … Matthew is a new boy at the school and crying uncontrollably outside the principal’s office. He was recently removed from his home and placed with a foster family. This is his second new home in three months and things are already off to a bad start.

… At age six, Bradley was verbally and physically aggressive with staff if they asked him to capitalise the first letter of a sentence. This is to discuss Edward, who meets criteria as emotionally impaired (EI) and who is also well above average in all academic areas without special education support. Everyone agrees he is very odd, and occasionally disruptive, but the medical community cannot agree on a diagnosis, and his parents cannot agree on methods to raise their son. Edward’s teachers are frustrated and want him placed in an EI classroom. I do not agree and decide to advocate for Edward. Although an EI placement will result in immediate relief for the teacher and his parents it might also result in academic underachievement for this bright boy.

School fails many. The Robots always pass. Does schooling have to do this to children ? I cannot handle this – thus ‘you are a dumb’

Teachers need to come from a new school of thought – its not what you can pass, but what you can do.

Catching up

If you have never read this blog before, you will not know that I am partial to some science fiction. Last year about this time I managed to rent Babylon 5 (a homage to Lensman, one of the first sci-fi books) on DVD (which at the time four seasons where available with six disks per season so that was at least 24 disks I rented). It was a blast.

Whenever I miss something I write it down, and when I sign up again for rental period I know what want to rent, and what they should have. I also have no desire to own a large collection of dvd’s, or even Babylon 5 in any format.

The dvd rental company I use are good, you actually feel as if there is a human at the end of the website/email unlike some of these operations. A lot can happen in a year, amazon got into the dvd rental business, and the rental deal i had from them last year is now actually worse as I can only rent a certain number of disks per month which was not an issue last time round.

As the company have (or claim to) the dvd’s I want to see I have no problems signing up with the company again.

Anyhow the first Babylon 5 disk of season 5 (unseen by me) is in the post. The television company did not show it either.

Economics it appears does not always work as the economists say it should.

Selling to China

I had an opportunity to see through the bullshit, and ask a chinese person why they would not buy a technical book from America as it is not available in China – the reason supplied was postage cost

Now this book I have seen and I decided not to purchase it – it looked ok.

China is a big market they keep telling us so anybody trying to ‘sell’ to china – it seems that your going to need a chinese middle ‘man’. Since its a book – that might also mean censorship – notable as Bill Clintons book was airbrushed when published there.

A good book about dealing with the Chinese is a book written by Chis Pattern (who was the last Governor of Hong Kong) called East and West – it was so good that Rupert Murdoch refushed to publish it just in case the chinese took ‘offence’ even in America.

Free trade ?

Blowing up demo software

Got a demo peice of software and I have spent the weekend ‘having fun’

I ‘Brainwiped’ an older pc – it has a hardisk in that an computer engineer (working in microsoft windows XP) pronounced dead, a friend gave it to me after I transfered all of his lost data off that the ‘engineer’ said was gone for good. Two years later I can assure you its performing well depite the abuse i still continue to throw at it.

Saved me having to buy a disk – so that ‘computer engineer’ gets a big thank you from me..

So I’m working through the official course book, things are are going well, and I hit the final couple of pages do the final excercise and bang this course book instructions makes the software go ‘bang’.

Now being that this (not microsoft) software did not tell what changed, its time to get creative. So after an hour of troubleshooting and reinstalling to no success I give up and brainwiped the disk again. The lesson here is that pretty inferfaces are very nice until something goes wrong.

This is not something you can really do at at work, unless you have a testing environment. I need a better book, recommend the software? not until I know what i did so I can make it better.

Tim Henman – Englands only tennis player.

One player is enough, then there is this ‘love’ business in the rules (?a leftover french word). Just image the word ‘love’ in football (soccer for the americans)

commentator: “welcome to the the second half, the score is Love Beckman…..Footballer Wife 1 is coming in. The Secretary is offside, no sorry she having a word with the manager…. No hold on there is some hanky panky with the manager going on etc….”

Going back to Tennis you seem to have to be upper class – thats own a small country estate (a place called Scotland), and most important of all be very pretty – to play tennis in England. So then the prize money for Paris,Wimbeldom,etc would not even pay for the upkeep of the country estate. Tennis is thus a game for stupid people as it does not pay.

And why don’t ugly people play tennis ? – if you have a good memory you might remember there was a bit of fuss made about six months ago about some tennis event where they had models (yes even more pretty people) collecting a ball. Is that dumbing down, or dumbing up?

Being ugly and not upper class I am rather glad that I do not play tennis. Now quite why the Williams sisters (they apparently played in the ‘ghetto’, according to some reports) can do it is beyond English logic.

No UK idcard required for this crook.

Meet the seedy side to to sending Jobs to india.

Please meet Kkaran Bahree in Delhi and that cash he is holding for your financial (bank) profile, he also offered the reporter a monthly supply of your banking information for an extra fee naturally.

Now if the uk identity card is meant to stop 'fraud', then it will not stop this fraud, as this Indian will never be registered. The UK authorities cannot stop him doing it either. if Kkaran Bahree is doing it how many others are?

Say no to uk id cards.

If the UK id card cannot or will not stop fraud, why have it ?
Well done to the Sun!

I did ? really plus other tales

I am now a Level 1 certified chicken sexer so I can now look after your chickens. Offers?

The mains electrics are down There is now a very large hole in the road as well it seems the local electrical distrubution box blew up – the mains did not even trip.

