Failure is the Key to Success

Walkers Crisps are running a promotion called BritTrips. This is to promote the fact that there are many things to do in the UK without having to go to the airport for a holiday. There are codes in bags of crisps that you register online to get points. You can exchange the points for partial or full payment of a selection of days out, meals, holiday accommodation etc.
Anyway, last Saturday afternoon we took the bikes out to Marston Vale again and cycled round the other bit of the cycle path. I was really good, as my son can now ride without stabilisers and this was the first time out since he had first managed.
On Sunday afternoon we converted 5 of our BritTrip points into a voucher for entry/parking at the RSPB headquarters in Sandy, which is about 45-50 minutes away from us. It was a really hot day, which was a shame in a way, as the birds were staying out of the way, at least they were on the heath trail that we walked. Part of the way round the heath trail is a pond that has been established for Natterjack toads and there were loads of damselflies and a couple of dragonflies flying around. I managed to get a photo of one of the damselflies, a male Large Red damselfly as I found out when I got home, and several photos of a female Broad Bodied Chaser dragonfly, also found out when I got home. There was a cuckoo in the woods further over, I can’t remember if I have ever heard one before, if I have it was a long time ago. We called it a day after about 1.5 hours as everyone was getting tired.

Tags:broad bodied chaser,dragonfly,rspb

A couple of weeks ago Jo and I decided we needed to get bikes so that we could keep up with the kids when they are on their bikes. I got a couple more Thule bike carriers to go on our roof bars, so it was just time to get bikes.

I looked about the local area for bike shops and last Saturday we all went over to Hitchin to Cycledealia to see what they had. Their suggestion for our requirement was a Giant Rock, but they didn’t have the size frames either of us would need. It was suggested that for a Giant bike I would need a 21″ frame and Jo would need a 17″. They were going to order in some bikes that week for this weekend, so to ring on Friday to confirm and then we could go back on Saturday. We finished the day watching the ducks and eating ice cream.

Jo rang them on Friday to be told that they didn’t have them, nor would they have. They would only have got the sizes in to order and didn’t know why we were told otherwise. Not impressed.

Anyway, Jo checked around some other shops, and on Friday afternoon, before we collected the kids from school, we went over to St Albans to Addiktion Cycles. John there was very helpful and we quickly settled on a pair of Ridgeback bikes. A MX2 in a 21″ frame for me and a MX2 open frame in a 17″ frame for Jo. The 17″ was already built, so Jo was able to try the bike we would buy. The 21″ wasn’t built, so they checked size for me on a 19.5″ Trek, which is about the same size. We got bike helmets and some security while we were there.

Yesterday afternoon we went over to collect the bikes and did a bit of shopping at St Albans market. When we got home, I took my bike out round the block. Of course, I didn’t take it easy to start with and by the time I got home, realised just how unfit I am.

This morning we went to a car boot sale and this afternoon we took all the bikes up to the Forest Centre at Marston Vale where we spent about 1.5 hours cycling around the wetlands part of the figure 8 cycle path. It was a really good afternoon.

Tags:marston vale,ridgeback mx2

On Thursday 24th April, the school is having to close to pupils. This is because the teachers, who are members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), are going on strike for more pay. The senior management team and the teaching assistants, who are not in the NUT, will be in school but are advised by their unions not to cover the striking teachers.

It is obvious with the timing of the strike, just as children are about to start their annual tests and exams, that the union do not care about the education of our children, they are only interested in lining their members’ pockets and causing the maximum disruption. The strike was called following a ballot of members, in which a majority of those who voted agreed with the strike, however this majority was less than one quarter of NUT members, so it is apparent most teachers didn’t want to strike.

To put this in perspective, the average earnings for a full time male employee was £498 a week (£25,896 per annum) in April 2007 (National Statistics Online - Earnings) and £394 (£20,480) for a full time female employee. From the NUT website you can find the teachers payscales and find the following:

A qualified teacher will start on point 1 on the main pay scale which at September 2007 is £20,133, the following year they will under normal performance conditions progress to point 2 which is proposed to be £22,259, the following year point 3 at £24,601, the following year point 4 at £27,103, the following year point 5 at £29,239(+next pay rise) and the following year £31,551(+the next 2 pay rises).

So, to recap, after 4 years of teaching, a qualified teacher is already earning above the national average, with 2 more years of points gain on the main pay scale and a guaranteed rise each year.

When you look around an average school staff car park, you will see an abundance of new cars, so I must be missing something. What makes teachers think that they are the only people who work hard for a living and are hard done by?  Other people also work hard to provide the money through our taxes to pay for teachers guaranteed rises. Many people in the private sector go for years with below inflation or no pay rises, with increasing responsibilities (without bonuses for taking them on). We are the ones who have to find additional childcare costs or use our holiday time to look after our children who should be in school (of course we don’t have as much holiday time to start with).

Am I bitter, yes of course I am. It’s impossible not to to be when the disruption this causes has such a personal impact. Do teachers work hard, again yes, I don’t dispute that. Do they work efficiently, I’m not so certain; from observation, time management that you would see at all levels in a private company seems to have bypassed many teachers, increasing their levels of stress as they struggle to manage their day.

