Overheard this snippet between two 8 year olds practising using the internet for research:

“Do you know who ran the first four minute mile?”
“Yes. I don’t need to look it up. It’s the 118 brothers”.

This, I think, is deeply, deeply rubbish.

Eventually?  So far it’s been almost 6 months.

Grr … gle.

OK.  So might be fun to respond to Ewan’s challenge.  Will certainly be sending a link to the Parent’s Association.

… when a friend gets on TV.  However undeservedly.  John, my thoughts are with you

Had a nice surprise in my mailbox this morning from Slideshare:

“Hi MrYoung,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team”

The slideshow in question was one on child safety online and is 18 months old – not exactly hot off the press – so feeling a bit bemused.

April 01st 2009 | Comments(1) | Life on #bestofslideshare bemusement slides

Pretty soon I’m going to grow a moustache. Not out of personal preference, but as part of Movember. For a month I’m going to be growing, trimming and tending an unsightly sprawl on my top lip in aid of prostate cancer. Dad announced about 2 years ago that he had it, a number family friends have it or have died of it, and Georgia’s father died of it. 1 in 11 UK men can expect to be diagnosed with it at sometime during their life. The moustache feels pretty trivial next to all that, but if anyone feels like donating to a worthy cause (the charity not the tache), I’d be hugely grateful.

If you are feeling generous, you can donate via me here or direct to the charity in the UK (or others worldwide).

Thanks.

October 25th 2008 | Comments(3) | Life on cancer charity moustaches

I’m playing around with coding a simple site that pulls in various “of the days” – word of the day, historical happening of the day, quote of the day, joke of the day etc. – so that I can put it up at morning registrations for children to look at (and hopefully discuss).

The only UK English spelling word of the day feed I’ve found is the OED. And their word of the day today is lubricous. I had to look it up. It means:

smooth and glassy; slippery; lewd, wanton, salacious or lecherous

Sheesh. Back to the drawing board. Might have to add things manually.

August 05th 2008 | Comments(1) | Life on

From Conor O’Neill:

“Expecting the public service to build webapps for us is a fool’s errand. They would spend €100m, take five years and it wouldn’t work when it was finished. However, if they make each department’s data available along with some simple APIs, then citizens can do it for themselves, or pay someone to do it. Free unlimited access to all APIs for individual or non-commercial use and some small pay-as-you-go for commercial use…

So what data do we want and need? Anything available under Freedom of Information from crime rates per county to court cases to tax revenue by category. If it exists, we want it.”

Yup. Just been looking for what I’d naively hoped were simple things: an API to help me sort out a GP nearby locator, and an API for OFSTED stuff. Ho hum. Am now fervently hoping the Guardian Free Our Data campaign works. Especially given the conclusion of this (very good) report:

In sum, recognition is slowly emerging in Europe that open access to government information is critical to the information society, the scientific endeavor, and economic growth. However, recent trends towards more “liberal” policies face opposition. This comes from treasuries as well as from entrepreneurial civil servants in charge of “government commercialization” initiatives, who are sometimes tempted to engage in anti-competitive practices. Therefore, these issues require consideration at the highest policy making levels of government.

John mentioned a lovely little quote at dinner last night, from Hermann Abs (apparently one of the great post-war bankers):

Profit is to business as breathing is to life.

Necessary, but not the point.

On the tube today, on the way to dinner with some friends, I finished a book called The Reavers, by George Macdonald Fraser. A ripping yarn, deeply silly but perfect to curl up with over Christmas.

At dinner, Jane mentioned that she was having to interview people about him. I asked what for, and it turns out she’s doing some work on The Last Word, Radio 4’s obituary program.

GMF died two days ago, and the cold spell feels a lot colder.

Sasha’s just sent round this rather fabulous Christmas card.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Just discovered Everyclick.com. It’s a nice idea. Half of their gross revenue goes to charities.

