money 4 nothing

we didn't quite make the 10am showing of nemo at shrewsbury cinema yesterday. it's on next week at the same time so we're going then. we didn't know but the film we saw last week - brother bear - is also showing on saturday morning. the entrance is actually £1 for every person. so that's £15.40 we paid last saturday afternoon. when on saturday morning it would have cost us £4. ah well. lesson learned!

we had a 'lazy day' shopping instead. i really enjoyed it. it was full of those blissful moments. i can't explain that any better[! hehe]

been trying avant - a sort of upgrade to ie. supposed to be faster and standards compliant. i don't like the tabbed browsing implementation, tho' the thing looks nice. i still think firefox is the way to go.

beige tower is still taking up far too much of my time. i'm really enjoying the participation. over 10 days i've made 150 posts! can i keep it up? ... we'll see!

thanks for sharing ... nikki-ann [yeah - wot snow! friday was a wash out even tho' school was on - so many had decided not to turn up!], Nick [i'm saying nothing!] & graeme [that's just a 'proper job' =)]

toys 'r us

we were sent home early from school today! yes, the staff too! i think there must've been some report of heavy showers on the way so as a precaution, the busses were summoned, i think to get home the more isolated students. it's a big organisational exercise and something you couldn't easily split into seperate journeys.

the kids were called to the main hall at 12:05. in the canteen lunch must've been almost ready. i just wonder what could've happenned to all that half cooked food ...

had a fun afternoon with the family anyway. the toy library were holding a small exhibition at the sports centre. they had some amazing stuff you wouldn't even have dreamed of! they had an inflateable play tunnel thing that was about 6 metres square. at each corner was a different feature, like a huge shark, a boat, a sub and an octopus. that's £15 a day to hire. we had great fun trying everything out. heather had forgotten her 'club' card so we'll have to get some stuff later on this week.

thankyou people... graeme, chloe-lynn and nikki-ann [every faculty in the school now has at least 3 computers, that includes 3 each for the sciences. english still have the ones you worked on, plus an imac]

a day in the life ...

i'm about burnt out. having a condition on beige tower [a potential new website host] of community involvement as a condition of membership i've been forum posting for britain. it's just so addictive! trouble is my head and eyes ache from staring too much at the monitor. in the normal course of a day i don't actually stare at a monitor for that long. when i occasionally do i really notice it.

hillariously busy at work the past two days. a pattern is emerging that i start out to do something first thing, then maybe at mid day i really start on it.

today my mission was to install a printer in biology. english sent 2 messages to fix printing on a pc. ok i thought, i can do that on the way ... on the way, reception collared me and asked if i could fix a network connection urgently. the office with a spare cable was locked so i put this off so i could borrow one from english. the pc in english was an easy fix, but then whilst they had me they asked if another, archaic pc, could also be connected to the printer. a mouse ball had gone awol so i decided to hit base and come back.

i called in on the withdrawl room with a new mouse on the way, but found they had had problems with their pc freezing. they'd been told it was the hard drive ... a little investigation revealed that it's matrox[spit] video card had lost it's settings, and crashed the pc at the slightest excuse. a quick fiddle and it was ok again. next door the careers advisor couldn't remember her password,

reception pc connected on the way, i carried on to english and had a fight with win95 and the new printer. win95 won the first round. it was 10 minutes to break [10:45] so i thought i could just squeeze in biology. another quick fix, plus the re-insertion of a few cables and a reboot and the old inkjet was working as well as thier new laser. i was five minutes late for break time supervision of the computer suite, but it was covered by a teacher too. so no harm done.

... and so it went on ...

sorry - i know this is a long post - but i gotta tell ya ... the boss today saw an article that said if you have 200 pc's [which we do], and turned tham all off every night, you'd save £12,000.00 per year! he suggested employing a subordinate to myself to do it for a bit less than that, as it'd save the school money! he's great boss isn't he!!!

thankyou people... Nick [growing pain :-)] & nikki-ann.