The big question is what do the unions expect to achieve with this strike? Blackmail the government into giving them their demanded 10% pay rise by disrupting our children’s education just as they prepare to take exams? Gain public support by causing millions of parents financial cost to look after their children while earning more than many of them?

I’d love to work for a company where each year’s pay rise was guaranteed, but I work in the real world.

Tags:NUT,teachers' strike

Tim at The Inflatable Soapbox blind sided me this with this post and tag on Tuesday night.

I wasn’t able to reply on Tuesday as I was replacing a failing hard disc and reinstalling Windows XP on a laptop for a colleague at work. I’d forgotten how long it takes from plain XP, through Service Pack 2 and then downloading and installing the remaining 91 security patches. Still, after all that I was able to install Avast as a free Anti-Virus program and Open Office as a free office suite (much better than MS Works that was previously on the system).

On Wednesday at work, I got called to look at a printer with a paper jam. Usually a simple fix, in the worse case maybe a pair of tweezers to remove the last bit of torn paper. The printer was an old, but very serviceable LaserJet 4000, not very heavy use, so plenty of life left in it. Of course, no maintenance on it, its not worth it for a printer that’s getting on for 9-10 years, so if I didn’t fix it, we would replace it…it would be cheaper than getting it fixed. After 10 minutes at the printer location pulling scraps of paper out of it, I took it back to my desk. I ended up unscrewing just about every bit that would come off, before I could finally get the tweezers to the last bits of crinkled paper and pull it out. All in all, I removed a piece of paper about the size of my hand, but it was finally working again.  Just time to get it back on the shop-floor and get the toner off my hands before going home.

One of my memorable tech troubles was a few years ago, I can’t remember if it was on a Tuesday or not. We were upgrading our local SMS server (used for software and patch distribution) from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003. On the face of it all the hardware was supported, so there shouldn’t be any issues. Any applicable updates had been deployed successfully to the client PCs in the morning, so the afternoon was an acceptable timeframe for the upgrade. The upgrade was run and completed successfully. Big sigh of relief when the logon screen came up. However, the network card didn’t detect on logon, so the server was shut down and restarted. Watching the message that no RAID array was found was not what I wanted to see. For those non-technical reading this, a RAID array is a collection of discs that your data is spread across to provide redundancy is case of a single disc failure, if it couldn’t find the RAID array it meant it couldn’t find any data on the server, in essence I had a box with some pretty lights, but not serving its purpose.

So, some urgent searching of the Dell site and Google uncovered the answer. I should have upgraded the firmware on the RAID controller before upgrading to Windows 2003. The firmware is the program that controls how the RAID controller works. On investigation, it was several versions older than that needed to work with Windows 2003, oops. Needless to say, the version that was currently installed wouldn’t upgrade directly to the version I needed in one go, so several updates and restarts later, all was working well again. No downtime as far as the use of the server went, but got the adrenalin going. The moral of this story, ‘if the instructions states there are prerequisites like firmware and driver updates, there is a reasonable chance they are not optional’. From it I learnt to carefully read and follow instructions when upgrading operating systems - especially on a server in a production environment.

So, a bit later than Tuesday, but there’s a triumph and a trouble that became a triumph.

I got hold of a Nikon mount for my Tamron lenses just over a week ago and tried taking some photos last weekend. I tried my 60-300mm f3.8-5.4 SP and my original 80-210mm f3.8-4 with and without doubler to see how practical it would be to use a totally manual lens on a digital camera.

First impressions were that it seemed a lot harder to hand hold a stable image than it had been when using film, but that could have been down to exposure settings. Also, there will be a degree of guess and bracketing to get the correct exposure. I managed to get shots which were correctly exposed, but to be honest, I was disappointed with the image quality. The shots seemed very soft and not as sharp as I had been used to getting using the lens on my film camera.

I didn’t get back to looking at it until yesterday afternoon, when I put my 80-210mm lens on my camera on a tripod and shot some flowers and a magpie in the garden. The images were a lot better, but still softer than I would have liked. The magpie was shot at 210mm which is equivalent to 315mm on a 35mm camera. I really needed to repeat this with the other lens (60-300mm) that I had used more recently, but the weather hasn’t been good this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow.

Tags:manual lens,tamron lens

Yesterday Jo-N at Shower Your Children with Love awarded me the Wise Owl award. Thank you. The extra effort to add our names is appreciated. I’m a firecracker! This award was created by Heidi Hyde at Hydes Like Us to show gratitude for those who inspire and mentor us in blogging.

This is now the point at which I should list my recipients for the award, but I’m not going to. Not because there aren’t people out there who inspire me, but because there are too many to choose. You inspire for the breadth and quality of what you blog about, the reasons you blog, the effort that you put into providing regular (and irregular) updates to your lives and experiences. So, this award’s for you. If you read my blog and I read yours, consider me inspired by what you write.

Tags:wise owl award