“everyclick allocates 50% of its gross revenue to charity each month. Each active charity receives a proportion of that sum equivalent to the proportion in which its supporters use the website relative to the supporters of other active charities. The activity of everyclick website users who do not select a specific charity will benefit all active charities on a pro rata basis.”

October 27th 2007 | Comments(1) | Life on charity search

After seeing this and reading this Facebook group (thanks to Andy and Euan pointing here) I’ve just signed up to this petition.

Burmese TV Message (via BBC)

I feel officially old. A very bright boy at my school has turned his talent to caricature. Sheesh.

July 03rd 2007 | Comments(1) | Life on aging cartoon school

At the school I’m working at, we’ve just started a blog. All in the best skunkworks taste, there’s only a few children working on it. It’s great to see them rolling up their sleeves and beginning to write some interesting stuff.

One post that’s caught my eye, partly for the response it’s had in the staffroom is this post. Zed is 10 years old. He’s seen something in his community – a run-down boat in the school playground – that he thinks needs fixing. Max and Josh agree. And they’re blogging their opinions, beginning to get it fixed off their own bat.

Do have a look and see what you think, and if you’ve got any ideas to help these activists save their boat, it’d be great if you could leave them a comment.

May 15th 2007 | Comments(4) | Life on blogs children politics

Spam was making me find MT increasingly unusable. So I’ve swapped to Wordpress.
Will try to move the feeds without screwing things up.

Little Legends is a newish, free service for parents and carers in the UK. A while ago, my sister and I were discussing how hard it was for her to find anywhere useful and good for mums (schools, late night chemists and the like). As a solution, I’ve hit the Ruby books, scratched my head a fair bit, and developed Little Legends with her.

Essentially, it’s a mix of a wiki, directory a social bookmarking site and maps. Something that Will Davies said a while back sums it up really:

“ICT can localise and delocalise communication; our public discussions can descend upon places, and then depart, and then descend again, like a stone skimming across a lake.”

What we’re trying to do, in our own small way, is to help parents, carers and people with kids to look after skim those stones more easily. [If you want a more in depth explanation of the thinking behind it, you might want to have a look here.]

Like all these things, it’s by no means a finished article. There’s more coming in the way of helping mums actually connect with each other (groups, messaging and the like). Anyway, I’d love to hear any feedback you have so we can find out what we’re doing wrong, what we could improve, and where we’re on the right track.

And of course, if you think it’s at all useful for anyone you know, do pass it on.

Thanks.

March 20th 2007 | Comments(1) | Life on Little-Legends parents project ruby social-computing UK

Thankfully everyone’s ok.

It’s important stuff.

In 1982(ish), I was given a BBC Micro by my father. It had a tape drive attached. And when I wanted to play a game, written by someone some distance away from me, I could hear the tape loading the code up into my machine. It always excited me, that sound of a new game and the treat in store.

In 1994(ish), I got my first modem. And to connect to the internet, via Compuserve, I could hear the dialup, and the connection. It sounded much like the old tape drive. And while I listened to it, waiting to connect to people miles away from me, I’d get a similar sense of excitement at the World Wide Web I was about to be able to stumble through and explore.

In 2003(ish) I started blogging. There was no noise, but I still had that excitement. It amazed me to be able to read people’s thoughts, from London to North America to Iraq to India, and then later to meet some of them. The world started to seem a lot smaller.

This morning, again there was no tape-drive noise, and again things were quick. I’ve become inured to it, I suppose. I expect a certain level of service, in the same way I expect running water from the taps, or electricity from the wall sockets.

But when I fired up Skype and I got that weird popping sound, I remembered the digital crackling noise. And not for the first time it struck me quite how astonishing it is to be connected. My friend Rajesh has just come back online after lunch in Mumbai, and the bloke in the US whose forum software I’m looking at is probably still asleep. And to briefly stop and think about how different their surroundings are from mine, how talented they are, and how far away they are drives home an often forgotten point.

It’s a huge world, I’m a miniscule part of it, and I feel very lucky to be connected, and excited to be stumbling my way through it.

Anyway, back on the testosterone supplements soon.