Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm working from home today... Although I use the term 'working' loosely; it's more like 'achieving very little while attempting to work but being distracted by anything, even cleaning'.

Still, I have made myself a mental to-do list, which I'm nearly done with. After that, I'm going reward myself by playing Skyrim. Yes, the length and detail of my list was an afterthought once I'd decided I was going to play Skyrim. But that's not the point, at least I'm not just jumping straight on the xbox! I think it's quite commendable...

Mrs T and I are currently working our way through all the Jonathan Creek episodes. There is a surprising amount of nudity, I wonder if that is because I have the DVD versions, I don't remember boobs when it was shown on tv.

Taunton Dean Services. 280 miles from home. Ka seems to drink fuel at 85.

Gatwick airport. Yo! Sushi for lunch (I AM DISAPPOINT), need something to do for an hour.

Will probably drink.

Home. Waiting for car to be collected.

Earlier today I was upstairs chopping off bungle's fingers, and someone gave my knocker a damn good thrashing. Try as I might, I just couldn't finish off and polish the teatowel holder quick enough to get downstairs to answer the door. I even swayed side to side to try and break the bastard's back and, via a system of internal flexing and clenching, drive the broken branch back up but to no avail. The guy was quite patient and gave three bouts of flicking my flap up and down too. When I did get downstairs I found a standard cardboard "sorry you were out!" courier cards pushed through the slot. Bloody depot was in Aston too, so it'd involve a journey similar to Frodo's into Mordor for me to pick it up. Anyway, an hour passed and my Ma turned up to take me to the mental hospital and to my utter delight the courier guy came back and delivered the parcel! He must've been passing by and saw the car pulled up outside. Supah boffo service.

A positive tale of a courier company! Interlink Express it were.

I've never known them to do such a thing!

I would suggest starting a "positive courier service stories thread" but I think that post would be very lonely.

Maybe an "Interupted turd with positive outcome" thread?

I've got my own office!

What a positive outcome! You interrupted turd.

How come it took you till now to post on here then? You should been on here at 9:05.

Heavily monitored internets! I think I'm done as far as posting 9-5 is concerned!

Use your phone, and get told off for excessive phone use instead. Worked for me!

Really monitored? We used to tell the kids their inderneds were monitored and besides the usual porny firewall and occasionally checking the proxy logs, I couldn't be arsed. Real exemplar for my kind, me. Shining. On a pedastal. PLINTH

Like fucking OMG! It's some unguent froth under a cloche on a plinth!

Cloche is a great word.

Cloche.

I covered my cloche in cibrushille. Looks lovely.

Some boiling froth sloughed off my shin skin. I need unguent.

Yeah. Actual monitored internet pretty much never happens. Because paying someone to actually look at what's hapening in the proxy logs costs money. If you don't want people going to websites, you block them you don't monitor them.

My firm blocks almost all the Internet and you have to request the IT department to unblock individual sites.

I say department but it's a team of 2 who are never at their desks and one is an aging old woman.

This works as well as it sounds.

We log all, read nothing. If plod want a look, they can.

I'm kind of banking on the fact that my work doesn't monitor the Internet usage.. If they did, I'm sure I would have been told off about it by now.

I suppose it helps that I'm on a different site to the "computers" department and as such, they probably don't care about us.

You people credit the IT department with too much, man. Too busy to be monitoring your poxy arses. This porn won't watch itself, you know.

I have the worst desk in the large open plan office. My monitor is in full view of all the senior managers....

I hope you went into the Bee Hive (or whatever the Wetherspoons is called) and drank Erdinger.

Nope. I only spotted a place that sold it on my way to the gate. Everywhere else was heaving though, I doubt I'd have got a seat.

You could either do the incredibly tedious computer course (with sections on Windows, Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel) with training sections and tests for each one... or do a 'challenge exam' which, provided you got 80% or higher, counted as a pass for the whole course.

So a friend and I went and just did the challenge exam today. I got 87, she got 96! Thank fuck. The testing software is so picky, it insists you do it as it wants you to, so when it told me to 'undo' something and I hit Ctrl-Z it told me it was correct but to 'try another way of doing that action' or I'd get it wrong.

American Dad is good tonight. Much racism and rudeness.

GCSEs to be no more from 2015

I'm sure the employers will love working out what a particular EBacc score is in GCSE "old money".

Also, I give it until 2016 until the papers start going on about how EBaccs are easier than GCSEs (as per GCSE vs O Level), and 2018 when the papers start saying that EBaccs are getting easier than they used to be.

Pointless fucking meddling.

Quite. And the root cause appears to be that with coursework assessments you can research and get other people to help you. If I count up the number of times during my life I've had a need to dredge up facts from my brain in silence with no recourse to any other sources, and compare that to the number of times I've needed to find stuff out with the internet and other people available to me, it's quite clear which is better preparation for life.

Teaching people how to make best use of the information that's all around them (and critically assess the value of such) is what teaching should be about, not cramming facts into your skull.

How are you going to get an art/design 'EBac' without coursework?!

Fucking paint quicker.

You're not.

It's always us artists that suffer most...

Isn't it only for core subjects or something? I'm not reading one article.

Maths science and english first, then more the year after and so on and so on. Phasing it in yo.

Quite easy. GCSE (any grade) = worthless.
New thing = ?

So there will be some kids coming out with EBacs and GCSE's for a while then?

Fantastic.

What happened to grading on a curve? When a third of students are getting As and above (and getting above an A is ludicrous anyway) then the system needs fixing.

including my youngest 2 sons.

1 started secondary school this year, and one in 2 years time! Hopefully it will be sorted out by the time my daughter does them!

Malc

We stopped doing it because grading on a curve is fucking stupid.

Well, that's exactly what they did this year. They shifted the curve meaning that a load of people got worse marks than they were expecting.

And grading on a curve is bollocks anyway. It only makes sense if you only need to compare within a given year's intake. If you grade on a curve, then I as an employer might be looking to choose between hiring a 16-year old or a 17-year old. One has an A in maths, one has a B, even though they both got exactly the same mark in the exam. Who am I going to hire?

Why?

Life is a competition, you will only ever be looked at compared to the others around you.

Others around you <> others of exactly the same school year as you.

No, they changed the grade boundaries and marking criteria, not the curve, cos we don't have a curve.


Zackly. If you have a thick year (it happens) then it's suddenly a lot easier to get an A.

Just do what everyone does

Both guys, then pick the least cunt like.
Both girls, the most attractive one.

Stop using logic against me, it's annoying.

Heh.

The other interesting thing here is that the big thing he's touting is that he's getting rid of coursework (because it's "too easy", presumably based on empirical, controlled tests? Oh, wait...),. Of course, IGCSEs and the International Baccalaureate, which are both lauded by Gove, both involve loads of coursework. Gove is modelling the EBacc on the IBacc, of course. Gove is an idiot.

Windows have been washed, apparently. They're supposed to be done on a Wednesday, and that's when we leave the back gate unlocked. Yet every time we get some decent rain, the little card gets popped through the letterbox saying we now owe them money. I think I'll cancel that one.