U

try your site through this. it's a modern translation service... hehe.

had a nice weekend. quite 'chilled' for us. went to the cinema today to see brother bear. nice film but 2d is dead. i was shocked to hear disney say so but now i believe it. it was a nice movie anyway, but one where you couldn't help worrying that it wasn't really interesting to the kids. it was an older kids film.

i'm sure kids aren't fooled by that stuff about films satisfying two audiences ... adult and children. toy story, monsters inc. etc. are kids films that appeal to adults 'coz of the great graphics and the technology behind them. the story, humour etc are pure 100% childhood. [maybe that translates across ages?]. ant's for example i think was really an adult film.

nemo is on next saturday morning for a pound per child - adults go free - woohoo! can't wait. ben and i saw it once. i thought he was a bit young but he's always going on about it since. bit of a difference to the price we paid at 11:30 this morning: £5.70 for heather and i and £4.00 for ben. em was free.

kind bouncy people... graeme [ben says "thankoo"]; Nick [not long out of short pants himself :-)] & nikki-ann [in my head i'm 7 years old! heather want's a bouncy castle for her birthday - no kids allowed!]

Party!

We had a party for Ben today at a local sports centre. We shared with a friend who's sons' birhaday is within a week of Bens'. We had a bouncy castle. It lasted an hour which was just right, It went really well. We spent the rest of the day going through the presents Ben received ... more fun! ... and ate all the left-overs for tea.

i'm liking firefox the more i use it. no crashes yet [unlike IE]. it's faster. it's nicer to look at and customisable. view source code is colour coded. 'open link in a new window' is top option on right click [right click has better options]. it works where IE doesn't [see last post]. bad points: i can't get it to work well offline like IE.

thankyou, kind people... chloe-lynn [i like your spam =)]; graeme [shall anyone ever use it tho'! :-) (i'm using it the other way if that counts ;-))]; Nick [you're too kind ... no really!!! stop harrassing people you troublemaker ;-)] & nikki-ann [thanks for the link]

U made it!

had a chat with my isp re webspace performance today. apparently some big hardware upgrades are happenning sunday night. so things may improve then. btw i've left the links up over on the tech blog if anyone should need them [like me!]

haloscan now does trackback! wow. don't you just love those guys!

spotted on boingboing. get your own barcode. i like the bit on the site to print off barcode stickers to annoy checkout people too. ...and here's a little barcode clock. ok, i'll stop there!

checked out a lot of the designs on csszengardens today. if you haven't already it's certainly worth a look. some stunning designs: luna xp; commodore; if you have firefox/bird then try this one (a few images so slow loading via 56k). coo ...blown away!

thanks for the comments nikki-ann [so who do you use then if you don't mind me asking?]; graeme [yeah. the salt and sugar grosses me out sometimes] & Nick [he's back!!!].

zzzzz

AargH! Sorry if you've had problems accessing the site. things have have been running - treacle like the last couple of days. I just made a change to the main index files to stop the isp server cacheing everything. seems a lot faster on my pc right now. still looking elsewhere seriously tho'. beige towers looks good for the price of contributing to the forums. i'd like more techie input but hey...

an unqualified thought... we treat kids like they think like us when they don't, just like we didn't when we were kids. I s'pose we always judge others against ourselves.

where's home

we hardly ever go to McD's... honest =d. this-afternoon Ben was playing in his toy car in the garden and apparently he pulled up to the shed and asked for a happy meal! worrying isn't it.

tried adding a little mini-me [like on friends reunited now] to this page today. it slowed down the loading time way too much. don't know what the problem is. i suspect my hosting server is a pile-o-poo. anyone have good experiences with free servers? this is my isp webspace that i pay for [included in the monthly fee] which has always been slow. there's cgi space too but that's equally sluggish.

aha! just read on my isp's site that there are problems with the cacheing server. that explains the odd effects of pages not refreshing properly. i'm getting sick of this so i'm looking for a new host. i don't think we can afford the £15 a month adsl, but that'd be nice. i'm off now to trawl for a new home.

beg, steal or borrow

more fiddling. messed up the clean style [#8] now. it was only really there for backward compatability anyway. something is lacking in the new design but i can't figure it out just now. i have loads of ideas but enjoy most borrowing from others. if i see something that works i like to try to encorporate it myself. that's the difference isn't it. like bob dylan[i think] said, "a good writer steals from other artists rather than borrows" [but don't quote me on that exact phrase! =)]. images are always a good focal point but i wanted to keep it really simple.

credits: graeme [the school keep bangin' on about getting some plasma screens - i'm just coming 'round to the idea that they may actually work out cheaper than £750 projectors - the lamps are so expensive that i recon they cost around £15 an hour to run - more than most teachers are paid! =)] & nikki-ann [half term me? - no-o-o-o!!!]

wot's that smell?

