Manhattan Skyline
It is a school thing, but it’s going to be so much fun. I’ve got my shipment of dollars right here (it feels like Monopoly money! hehe!) ready to spend in the city that never sleeps. I don’t really know many people who are going, but it’s a small group (under twenty people) and they all seem very nice so I’m sure we’ll get along. And if not, we’re in New York! Who cares?!
Oh and Alex, I’m sure I’ll run into you. There are only, what, 19 million people? Watch out for me 
Incidentally, teachers wishing to send me homework should use the contact form here. Yes, I’ve already had people saying they’ll do that. But don’t expect I’ll get anything done on the plane!
Right right… I’ve got to Americanise myself. We’ve already been warned that they take tipping rather more seriously than us, and that people on the subway don’t have the same London instinct to stay quiet and stare at the middle distance right between other passengers when travelling. Oh – and that in New York, you have to be 21 to drink and that yes, they do enforce that and yes, you will get in trouble if you break it. Apparently.
We get back on Friday morning. Not sure if they’ll be blogs in the meantime, but have a lovely week anyway 
Incidentally – when is the visa waiver form going to stop asking if I was a Nazi? 
Grabbed the latest IE 7 Beta from Microsoft today to try out the long-awaited version of the ubiquitous browser. And it’s good. Confused me at first because for some reason it turned ClearType on, but after I found the setting, I played about with the new IE.
The obvious change is the user interface. I’m getting used to it surprisingly quickly, despite it being rough around the edges (as you’d expect) and markedly different from IE 6. I use Firefox for browsing and while this doesn’t manage to overtake its rival, Microsoft do make a valiant attempt to catch up – at last! Printing is fixed, tabbed browsing is here at last, and the nastiest CSS bugs are gone. The new phishing filter also looks promising although I’m sure they’ll be some users who won’t use it on the privacy principle.
One small improvement that I do really like is the ease at which you can enable, disable and remove ActiveX controls. Many of the little things in Firefox that I couldn’t live without, like spell checking, are actually done via extensions which I’m a lot happier installing in Firefox than I am loading a plugin in IE. This might change that and make it easier for Internet Explorer to acquire some of this extra functionality safely. (In fact – ieSpell seems quite promising for spell checking in particular!)
So – anyone willing to try it out too? 
Woot! 
I just got a place on the scheme which means I’ll get to visit Cambridge University from the 16th to 18th of February and follow round a student there, which is going to be so great! I hope everyone who applied from my school got in too. Anyway – more details here.
Incredibly busy weekend too – had lunch with my great-uncle, then onto my cousin Alix’s 20th birthday celebrations (happy birthday!) before Joshua’s party tonight. Then tomorrow I’m off again to see grandparents… apparently their computer is exploding. Or something. We’ll see!
Oh and finally – I managed to burn a small patch of carpet after a lamp fell on it. It seemed to turn to astroturf. And this was minutes after I had been teasing Josie about setting fire to things, which made me feel bad. Karma!
Update: OK, maybe not 
I’ve suddenly lost all my things to do for the rest of the weekend! How odd. Oh well
For the record, the current homepage was inspired by the Daily Show’s Blurry Photos of Poor People coffee book joke. If I replace it by a nice picture of some clouds in a week or so, you’ll known I’ll have lost nerve.
So, another weekend is here. Tomorrow I’ll be going to Joshua’s party (yes, again) so we’ll see what happens there! Erm, happy ‘very early’ birthday Joshua.
On Wednesday the History class went on a trip to the Liberal Jewish Synagogue to listen to a Holocaust survivor speak. Which was moving, as you’d expect, but he was very good and didn’t seem to feel that his whole life had to be dictated by these awful events. A lesson which, I think, is important to learn. Fascinating story about later ending up as a guard at a POW camp for German soldiers and meeting a boy who had once gone to his school.
Plus we got tea and biscuits there – which is typical Jewish culture cause it’s never happened to me at a church 
Very worthwhile trip!
Oh and an update – Toy Story 3 has been cancelled. Thank god for that.
I’m obviously delighted and very relieved that Sue Axon today lost her case to force doctors to break confidentiality if a teenager wants to have an abortion or even just seek contraception advice.
Of course it’s much preferable if the parents can be informed in the case of an abortion. The current guidelines make it very clear that doctors should try and persuade them to do so or at least confide in another close family member, because it is in their best interest to do so. But to force doctors to do so – and take it out of their professional decision – would have been a disaster. People like Ms Axon who seem to believe that parents have a divine right over their children don’t live in the real world.
Not only would it be wrong – but it would also discourage girls from going to their doctor in the first place, because they wouldn’t be able to trust them. The result is children placed at greater risk, particularly of backstreet abortionists, who are thankfully not as common as they were before the initial legalisation of abortion.
In the case of simple contraception advise… there shouldn’t even be the expectation that the parents would be told!
(The title of this, btw, is a Doctor Who reference. Sorry.)
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
