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Sunday, March 23, 2003
and pasting from Word X to blooger puts question marks instead of single apostrophe. grrr.


bugger, I can't see the formatting buttons on blooger in Safari...


Last week was a long and strange one. I guess it was for a lot of people, kind of hanging around in stasis almost waiting for something to happen somewhere far away and feeling like there was little or nothing you could do about it. I didn't do very much. I gave assemblies all week to the whole school and took advantage of the opportunity to present some info to the kids that they may not have had from other sources. Of course as teachers we are not allowed to express a personal viewpoint on issues... nevertheless it was pretty clear what side of the fence I was standing I suppose. I had some rounds of applause from several year groups, and it was deadly silent in the hall, especially with the older kids. It was kind of spooky. A lot of kids and staff said how good it had all been, so I suppose it was worth doing. Even if in the big picture of things it was bugger all. I'm not good at joining large protests, mainly because I don?t like large crowds, so I suppose the assemblies were my way of protesting. Whatever.

Quite a few of our kids went on the protests on the Thursday, skipping out of school for it. Most of them were doing it for the right reasons but there were many who clearly didn't, which kind of undermined the whole deal I thought. Especially when there were reports of some of them being very aggressive to drivers who refused to stop and sign their petition. Perhaps unsurprisingly these individuals are amongst the worst bullies in the school...

So we spent most of the week waiting for the promised Shock and Awe, pondering as we did just how long it would take for some scrappy computer game to appear with the same title. Unless of course the US State Dept has claimed copyright on the phrase and all translations thereof, much like Microsoft did with 'where do you want to go today' all those years ago. It wouldn't surprise me.

I spent most of the week too waiting for my PowerBook to arrive. It finally did, again on Thursday, and I have since spent most of my free time trying to get to grips with it. It?s pretty nifty. It feels slow compared to my 1600+ AMD PC but I guess that's to be expected since there is no onboard chip memory apparently, and my PC has a powerful Hercules video card with 128MB ram on it, so... whatever. The PC also makes a hell of a racket, which was one of my main reasons for switching. The Mac is silent. Wow. Anyway, yeah, I've been spending my time figuring out how to shift data from my PC (the Lacie firewire hard drive is cool and did the trick, it's now loaded with 60GB of MP3s, from which I'm listening via the nifty MacAmp Lite X. iTunes just seems too much effort I?m afraid.) and tweaking the X interface so it works a bit how I'd like. It's not perfect but as the weekend has gone on I've become more used to it. It does look lovely, after all.

What do I miss about Windows? Not much yet, although I do dreadfully miss Homesite for editing my webpages. I've been looking for a Mac equivalent but nothing comes close yet. So I'm stuck with Dreamweaver in Homesite-esque view, making up all my custom snippets over again, and knowing that after the 60 day demo period is up I'll have to go through the whole process again, although I guess I can just back up my code snippets, and hey ho... how dull is this? But yeah, any friendly folks who want to slip a copy of Dreamweaver or Photoshop 7 my way, no questions asked like, that would be much appreciated. Or any other neat software come to that. Like InDesign. Or Pagemaker... Ahem, not that I want to break the law or anything.

Not that I've been spending all my time in front of a computer screen. Oh no. Yesterday I even managed to get a decent ride in, out to the Teign valley and up through Trusham and Haldon, down to Starcross and home to Exeter. About two and a half hours, which is ten minutes less than the same ride at the same time last year, more or less. Maybe it was the sun that helped. It certainly made the countryside look glorious. I swear you could almost see the buds opening out on the trees. And as I rode I had 'Look Up' from Stars glorious Heart album ringing through my head. It?s such a terrific Pop song, it's made for days like that. I don't know if Heart is out yet (it's on Setanta) but when you see it in the stores you need to snap it up. Unless you have no ears. Or, indeed, heart.

Oh, and how long does it generally it takes to stop pressing the 'control' key instead of the 'apple' key?! Argh!!!