First Aid Beany (by sarah)

After acting like a monster Jean proceeded to do something amazing for a 5yr old. She'd gone over to Barbara for a yogurt and came back saying she'd had an adventure - she then told use she had washed Barbara's leg and put a plaster and bandage on it.

We asked why and she told us Barbara had stabbed her leg with a fork!

Startled Al rushed over to Barbara's to find that indeed Barbara had stabbed her self with garden fork, she had been carrying over her shoulder and let go and it had fallen hitting and stabbing her calf.

Al told her that it would have to be kept an eye on and if it didn't heel or became infected she'd have to go to a Dr (She should have gone anyway but that wasn't going to happen.)

Anyway I was amazed at Jean - should could have just run away from the situation like most five year olds or been inept but she wasn't. I am also worried that she was put in such a mature situation to be quiet honest :/

But mostly I'm proud of her.

Barbara got convinced to see a Dr by a friend and ended up on antibiotics.

Challenges for September (by sarah)

Starting slightly late this month but I do have a series of challenges - first off I want to get back into the novel I was writing for the Terry Pratchett Prize. It has been on the back burner for two reasons a) Jean being on holiday and me being pregnant meant I just did not have time or energy to do much other that look after me and the 'kids'.

And b) I have sorted out the storyline now - there is actually a plot and stuff but somehow this appearance of a destination stopped me writing :/ I think I need to force myself back into it which is what I shall be doing this month.

I am not doing any proper work at the moment as my hands and things are just being to too erratic - basically if I fail at my own challenges I'm not going to upset people or get sued where as if I take on a client - it's a different matter entirely :/

I would like to get the novel finished this month though realise the hope of doing so is minimal :/ I'm going to say I'll do 1000 words or an hrs writing today - mainly because if I haven't reached 1000 words in an hour I'm struggling and it probably will not happen no matter how long I sit there!

I would like to have the novel finished so that a) I can attempt GothNoWriMo in October but with NaNoWriMo that would be three concecutive months of novel writing and I'm not sure I'm up for that!

b) I want the novel have it's first lot of changes done in the beginning of October ie spelling and grammar and then to be sent to readers for feed back. This would hopefully then give me a month to effect any further changes and get it actually sent off!

So with this tall order what is my second creative challenge for the month?

To write a blog post a day - this is not a hard one as I tend to manage this each month without trying 😉

Ok so I shall begin!

A Five Year Old Monster :( (by sarah)

Yesterday Jean went back to school and was taken by one of the other parents to their younger child's birthday party. Jean was returned before the end of the party under the claim of being tired (having apparently almost fallen asleep in assembly). But then I am told she has been told off by some of the other parents at the party for being naughty and aggressive to the other children :/

I asked Jean about this and she said she had tried being nice but the younger kids had been naughty to her. I gave her a speech about younger children and told her to go to her room and think about her behaviour especially as she had not been that well behaved with Al's cousins kid who came to visit the day before. She mantains she wants the younger kids to come and play but as far as I can see is being awful to them. 🙁

Her behaviour has been bad the last few weeks - I thought part of it was excitement over the party and part boredom of being at home with adults and no kids. Now I am ashamed and embarrassed 🙁

A situation not helped by the fact that Barbara then shouted at the mum for not turning around in the right place in our garden. How are we supposed to have friendships if she does that? The less people who visit the worse I feel Jean's behaviour comes :/

I know she has basically only mixed with boys over the summer when she has mixed at all but really that and tiredness is not an excuess - especially when the tiredness is her own fault for refusing to go to sleep :/

Portable computers (by alaric)

I like the iPad hardware; shame about the crippled iOS software. Similarly, I like the Kindle hardware - shame about the restrictive DRM system.

But the biggest shame is that I'm actually tempted to own three or more different computing devices, purely because of different situational specialisations in the hardware. A smartphone (or, more ideally, a wearable computer) for real-time pervasive tasks. A tablet device for portably viewng stuff on (whether it's ideally electronic ink or a nice colour LCD really depends on what I'm viewing) . A laptop for actually working on... ideally a small one for portability and a larger one for power (both in terms of CPU+RAM and in terms of more screen real estate). Plus remote servers that store a significant part of my data since it needs to be available to others in some way (this blog, my email, etc).

