This is a special plea for people who make icons: I would really, really like an animated pic of Boris Johnson saying 'I'd like to be king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat'.

Also if anyone can point me to more good feminist/political icon sites, that'd be awesome :)

8pm, Three Goats' Heads.

(I would filter this to Oxford-only, but then it won't export to my Facebook..)

I just finished Mad Men Season 3. It was great. Hopefully Schmevil will wander by so we can discuss it, since the only other person that I speak to who watches it is about 20 episodes behind me.

As a brief aside for myself, the next Reed Richards Explains will be about the Common Agricultural Policy, using #571 and The Farm. It's another scene that's just brilliant in the original form.

For work, I'm putting together posters about some of our core concepts.

I've got this for Rights and Responsibilities

I spent the weekend on a first aid course in Cambridge, which was exactly what I needed it to be - a thorough recap and reminder of things I know how to do but hadn't practiced for ages, that I might, you know, need to do as part of my job, except they can't afford to retrain me, So going on the student course was at least good practically speaking, although it's not te work recognised qualification.

It was perfect timing - back at work today, the show is a ballet; and prior experience has taught me that dancers can be fairly good at injuring themselves. No problems yet though, and they're only here for the one night. Just as well - the buildings only been full of ballet dancers for a few hours and I already feel huge. I don't need a repeat of the ballet central run in the summer.

It does also make me want to dance even more though; as if I needed any encouragement :) Dancing=joy

Among the audience going in was a woman who directed a show I stage managed, lit and co-produced exactly 2 years ago. She looked right at me without the slightest glimer of recognition. Ah, thesps...

Right I shall go back to writing letters to my MP, which I've taken to doing. Dear Tessa....

My computer appears to be on the fritz. This means that I may properly fail at NaBloPoMo this year, rather than just posting technically an hour too late.

When I try to boot Windows XP I get a blue screen error. When I try to boot Ubuntu I can only successfully log in to an x-terminal - trying to go direct to GNOME just makes the screen flicker a bit then dump me back at login. Perhaps it is time for a new computer.

Sadly, this means I may not be posting interesting stuff and responses to comments for a while. I'll try to return to daily blogging ASAP!

Seeing an event that you help run that started with about 20 participants a few years ago swell to over 100 is nice. It was a fun day. All tired now, especially after transport issues.

i wasted 17 quid on dyes.

After three washes I realised that the dress in question is acetate and therfore has no hope of being dyed.

There go my plans for creating a perfect black cocktail dress from old purple ballgown.

Humph there go my good intentions of 'make do and mend'

Dear anyone who was at khalinche 's party tonight: somebody walked off with my coat. It is a big, black, size 18 woolen coat and it has my bank card and oyster card in the pocket. It is very much loved, I'm upset to have lost it, and I'd like it back as soon as possible.

David Howarth will not be standing for re-election next General Election.

This means I'll actually have to put more thought into voting rather than just voting for the awesome guy who does stuff like stop people passing things that get known as "The Abolition of Parliament Bill"

It is done!

After 18 hours of writing I have finished the assignment. And it is possibly slightly better than mediocre and I still don't understand the harvard referencing system. But it is done. I have a thing I can hand in.

5,088 words.
1 lesson plan.
1 handout.
A poem by osama bin laden and a youtube clip about Jihad that acutally gives a moderate, sensible and contrasting opinion.

I am going to bed now. Then I am going to wake up and hand this in and then sleep again.

And there was me thinking that I'd left the days of essay crises well behind.

