Ringing the Bell (by sarah)

Yay Jean got chosen to ring the bell at school 🙂

School – Beginning of week 2 (by sarah)

Today Jean went off to school happily though she still clings like an extra clingy thing to Alaric in the play ground :/

She was given an invite to a Girly Party which is tomorrow - the dynamics of this where quiet interesting, the little girl couldn't find her so one of the boys tracked Jean down and then when Jean didn't get what was being said he went and got the invite for her and delivered it!

The boys where also quiet put out about not being invited which was interesting to observe with one child having to explain the it wasn't for boys.

When we went to pick her up she did her skip home from school thing which includes a silly song I had to make up for her about skipping home from school at lunch time and trying to catnap Cosmic the cat. As we were walking past the cemetary Jean informed us we had to be quiet other wise they (pointing to the grave yard unconcernedly) might hear us. I don't remember really explaining much about grave yards to her - it was very horror movie-esk to be honest!

The Cats have also started following us part way to the school and Helium was even sitting at the gate for when we returned 🙂

This afternoon Jean announced I was using full stops and finger spaces when I'm writing but that I do naughty writing (my handwriting?) which was quiet sweet. She seems to have learned a song as well and announced that her food turns into energy which was interesting - not sure if that from Alaric's rescent conversations with her or school.

In just one week her colouring in has drastically improved - she is at least attempting to colour rather than just scribble over the top. Though she has attempted to draw cat whiskers one me this afternoon - I was being distracted so almost said yes to it too!

The only sad thing is that pretty much every day she colours a stack of pictures for her pre-school friends and asks us to send them to them 🙁

Oh No Mummy! (by sarah)

The end of the first week and Jean is awakened and finially we get 'is it a school day?'

'Yes'

'Oh no Mummy! I wanted to stay in bed - I don't want to go to school'

'Don't you want to see your friends and learn things?'

'Yes but its too early'

🙂

Earshot Poetry Night (by sarah)

For anyone who's are Cheltenham this evening I'm going to be reading some of my poems at Slaks Comedy Bar on the Bath Street.

The Headliners of the evening are top poetry dudes from Bristol Byron Vincent and Angie Belcher.

I've seen Byron perform before and lets put it this way - its the only time I've ever seen Alaric truelly engaged whilst listening to poetry.

I am a bit nervous as I haven't read anything since like Febuary so feel a bit rusty!

I have selected four poems as requested:

The Break-Up

Summer Sales

Ana

The Markov Chains of Literature

Out of these only The Markov Chains of Literature has been read out at an event by me namely Tech Adventure earlier this year.

Not entirely sure what the secedule is for the night or how many of the four will be read but I will have on my nice red boots (I was going to wear my glittery heels but walking Jean to school has resulted in hurting shins and clicky pelvis so thought better of it - the boots are flat no heels!).

Why are networks so hard to build? (by alaric)

One of my sidelines is network management.

Often, the problem is this: you have a bunch of sites, each with zero or more external connections out to the wider Internet (or to people who you provide an Internet connection to), and each with zero or more computers that need some level of network connection (be they servers or workstations). Each computer needs to be able to talk to some subset of the other computers, and maybe able to talk to computers out on the Internet or some other external network, and maybe computers on the Internet or some other external network are able to talk to it. And computers may be on public IP addresses, or on a private IP address; in the latter case, if it can talk to other external networks there needs to have a public IP address (possibly shared with others) that its connections are NATed from, and if incoming connections are allowed, there must be a public IP to which those connections are sent to be "forwarded" into the private IP. We can think of those NAT/forwarding public IPs as "virtual IPs", which don't correspond to a physical computer, but seem to by way of some form of port/address translation.

Also, each computer or external network connection needs some level of reliability. Some have low requirements, and we can happily tolerate perhaps up to a day of outage per year; that's mere 99.7% uptime. The fabled "five nines uptime", 99.999%, equates to a maximum of about 30 minutes of downtime a year. And that downtime isn't just used up by equipment failures; if your network's requirements grow and you need to upgrade things to provide more capacity, you might need some downtime to replace and reconfigure things.

In other words, the problem domain is already complex. But the fun's just starting.

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