Because of that so I am posting this from a very dodgy internet cafe – that Greek person whom now also does cruise ships,airlines and whatever. Somebody looks like they have been sick on the pc I am using as there is pizza like stuff on the screen, and the keyboard looks like a public health hazzard. hmm Very nice.

Right please have a go at this.

Our records indicate that you have voluntarily given personal information to us

In order to protect that data and your privacy
we have established and abide by data
protection measures that are compliant with all
requirements for "Safe Harbor" designation by
the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Safe Harbor standards meet or exceed all
requirements of the European Union Data
Protection Directive and member country
requirements

I had to give the information or it would not happen.

So how was it ‘voluntary’ ? Thats not the way i see it. I am sure they are honourable but the word voluntary seems to be misplaced here.

The curse of Microsoft

Netsky (a windows virus) has returned. The internal service we use reported and rejected it. – our ‘investment’ in making Billy Gates rich is now very minor. If any of you think that a Microsoft server or client is ‘secure’ get real.

What irks me most is that I need to have a mail scanner on our unix platform. Behold the logic of the windoze botnets, and poor microsoft operating system design which can send pif’s (and other crap) in order to try to infect other windoze pc’s even to unix environment which are ignorant of what it should do with a pif file.

What is trusted computing going to do about this absolutely nothing – trusted computing should have nothing to do with drm, but instead make computers harder to infect rather than give record companies the tools to ‘hack’ windows pc’s without the owners knowing about it. Trusted computing is good for them and the virus hackers, not for the windows users.

A lot of spam comes from these infected windows machines. So we also use quite a few spam blocklists do they cause problems ? absolutely no if you run a decent mail server – you will get no problems – ignore that or use a provider that likes the concept of spammers cash then you will have many problems.

Do we miss much ‘legitimate’ spam ? – well one airline cannot email us – because they cannot do there dns properly – if we can have a proper setup quite why that is beyond them is beyond why logic.

Most of the spam is directed to users that never existed. So no problems here at all by running blocklists.

We also report all spam to spamcop, there are a lot of trojan pc’s out there. If Microsoft is a ‘very safe’ platform you have yet to convince me. So you dont like spam the solution is very simple just get rid of windows.

Another curse is the death of normal non-microsoft software – do any of you use Wordperfect ? We are migrating to openoffice – now who is to blame for the demise of the top word processing software I dont know but the more recent versions of it (produced by Corel) where horrible and buggy – the good news was it meant the office could not be upgraded to windows xp.

Thus the ‘interoperabilty’ works both ways. I really enjoyed telling people that until we migrate to open office xp will not be purchased and thats going to take forever.

I try and not to post corporate junk here but this sums up Microsoft (realplayer) well for us
Enjoy

update: I note that Microsoft have just invented ‘BitTorrent‘. No doubt this new idea from Microsoft will soon be patented, and then will have hundreds of security holes discovered in it. Coming soon I suspect viruses will be transmitted via the microsoft version of bittorrent. I love this type of innovation – blue sky thinking at its best. *

While I am at it – the webserver also gets a fair amount of weather from windows bots trying to infect our unix webserver – its not going to happen but that Microsoft and Virus writers for you.

* this is being scarcastic.

I am going to miss Dr Who.

For the record I am not a long term ‘nutcase’ dr who fan – but it has been fun with Chris Eclestone, and hopefully made some people think with its subtle stories underneath, and more believable prop things.

There was a fair amount of loose ends that really where not cleaned up in the last program – but its been fun.

It is nice to know that televison can still do quality stuff rather than only produce crap soaps about east londoners, which apparently has the largest population of muderers in england on its storyline. So i hope the Dr Who team win some industry gongs.

I will look forward to watching the next series so thats high praise coming from me.

return of the handy

I finally found a cheap handy (mobile phone), its also comes with a sim card with a large telephone company I never used before but have heard of. My existing supplier decided that once I emailed them about a query that they could then spam me. Oh and I’m still waiting for the answer about the question I asked them over two years ago.

When I then emailed to ask them how do I best dispose of the old sim card (the thing that really makes the phone work) suprisingly I got an email back saying

” we are very sorry to hear your leaving us. “

I was not not really expecting a reply to – I left them anyhow.

New phone is a very small phone (I would have prefered a larger handset) but the new handy was actually cheaper than my very old (and I bought second hand as well) handy. No I’m not going to pay to watch film trailers on it either (it is unable to do that). Quite how the hell you would want to websurf on these things beyond any logic I know.

The new phone can also send email – or I really should say the server can send to email systems – so I tried it – boy do i have some harsh spam blocking – the stuff we use rejected my phone email message, I then sent a email to Yahoo it got there just fine please give me a proper keyboard and screen anyday of the week.

Now I might be not worth having as a telephone customer – but if your going sell to people like me ‘service’ then I am sure that Orange (Hutchinson Telecom) will understand that there not going get any further money out of me when they don’t answer my questions. After all it’s there bottom line and not mine.

Speaking of the disposal of my old phone which was very old and intermittant in operation, I found a website that would have paid me the princely sum of £1 (us $ 1.75). for my old handset. I decided before I found the website that i would donate it to a charity for nothing After i paid postage i estimate that I would been in ‘loss’ The charity also had ‘free post’. I hope they can get a better return and put the money to good use.

Then shock horror yesterday: my Dad has just rang and asked me to buy him a mobile phone, and car charger thing – he finally joins the mobile phone revolution.