There were a bunch of interesting suggestions for stuff to be taught at schools following my last blog post (which can be read at http://androidkiller.livejournal.com/28134.html). However one thing that I found myself thinking when reading some of them was "Surely their parents or family should teach them that." This got me wondering, what sort of things should we expect families to teach children, and which should be covered in schools? I think that mostly what I think families should teach are the sorts of things that I feel you should have a basic grip on before school, perhaps at least the ideas of manners for example, and some everyday life things. I was surprised on an Explorer Scout (14 to 18 year olds) camp once when one Explorer messed up the cooking by pouring a huge amount of water on the mince and expecting the vegetables to just cook on their own. I feel that basic cooking skills should be taught by the family, but I can see that at the moment many adults lack these skills and so this is a good candidate for something that schools should teach, as well as classes for adults to help remedy this situation. I feel that the basics of getting public transport is another thing that families should do (as family trips to places could include these), but again some people don't get experiences like this and need schools to help them catch up. I do like the idea of monetary and consumer stuff being taught, as this is where a lot of people get into trouble without really knowing what they are doing. How to deal with bureaucracy is another good one. Practical skills like looking after bikes I can see arguments for both ways. The waters are of course muddied by various youth organisations that do teach some of these things. Of course this also means that people of certain backgrounds are more likely to get taught these skills, which could be a good argument for teaching them in skills, to prevent the inequality this causes.

Sorry this isn't hugely coherent, it's late and I probably haven't thought about this as much as I could have. But I'd be interested to see where people think the line should be. What do you think?

This morning, I collided with a car at the corner of James and Hurst streets.

On the one hand, I've written off my bike, will need to pay £200 in insurance excess, and have to go to the police station to "report my injuries". (Just finger injuries - tends to happen when you punch off someone's wing mirror - my head and body are fine.)

On the other hand, being unable to cycle into town means that I can wear stupid clothes and drink a lot at the Borderville gig tonight! They've linked my review of their album from their facebook event. I'm sure this must officially make me a BNF!

It's all about priorities.

At the moment at work we have a Shakespeare schools festival on - each night four schools each perform a different extract.

I had a feeling it was going to be a challenging shift tonight, after seeing it from afar, so to speak, from stage door last night. This was confirmed when the director came and complained to me about other people using the Green room as he claimed he was meant to have it exclusively to use as an overflow changing room, with there being so many groups of kids. (He didn't of course have it exclusively). Then the stage manager disappeared when I needed to open the house and myself, the techncian and the director couldn't find her. She turned up about 2 minutes before the show.

What I wasn't expecting was racism. A customer came up to one of the ushers, who is mixed race, and told him, among other comments about the show that "none of the minority children could act" (the usher was clear that ethnic minority was what was meant). The usher reported this to me after the interval. I don't know how well I dealt with it: The man in question came out half way through the second half and and started playing with his phone, so I approached him, saying that I understood he had some comments about the show and was there a problem I could help with. He said no, but obviously caught my tone/expression, adding that he had been "joking" with an usher. I said, yes, the usher had been unhappy with what was said. I got an apology - at first the "sorry I didn't mean it seriously, sorry if it was misconstued as being offensive" false apology. I said I'd pass the apology on; and stayed where I was. I wasn't satisfied obviously, and if it'd been a non-work situation I would have said so, but at work I was uncertain how to proceed - unfortunately you can't call customers racist c***s. But although I didn't really say much more, the fact that I stayed standing there, and didn't go away, whilst he continued to fiddle with his phone, I think embarrassed him, because he intermiitedly, between fiddling, and attempting a one-sided conversation about how much he liked the theatre, kept apologising. And gradually his apologies moved towards "I'm sorry what I said was offensive" - *almost* a real apology. Not one full enough that I would be personally happy with, still, but getting closer.

On reflection I think I didn't push it enough, And I probably should have made him apologise to the usher in question - at the time I didn't because the usher had asked to swap positions with another usher so he didn't have to see or talk to this man again; but what I should have done was ask him if he would like a personal apology to his face, rather than assuming not and allowing it to be made through me. I've never ever had to deal with a customer saying something like this before. Sometimes angry customers are offensive (although in my experience not in a racist or other prejudiced way - just in a swearing/insulting way), but I've never had someone say something so offensive so casually, in a situation where I had to repsond to it as the manager in charge, rather than as an individual.. So my response wasn't as good as it could have been. I'm mostly just shocked that it happened.