I got some awful stomach bug from my time away. I walked into a resturaunt this afternoon and nearly heaved at the smell of the garlic. I smell of rotten eggs! {snip} I'll stop there in the interest of decency!

we were running late for a 10 o'clock appointment at Shrewsbury Hospital for Ben, so we took the new toll road. Wow! - it seemed a hell of a lot quicker. I subscribe to the theory that people don't appreciate anything until they have to pay.

The appointment itself lasted about two minutes. Which is what usually happens. [I dropped Ben and he landed on his face - his lower teeth cutting through his chin - something I still have nightmares about even though it was a year ago. It's basic first aid to apply a compress to the wound until the blood clots - but we nor any of the medical professionals that looked at him or helped us over the phone thought of this. I spent a night and the following day in hospital whilst Ben had tests run on him for I don't know what. The upshot is that Ben'll have a scar for life where the flesh didn't line up quite right]

My mum and Dad have had a new widescreen telly. Very nice. We're ok though. We can suffer along indefinitely with our old 4:3 aspect viewing! {well we don't have much choice :-)}

credits: Nick [i'm sorry!]; graeme [there are school kids everywhere I turn - I can't escape!!!]; nikki-ann [half term for adults! - yeah!] & stu ["chat" it says!!! :-)]

a.i.

weird things were happening last night. I uploaded the post and ie just wouldn't refresh to show it. If I put in the complete url with index.html at the end it showed it. most disturbing! put me right off what i was doing.

rusty [style #9] has undergone a bit of a makeover. though he doesn't want to come out to play! not on my PC anyway. I'm losing patience with this and certain printers at school. just changing thier names doesn't mean they'll necessarily play ball. you have to be nice to them and give them a new name all of thier own. otherwise you're just asking for trouble.

credits: nikki-ann [yeah - teachers are too soft]; graeme [oops! there goes a potential friendship! ;-)] & stu [missed that comment over on the tech log! did you know your site is blocked by the powys filter for employees and students? all those potential hits you're missing out on :-)]

Don't look now

Good productive day today, though some things were still not done by the end. My meeting with the head was fruitful. We'll now be doing something positive about kids distateful surfing habits. Currrently we have an ad-hoc system which I think was sending mixed messages. I'm no prude but there are certain things I'd rather not see a dozen times a day. I can't believe the nerve of the kids that download and amass galleries of these pictures. One kids area I surveyed last week contained over 100! [We have a rule that no kids use PC's unsupervised, but in large classes it's practically impossible to monitor everyone all the time.]

credits: graeme [yeah - firebird was a car wasn't it! - and a nice guitar I lusted after at one time too. I've bin' trying to get into 'enterprise' recently. The trailers put me right off - it was like corro! + I don't like the captain 'coz he was in quantum leap which Heather made me watch till I could take no more - and she got the books.]nikki-ann [yes - need more input!] & Nick [are you after something? ;-); you can be my official *site bouncer* after those comments ;-)]

the lower case

went to join the 100 things about me webring - it's not accepting any more sites! i'm sure it was featured in this years blog awards [can't check right now as the site appears to be down]. puh! just going to make a start on heathers 100 list {hehe}

'bin reading a guy's blog who hates capitalisation. must say i have sympathies!

tried the new release of mozilla firebird - renamed firefox [release 0.8] today. i've never managed to stick with the thing before. the ui is really neat, it's customisable, it blocks, it crashes - oops! when they get this thing sorted out it'll be awesome.

comments by: nikki-ann [again ...thanks!] graeme [at last - someone on my side! never was too keen on any of the films. that was a good one tho'] & chloe-lynn [wot's mine is hers an' all that!]

101 things to do

I like bathtime. It makes me feel like we're a real family bathing the kids.

I've been working on 100 things about me. I've done it because I knew a cool person that had done one before [Chris Pirillo's wife Gretchen], and because it made writing about myself easier. I was having problems writing an about section.

Thanks for not being on my side guys ;-) Nick [You finding fault? - I could start to make your life difficult you know ;-)]; and Nikki-ann [If Heather blogs i'll definately have to do the cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping, ...can't you discourage her or something!]

Hello again