But this sucks - there's a lot of duplication of hardware (mass storage and CPU power) there, when I'll only really be using one device at a time. And there's an annoying duplication of data that needs to be "synched" between things. And an annoying variation of user interface, as different devices often have very different models of storage management.

Here's what I'd love to have:

In my pocket sits a smartphone. It might have a Blackberry-style keyboard or an iPhone-style touchscreen, depending on taste. It has a small computer to run its apps, and a battery, and the usual Bluetooth/USB/GSM/etc interfaces. And it has a wodge of Flash to store my stuff.

Maybe it has enough Flash to store all my stuff. Maybe it doesn't in which case, I might also carry a featureless cuboid that contains batteries and a lot of flash, or even a hard disk, or some combination of the two. In which case, my phone is slaved to it - using its own internal flash to cache resources fetched from the storage box, and accessing it via Bluetooth or some more advanced personal-area radio network; but when it's plugged into the storage box via USB, it can access it more speedily, and suckle power from the larger battery.

Perhaps I'm lucky enough to also possess a head-up display (which also functions as a headset for audio), and/or a chord keyer, that talk to the smartphone via radio or wired links. They're just extra I/O devices that plug into it, though.

But maybe I own a tablet computer, or an electronic paper device. They might have their own internal storage, but I'd slave them to my phone, or direct to my storage box (slaving to the phone, if the phone is slaved to the storage box, just slaves them to the storage box, in effect), and use their local flash as a cache. Also, if I don't like their file-browsing interfaces, I can just use the phone to select a file and "send" it to any willing device reachable through the slaving relationships, which causes it to access the file (from the original source) and open it up. The file isn't actually "sent", it just seems that way (except faster, and with a single central copy if I start editing it).

But what of the laptop? Or my big, powerful, desktop machine? Let them be slaved to my phone or my storage box, too. Take my home directory and installed apps from my central storage. Then there's no synching of address books and all that. There might be files in my phone that only laptop-scale software can manage, which I then can't open on the go, but I can at least use my portable devices to email a copy to a colleague who needs one, and to open simpler types of files that happen to be associated with the same project. They can talk to my storage box via a wireless link within range, or I can hook my storage box, phone, etc. up to it via cables for high-speed communications and power distribution.

What will it take to do this? Some cleverness to negotiate which device should give which power when they're joined by a cable (easy if one of them has access to mains power, trickier to decide if they're both battery devices; perhaps the default should be to not share power at all unless asked to by the user or unless the battery of one device is flat, turning it into a non-self-powered device). But it's mainly down to standardising file systems and protocols. Working at the "USB mass storage device" level is a bad idea, as only one device can have such a filesystem mounted. It needs to be more like NFS. And, mainly, devices and desktop OSes need to let go of managing their own filesystem and learn to use a shared standard for home directory layout - which will NEVER happen for legacy systems, but at least they can mount your mobile data store as "My Documents" or something like that, and perhaps make some effort to invisibly sync between their own personal-information databases and whatever's in there.

There'll still be some need for syncing - my email and blog, and shared work stuff like Git repos and group calendars, have to be on servers somewhere. And there's a good reason to mirror my portable storage to somewhere else whenever I can, as a backup. But the less syncing, the better!

First Day Back (by sarah)

It's Jean's first day back at school today - she is actually five now!

I made sure we had everything ready last night and we where ready in plenty of time until it came time to leave and I discovered I'd completely forgotten lunch!

Anyway she got to school ok - she was very impatient this morning to get there and instantly disappeared into the playground with the other kids.

The only thing was I had to write a letter to the school about the library book they had sent Jean home with over the summer - it was a big book of bible stories and crafts and also some little 'moral' stories and true stories. It was these latter two that made me decide to censor it.

They were absolutely awful 🙁 with implications that those who had been abused in the Nazi Death/Work/War Camps were not protected by God because they didn't hold secret bible meetings :/ And many similar things, including a child in what I would call a mentally abusive situation trying to gain some self respect only to be hit back down because they 'stole' from the parents :/

I'm sorry I just could not read this to my child. And because these bits where hidden in the 'side-boxes' I don't think the school had any idea what it was like either. I was highly unimpressed.