Blogmeet – the summing-up

Yes, it was fun – Meg turned up, and that dirty little stop-away Stuart didn’t. We’ll get him one day, I’m sure…

Photos will be up later – some were _very_ shonky, so may not see the light of day. Fab cafe ran out of Budvar – focking disgraceful. *Grin* Le knacker du Chris was an early theme for conversation, followed by (in no certain order) films with too many endings (mentioning no names); whether Princess Bride is a good film, or “just shit”(©Topper); hobbit porn; tattoos; body mods in general; whether some people should even be allowed out of the house; whether the same people look in the mirror before going out, and think “Fuck, yeah, I look hot tonight!“; whether striped tops are a priviledge or a right , and a whole range of other disparaging comments and subjects. It was fun.

When’s the next one?

Quiet

There’s not much been happening today. The entire working day has been filled with skirmishes and running battles between PHP, CSS, and SQL. Overall, a lot of progress has been made, but each section has been a struggle with something new, or not working, or not doing the job properly, or some combination of those.

Luckily the evening is looking like it should be good – the first Manchester Blogmeet of ’04 is happening tonight, and I’ll be there. So will (in no particular order) Lori, Jane and Adrian. Unfortunately, Chris is (ahem) out of action, and Sarah’s broke, so neither of them are likely to be arriving. New guests are welcome – and Meg Intergalactic is looking to be one of them. Possibly Stuart too – he’s been invited, but remains quiet so far. It should be a good night…

Larceny

On a different tack, I’m fascinated by the story of the secretary who allegedly embezzled £4million from her employer, Goldman Sachs. The money was transferred from the personal accounts of three bankers with Goldman Sachs – and they didn’t even notice, until she’d been caught. I know the saying about having “more money than sense”, but this really takes the piss. One transfer – the largest – was for £2.25million. How the hell do you not notice an amount like that?

She was being paid £42,000 – so how come no-one noticed that she was buying a £650,000 house in Cyprus, or that she owned a powerboat, and spent £300,000 on Cartier jewellery? Another utterly bizarre story, ably showing how the other half lives.

Apathy

Yes, I’m slow on the uptake with this one – it really hadn’t entered my consciousness ’til yesterday, and then it fell right back out again. So, what I’m wondering is who actually gives a flying donkey-dollop whether John Leslie and his partner were involved in group sex? I certainly don’t – so long as all the people were consenting partners, then it’s about as newsworthy as someone taking a shit.

I see even less point in sacking his partner from her ad hoc TV presenting slot. Does the fact that she gets involved in this kind of thing affect her reporting ability? Or her objectivity? No. (Well, unless she’s feigning shock at orgies in Little Britain Middle England or something) So – and I’m really intrigued by this – who cares?

Priorities

The BBC today has a story about the Russian army salvaging barrels of beer from a frozen river. The truck carrying the barrels had come off the road and toppled into the River Irtysh near Omsk – the driver managed to escape, but the truck sank.

In all it took six divers, ten men with electric saws – and a tank. They managed to get the beer kegs, and then the rope snapped, so the truck sank back again.

Now that’s what I call priorities. *Grin*

Litrucy

via Gert, the BBC’s site has a story about pupils having difficulty with spelling – which includes a small test. (And yes, I did get eight out of eight, but that’s beside the point.) Personally, I find that it’s an incredibly sad state of affairs when 60% of the sample tested couldn’t spell “effortless” or “knowledge” correctly. It’s sad – but it’s not a surprise.

At school, my year were the first to take the GCSE. In primary school, we had a more “traditional” education, with weekly spelling tests, and numeracy/maths tests. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn the times tables by rote, and as a result I still have to work it out rather than instantly knowing. But when it came to English, and literacy, the theory was that if it wasn’t correct, it wasn’t acceptable.

Since then, the education system has headed for a more relaxed route, where “it doesn’t matter how it’s spelled/presented, it’s the way the thoughts are formed that counts” – and results like those in the BBC story are finally revealing the flaw in that. Unless we wish to end up with a two-tier system, the literati and the illiterati, then there seems to be a need for the education system to change the philosophy of the last decade or so, and return to an emphasis on literacy. To my mind, it’s an essential – I’ve no desire to see a society where it’s frowned upon to be literate, nor one where everything becomes pictographic in order for those who can’t read/write to still be able to operate machinery etc.

In many ways, I feel that computers haven’t helped with regard to literacy. MS Windows uses pictograms as a reference point, rather than words. Spellcheckers mean that people don’t need to spell correctly – instead they can just press F7 and voila, everything’s done. (Of course, it’s still occasionally fun to play “fowl up the spellchequer”, because they’re still unable to cope with context – but you’ve got to be literate to understand that particular amusement) So why bother learning to spell, when machines can correct it all anyway?

I was lucky – both my parents are intensely literate, and in fact I was reading way before school age. They instilled in me a love of both words and literature, and an understanding that being literate was a good thing, that it would enable me to express all of my ideas, as well as allowing more (metaphorical) doors to be open than would be available if I couldn’t spell/punctuate/write. Maybe that makes them elitists, or intelligentsia, but I don’t honestly care – they opened those metaphorical doors, and it’s been up to me whether they have stayed open or not. But not one opportunity has ever been closed to me by way of a lack of literacy.

All of d4d™, no matter how vile and vituperative it may be, is at least literate. The ideas come through although some, as over the weekend, may end up being more visual than literal now. Would the same be true in ten/fifteen years’ time, if I were just now coming to the end of the basic educational period?

Caffeine

Amazingly, the reduction in caffeine intake is still working pretty well. I’ve said before that caffeine is really the only remaining addiction or habit in my life, so it’s good to see that cutting it down is working out for now. I’ve even managed to avoid most of the vile headaches that normally are part of the reduction process. So all things considered, it’s pretty optimistic. The other part of it is to be drinking more water – and that’s going OK too.

The weekend meant I didn’t drink as much water as I perhaps should have done, but still, I’m trying to keep the intake up on what it was. But today I’m back at work with a 2l bottle of water, so even if I manage 5 days out of 7, I’ll be happy with that. Now I just need to get myself motivated for going to the gym more again…