No Easy Way

but it looks like my marriage is over - and now its just getting ready for the next stage. We've done the separating into different rooms and gone through the numbness - now its sinking in and all the attendant discomfort that comes with it is starting to hit home. Oh well, I was looking for new challenges this year 0.o

Bugger

Its officially one of those days where things are turning to crud before my eyes.

I'll be sleeping on the sofa tonight

Signs That Your Daughter...

...May Have Expensive Tastes...

England young 'among most tested'

I'm occasionally heard to joke that we love to have standards - after all, we have so many of them - but nowhere does this seem to be more apparent in the regime of tests and standards which is currently commented on in the news today.

My daughter, who is eight, going on forty seven, seems relatively casual about the tests and SATs that she currently has to go through, but maybe I'm just showing my age at remembering the old reports that were current when I was her age - a single sheet of paper with the subjects, an estimated grade and a terse comment such as 'Could do with writing more in his answers' (This usually translated to - he knows the answers, puts them down, but doesn't necessarily always demonstrate how he got to them)

These days we apparently have 'a system uniquely "preoccupied" with national standards and accountability'

This sounds to me like someone trying to wriggle out of saying - "we've used education so much as a political football that we can't find a graceful way of admitting its screwed up." Maybe that's just my being cynical

Un-PC, I know

...but when I read in someone's signature "Animals are my friends, I don't eat my friends" I immediately thought "but when I've eaten my friends they've been rather happy about it"...

I'll get my coat...

Privacy Law Musings

One of the more amusing (to me, anyway) stories to break at the weekend was that of the alleged bugging of an MP under terror laws introduced by this government. Oh, the shock and horror and public wringing of hands..! God forbid that politicians should be as subject to the same laws and lack of privacy that have been fostered on the rest of us.

Welcome to our world - do you now understand why we get a little annoyed at increased surveillance and simultaneous losing of personal data on a seemingly daily basis?

I have no sympathy.

I also note that the BBC ran a poll about this issue and roughly 75% of the 7-8000 respondents did not agree that politicians should continue to be exempt from monitoring...

There's a phrase about chickens and roosting that springs to mind...

Windows Se7en

So I'm reading through the filler in my in-box and check out the IT Trends Bulletin, which has this little gem in it:

"Windows Se7en: The Anti-Vista? – Free Article - Even with Windows Vista’s one-year anniversary launch just a week away, all that anyone in the tech-enthusiast community seems to want to talk about is Windows 7."

I'm surely not the only one at this point to be getting a mental image of Brad Pitt staggering away horrified from a battered brown box and shooting Kevin Spacey...