dom.blog

If I remind you of the last entry…

“I’ve also been roped in to present a Power Point thingy about rebuilding Harlesden”

Well, I made it, and half-presented it, and then we won! Woo hoo! £500… for the school. Oh.

Yesterday was the second Tuesday of the month – and that means Windows Update day, and some Office ones. I also started detecting another wireless network – open and unencrypted – from my bedroom. Interesting… [thinks evil thoughts, but not really]

For those waiting for Part 3 of the great OfSTED story, they said we were one of “the most inclusive schools the inspection team had ever seen.” So there!

I stayed up to 3am on Friday night… working on a database for IT GCSE. Yeah, Access is hard work, though I’m actually fairly happy about it now. Relational databases, who would have guessed they could be so much fun?

I’ve also been roped in to present a Power Point thingy about rebuilding Harlesden, god knows how I got into that one, especially as I seem incapable of even *spelling* Harlesden correctly! (Yes, it’s right here, I checked.) Apparently, the conclusion ‘we’ came to was to simply demolish the whole area and start again from scratch. Not quite sure how the residents would feel, but there you go…

OK U-turn time, I met some *nice* OFSTED people today which was great. They sat about 6 of us down and asked questions about the state of the school, which was good because everyone was really positive on the whole. Although I did laugh when he described our multi-ethnicity as “smashing”.

I would also like to quote from a Guardian column today:

“To all those on the left who think Tony Blair is a Tory, I wish you had been here to see the real thing. Note that Michael Howard made no mention whatever of poverty. Compare that to Labour’s child-poverty pledge. He said nothing on childcare, nothing to woo back women voters. The whole array of policies on offer from the platform is strangely thin, with the feel of ideology devised in Central Office, lacking the substantial hard work Labour did to prepare for power. Labour is open to attack on various faltering policies, but the Tories do anecdotes, not killer research.

But when this party is eventually re-elected – and they will be back when they have done some of the above – it will show how far Labour has pushed the centre ground leftwards since Mrs Thatcher’s day. Something else Labour’s left might learn here: Blair’s snatching of “choice” really has dished the Tories’ best line. Conservatives’ “choice” is money taken out of public funds for the better-off to spend elsewhere: it only highlights Labour determination to make services more responsive to everyone within the welfare state. The “choice” coup is just another example of how the Tories did not jump down into these depths all by themselves: they were also pushed by Labour, which still holds them down there.”

Politics to make you feel better

That’s right, the Dementors have descended. They’ve killed any atmosphere, all the teachers are stressed and I have a feeling that the only people who become inspectors are failed teachers anyway.

No no – that’s unfair. After all, there’s a slight chance they might be reading this. I just get irked by the fact the *private company* which has been contracted to inspect is probably the lowest bidder, ‘we cut corners the most’ kind of company. It stinks of an organisation set up during the Tory years. Hey, wait a sec, it was. Surprise!

Talking of Tories, they’ve been having their party conference to try and decide the best way to commit further suicide. A fairly novel way has been by screening videos of Michael Howard talking about his first kiss. Guys, you aren’t supposed to SCARE the voters!

And Matthew got me looking into old school rap, starting out with Rapper’s Paradise (the original version) and ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash. It’s surprisingly good, especially if you watch the unintentionally hilarious videos for free at Yahoo’s Launch service.