Poetry Monster a.k.a. Turquoise Monster (by sarah)

With National Poetry Day Yesturday I thought it was time to finially launch my Poetry Blog it is in fact another Monster - this time Turquoise Monster who is a Bardic Rhymerian Monster 🙂

Anyway just thought I'd let you all know that Turquoise exists 🙂

Hero Poem by Jean (by sarah)

Today is National Poetry Day Uk and with giant knitted poems and a flock of fun events around the place I thought I'd get Jean to write a poem on the theme.

This is it 🙂 :

Super hero!

Super man

Doctor

The UK MoD Manual of Security has been leaked (by alaric)

The UK MoD Manual of Security has appeared on WikiLeaks.

I'm not certain this is a good thing, to be honest... the intelligence services are renowned for overstepping their mark, and I'm sure the sections on dealing with investigative journalists and the like will be useful to those who fight against that kind of thing, but I suspect the bits about dealing with foreign intelligence agencies would probably have best been kept secret. Still, the cat is out of the bag, so perhaps it's no bad thing if the MoD are forced to have a total security audit and overhaul their manual 🙂

I've not managed to download it - WikiLeaks servers seem to be rather busy - but the front page does have some interesting snippets from the sections about visitors to China and Russia, discussing the kinds of things the local intelligence agencies do to try and extract Western commercial and military secrets.

This has some interesting bearing on the growing tendency to outsource software development tasks to developing countries. I know a lot of this work does go to China, and so we can probably assume that any intellectual property made available to developers in China is probably scrutinised by their security services and passed on to Chinese companies that may be able to benefit from it.

In the depths of my career history, I once worked on a software system that was to be used in a Government project to protect the nation's "critical national infrastructure"; and I gather that another part of the system was outsourced to an Indian development team. I'm not sure if the client was actually made aware of this, but at the time, I felt concerned that national security might be threatened by this.

All Change Friday (by sarah)

Today I had a stress getting Jean out to school on time mainly due to the fact she managed to get something on her last clean shirt but we made it as the last kid was entering her class.

I rushed her in but had a sinking feeling as I noticed none of the rest of the children where in their uniform - it was All Change Friday - the first of the school year and I had forgotten 🙁

Jean hasn't said anything about it but somehow I get the feeling she is slightly annoyed with me and not least becuase I managed to send her in with two snacks for lunchtime instead of one - not entirely sure how I managed this one 🙁

But the thing is they have a none uniform day EVERY MONTH! I'm sure we had them max once a term - true uniform was only made compulsery at my infant school once I was in the juniors but still. And the day its one changes depending on which term your in so I have this sinking feeling that this is not going to be the last one I miss :/

Nanowrimo, The Universe and Everything… (by sarah)

I have a tone of photos and half written posts pertaining to the last month and a half which hopefully will be finding their way to going live soonish - but no promises!

I have decided to try and get back into the swing of things after this years medical stuff and random illnesses and so have signed up to do NaNoWriMo this year.

This stands for National Novel Writing Month and I was going to do it last year but what with the MRes course work and stuff I never even got started.

This was a shame as I had a lovely idea which I hope to go back at some point and make an actuality. This year I have forced the issue by actually signing up on the forum and getting myself writing buddies who will help me write!

The idea of nanowrimo is to write 50, 000 words in a month - that month is November - so why am I writing about this now? At the beginning of October?

Becuase I have already spent several weeks planning out what I want to do this year - I have a title - The Punk in Pink and am in the process of trying to sort out exactly what I want the story to be!

I am documenting the entire nanowrimo process as Purple Monster and will have the novel up there as well!

Poetry wise - things are moving forward - with my work starting to appear in anthologies and being invited to preform my poetry.

I have also taking part in an art project across the pond but more on that later - no I'm not going out there :(.

MRes wise I've asked to drop down to the diplomer and am still awaiting a response - I still want to do a PhD and stuff but I think realistically its got to wait.

Nanowrimo is away to get me doing things again with no pressure - if I failing to meet the deadline it really doesn't matter but if I do meet it then I'll have a good chunk of a novel (not that I've done anything with the previous novel I've written :/).

October is going to be me planning stuff for the novel and researching the bits that need researching - funnily enough it involves alot of geology 🙂

I'm also going to go into the school to talk to the kids about dinosaurs and research techniques which should be fun 🙂