Here's an interesting question. What do you think should be taught in schools that isn't currently?

Personally I think people should be taught more about problems with the way that we tend to think. I've stuck some wikipedia links here to try and make what I'm getting at clearer, but I must stress I haven't read them all.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). For instance, people should be taught about confirmation bias, the way that the human brain tends to pick up evidence that seems to confirm ideas that we already have more than evidence to the contrary. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias). We should explicitly teach people that correlation doesn't imply causation, and in what sort of circumstances we need to remember this. Also about how memory is less reliable than a lot of people think (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_bias). Helping people to spot various logical fallacies would probably be quite useful too.

I think that explaining these sorts of things to children simply will make them much more capable of making well informed decisions in later life. Would people agree with that?

I should probably come right out and admit that I love dystopias, and I love musical narratives. (An adolesence spent reading Orwell and Atwood and watching Rocky Horror and Hedwig will do that to a girl.)

It will probably come as a surprise to no-one at all, then, when I say that I love dystopian concept albums. David Bowie's Diamond Dogs and Gary Numan's Replicas hold places in my heart from which they may never be ousted.

Regular readers may also know that I am, at times, prone to hyperbole (ironically, this sentence is in fact understatement). So I really had to look closely at my thought processes when I wanted to log on here today and tell you all that Borderville's Joy Through Work is the best dystopian concept album that I have ever heard. On reflection, I want to modify that statement; Borderville's Joy Through Work is the only dystopian concept album which feels immediate to me. Replicas and Diamond Dogs are quite clearly set in some future: cyberpunk and post-apocalypse, respectively. But Joy Through Work is a dystopian concept album where the dystopia is the capitalist megamachine that I feel crunching us all into its cogs more and more each day. It's real, and it's now, and it's everything that distresses and depresses me about the world I see; yet it offers hope.

I cannot stress enough how much what follows is half review, half creative response to this hope. Of course, I want to excite you all to purchase their album (either today from their website with a beautiful gatefold sleeve, or when it receives its multi-platform digital launch on 5 December), but this is more than that; I want to spread the beauty that they have built out of degradation, and the hope that they have built out of despair.

( Review )

After a couple of comparatively relaxing days, I thought I'd better get back to doing stuff. Unfortunately I can't say no, espceially where work is concerned.

Today:

Number of new shifts I've agreed to work next week (on top of existing shifts): 4

Number of days I will have to get up before 6am next week for early shifts: 5

Number of political pettions signed: 2

Number of white peace poppies bought: 1

Number of 350 page documents edited: 1

Bon.

Oxford Circus X-crossing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8337341.stm

This seems sensible. In fact, I've done this at some crossings before when all of the lights are on red at the same time. But £5 million for the privilege? Surely it should be gold-plated at that price!

In other news, the short updates brought to you by "Tales of the Unanticipated", tonight at 11pm at the ADC.
http://www.adctheatre.com/showsmall.asp?code=575&event=1801

Is there any possible application for a male Micro SATA to female SATA + male Molex adapter? It could be used to plug a normal hard drive into a Micro SATA bay, I suppose, but only if you ignore the Molex. If you plug in both Micro SATA and Molex you'll be joining two power sources together.

Anyway, if you can think of a purpose, I appear to have bought three by accident. I meant to buy these instead which are rather more useful (but out of stock everywhere).

Today, a quick game of "Bad Thing, Good Thing"

Bad Thing: Updating Ubuntu to Karmic Koala breaking a large number of programs running on it for no apparent reason.

Good Thing: Googling turning up an answer which was easy to implement and required no touching of the command line, but still gave a sense of a difficulty overcome.

I thought this sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen with Ubuntu. Turned out one package that I had installed was causing problems for some of the new ones. I've yet to find out if removing it has broken anything else. And there are still another few wrinkles I haven't managed to sort out yet.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if I can run Windows 7 on this computer (my graphics chipset doesn't like Aero, according to the Update Advisor), and my Windows XP install is very very slow, so Ubuntu is still top dog. For now...