Monthly Archives: May 2007

Call & Collect

Thursday May 17th 2007

This morning I got the phone call I’ve been expecting would come since Elisha started nursery in December. They said she was ill, and could somebody come and pick her up because they thought it was a bug and didn’t want to put the other kids at risk.

When I went to get her I figured she’d be tearful and running a temperature, but she seemed alright to me. I gathered her stuff and took her out to the car, then figured that this (just after eleven on a Thursday morning) would be as good a time as any to take her to the Early Learning Centre for a play. That turned out to be the case, as it was pretty much empty and Elisha had a free reign to play with the bikes and other odds and ends.

I wanted to get her some flash cards with animals and stuff on them so we could help her learn them, but the closest I found was a jigsaw type of thing with animals and objects in different shapes that you had to match to the appropriate hole. I got that for her and a box of chalks so she could draw on the patio, too.

Once we were home I took her out into the back garden with a purple stick of chalk that she’d chosen from the box, showed her what to do with it, and then left her to draw while I made us lunch. The chalk didn’t seem to be a big hit, to be honest. She just left it on the ground and went for a wander into the garden next door.

I brought her back in for lunch and after that I showed her the jigsaw. We had fun for a while as I picked out an animal in turn and asked “what’s that?”, pausing for dramatic effect before telling her the answer, then giving it to her to put back in the board. She seemed to think it was good fun for a while, but then wanted to see if she could make the fish fit where the cat was supposed to go. Not exactly the point of the thing, but at least she was having fun with it.

One out of two isn’t bad – I’m sure she’ll warm to the chalks some other time.

Now we have to figure out who’s staying home to play with the jigsaw and chalk tomorrow, as Elisha cant go back to nursery for 48 hours or until the “bug” clears.

Let The Credits Roll

Wednesday May 16th 2007

I’ve become increasingly irritated by all the bollocks that’s going on towards the end of programmes of late. I hate having my concentration broken by something that pops on screen to prompt me to watch the show that follows, or to remind me that there’s something on a sister channel they want me to watch.

Throw in the voice over people that jump in the second the credits roll and it’s not just the advert break volume spike that has me reaching for the mute button.

Sadly it looks like it’s going to get worse, too – the BBC are going hard core on this kind of thing from June onwards. To quote Charlie Brooker’s neat summary; “the BBC are about to ruin the ending of everything they show.”

It’s not that I watch a lot of BBC stuff – I saw adverts for a bunch of new BBC Three comedy programmes last night that indicate they’re so obviously desperate to find a replacement for Little Britain, now that it’s jumped the shark, that they’re using the scattergun approach of commissioning as many quirky comedy shows as they can get their hands on.

The real worry for me is that once the BBC advocates credit hijacking then it’s the green light for every other broadcaster to follow.

Last FM Widgets

Saturday May 12th 2007

Not to be confused with my favourite desktop friends, Yahoo! Widgets, Last FM now have their own selection of Widgets that make it easy for you to embed your listening data into your web page. I replaced my own solution with the Last FM one today, as it’s more functional and much better looking than mine was.

My php script was polling the XML feed of my recent artists from Last FM, parsing the XML and wrapping HTML list tags around the song data, creating a text file from the result, then embedding that into the page (if it wasn’t too many hours old) to display my list of recent songs. Quite a round trip, eh?

The Last FM Widget cuts out all that nonsense, so it’s a welcome addition to the sidebar.