Wark This Way

Archive for July, 2009

Apparently Shawn Fenton» wants to turn over more school places to poor pupils – according to the Daily Telegraph.

I went to a fairly decent school – before they ripped the system up and Grammar Schools went out of political fashion – and I have VERY clear memories of my school years – and I recall just how much of the learning experience was disrupted – not by poor schooling – but by idiot pupils. Almost without fail, the dimmer ones were the ones who put fighting ability above academic achievement. Peer pressure is a powerful thing at that age, indeed, sadly for some it remains powerful throughout life… and if the people around you are not high achievers there is a very good chance of them bringing you down with them.

Of course the very idea that kids from poorer families are kilely to be more disruptive – is political heresy – but this is no longer Britain of the 19th and 20th century where family and class were all – there is a REASON why people rise to a position of being able and willing to put their kids into “better” schools!!

What Britain needs right now as we slowly become a third world economy (a double-rip recession coupled with the probable MASS sickness around the corner – predicted to bring 10,000 new cases a DAY sometime later this day, should ensure the collapse of our economy) is a new generation of leaders, of educationally excellent, business-savvy entrepeneurs – who will create new jobs, new industries and new sciences.

THAT is what we need to be spending our money on – pushing the BEST to be BETTER.  And what are we doing….

I am SO GLAD I’m not at the START of my career and life right now – we’re really making a complete BALLS of this country.

I recently discovered something called Liberkey. This comprises a menu system and a bunch of open source programs all wrapped together and well suited to use on a memory stick. Apparently the program itself isn’t open source – but that’s another matter. It has been compared to PortableApps – but for me the actual applications included are WAY better.

Ok so what’s special about that? These are programs that are generally available separately and nothing new… so why bother. Well, these “portable” versions of the programs all sit inside a nice popup menu system – and importantly the package looks after updates for you, so that the first thing that happens when you run the program, is that a load of updates occur automatically. Not only that but you can go to the website and simply double-click on links to add new programs to the list. We’re talking here of some pretty good open source and free sofware – like the GIMP for example which I’ve been using for a while now in preference to the expensive and somewhat overblown “PhotoShop”.

But there are also programs in here that certainly I’d never heard of. RadioSure for example plays streaming radio stations and has a massive list built in – so what I hear you say, Shoutcast does the same thing with Winamp – yes but this also has a large RECORD button on it which records straight off the radio to MP3 complete with titles – rather handy for parties.. and on the subject of music playback there is another free MP3 player in the pack called AIMP – and already I prefer it to Winamp – it’s fast, small, nice looking with analog meters… and does a very nice track-to-track fade straight out of the box. Once the Liberkey package is running and you’ve elected to hand it file associations, a quick right-click on any of your files will securely encrypyt it using DCU. As for passwords, the excellent KeePass is included also.

But I’m in danger of giving the impression that this is a manager for a small number of decent programs – it isn’t – the “ultimate” version of this is MASSIVE and of course you can put the whole lot on a memory stick and cart it from PC to PC. I strongly urge you to give Liberkey a second glance!

As far back as I remember, we always seem to get sensible white papers from governments either just before they go on summer break – or when they’re about to be thrown out of office – either way, nothing ever then happens.

In a new white paper, the suggestion is being made that parents could be fined or jailed if their children mis-behave! Now, you may think that’s drastic – but nothing else has worked, in many parts of Britain kids roam around causing damage and absolutely nothing is done about it – I’m 55 and it’s been this way since I was in my teens. The parents don’t care, the police are almost powerless, schools are terrified of even scolding kids – and the kids themselves know it. Perhaps the thought of a jail sentence might renew the parents’ interest in the behaviour of their offspring.

As a kid, I went to “Spring Gardens” school in North Shields and I had a fabulous time but there was no shortage of discipline when needed… I was generally productive – I had hobbies and simply got on with my life – but on the odd occasion I got into trouble like everyone else and I still to this day remember sitting for what would typically be 5 minutes but which seemed like hours, outside of the headmaster’s room awaiting a caning across the hand and BOY did it hurt. Ok the pain only lasted minutes but the whole authority thing, backed by parents who usually tool the school’s side, ensured I generally played ball with society. Today, schools have zero power to discipline kids and have done for some years. Parents of unruly kids are more likely to try to sue schools and police than cooperate with them and meanwhile the kids are loving it!

If someone has kids then until they are 18 and fully responsible for their own actions as adults, SOMEONE should be responsible – and I reckon it should be the parents – and it sounds like the government finally agrees…. it all sounds like a breath of fresh air – the funny thing is it’s the LAST thing I’d expect from socialists – but then, there isn’t a hope in hell of the current government staying in office for much longer – so don’t expect ANY of these new bold initiatives to actually GO anywhere.