Phew

As stated on Twitter, I found out today that I won’t be being made redundant. To say I’m relieved is an understatement. The consequences of losing my job would have been severe. There are very few jobs going and even fewer that would have a salary close to what I’m on now. Outside of working in a school I have little other work experience too so I’m not sure what I could have done.

Although we wouldn’t end up living up on the streets, there would have been a very good chance we would have to either sell the house and move in with parents or borrow money from parents, either way putting a huge and unfair burden on our family. The prospect of all this has put a huge pressure on me and I’m just glad it’s all over and that I have had a lot of support from everyone whilst waiting to hear the outcome of my interview.

It is extremely rare for me to get angry, but whilst waiting to hear about my job I could feel the anger building up. I could have lost my job not because I’m not good at it. Not because the place I work for needed to get rid of me. But because we are absorbing another school that has failed (and been forced to shut) and to take on their staff there would be some people surplus to requirement. Now from a business and legal standpoint I understand that people at both sites need to be treated equally. But to be on the receiving end of a possible redundancy it felt very personal. The idea of losing my job through no fault of my own has never occurred to me. I’m not in a role that the school can do without (unless they change teaching regulations re: how often teachers should cover lessons) and I assume I do a good enough job as nobody has ever complained (to my face!).

A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I’ve not lost any sleep over the issue but I all of a sudden feel like sleeping for a rather long time. Again thanks to everyone for their support, most especially my lovely wife who no doubt has found it just as stressful as I have.

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Goodbye, Facebook

I think I’m going to leave Facebook. After deleting the vast majority of ‘friends’ from there, the only real use it has been is seeing the odd pictures from friends. Even then, the people I’m interested in seeing about are friends with my wife on Facebook so anything really worth seeing she will no doubt show me anyway.

So yeah I’m going to delete it. May be forever, maybe not, I shall see. I have barely used it and between this blog and Twitter I have the whole ‘posting whatever I want’ covered.

Will leave a status up for a couple of days with my Twitter/e-mail/blog details and then get delete the account.

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Fucking Garden Fence!

Recently I’ve been doing well with money. For me, anyway. It’s also helped I got a decent amount of money for selling a gold soverign and also for cashing in about 16 hours of extra work. So in the past few weeks I have managed to buy some nice things for myself including:

  • New netbook (arrives tomorrow!)
  • New camera
  • A couple of games
  • A couple of books
  • A chinese and a few nice lunches

This is in addition to having to spend money on a the dog’s booster injections and a couple of birthdays. So about breaking even for this month.

So when’s the perfect time for the garden fence to start breaking apart with the strong winds? Yeah, now. In-laws reckon about £250 for new panels. If this could only have happened a couple of weeks ago, I could have not bought some of those things and have asked for B&Q vouchers for my birthday (which is on Friday).

Should really have an emergency fund I know, but between birthdays, Christmas, our anniversary and OU fees, the first few months of the year conspire to make me poor and April is a chance to treat myself a bit, and so I did.

You win this time, nature.

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Ashamed of my Shame

It’s no secret I am a geek, and always have been. It is something I am proud of, but this was not always the case! Like many people I became more aware of what others may think of me during my teenage years. I’m not sure when exactly I did it, either just before going to college or just before university, but I trashed a lot of my geeky things through shame that the new people I would meet would judge me negatively. Which in retrospect is shameful in itself, and of course I gravitated to people that were fellow geeks anyway. It was probably the fear of scaring off girls actually, which is a silly thing as there was no real danger of them entering my bedroom, let alone my house.

One of the things I binned was a technical manual of the USS Enterprise D. I loved this book: 

It attempted (pretty well) to scientifically explain all the ins and outs of the ship, with a few bits of behind the scenes trivia on the show. I have regretted throwing it away for a while, so the other day, on a whim, I looked it up on Amazon to find it going second hand at the tidy sum of £2.81 including delivery. Well I could hardly refuse! So it’ll be part nostalgia re-reading it but part correcting the mistake I made of being ashamed of what I love.

So when it arrives this week it will take pride on my shelf amongst my comics, games, DVDs and programming books.  The funny thing is this time there will be a woman in my house, and this one will call me a loser. But it’s ok, we’re married, it’s allowed and she loves me anyway.

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DIGITALCOMICSNAO!

I’ve written about this before but it’s bugging me again, for the love of Thor please Marvel (and the rest), bite the bullet and start releasing digital comics simultaneously with print copies. Not just some obscure, non essential title like you’ve done with Hawkeye & Mockingbird. All the titles. I do not live anywhere near a comic shop so I have to use eBay which is just a pain in the arse!

Marvel has an okayish website for digital comics, and a pretty good iOS reader (in fact lovely to read on my iPad). The process to make the comic work with these apps can’t be that convoluted, get that stuff out there!

So I propose this:

  • Simultaneous digital and print releases of all titles.
  • £2 for new comics.
  • £1.19 for comics 3 months old and over.
  • £6 for the equivalent of a 6-issue trade/story arc.
  • All print copies of your comics come with a redeemable code for the digital version at no extra cost.

Books and TV shows already have simultaneous physical and digital distribution, movies may get there eventually but I can at least understand a director wanting to their audience to see their work in a cinema. But comics? On an iPad the images are always 100% crisp and clean. I would argue it is the best way to view a comic.

No delivery costs (though yeah, 1/3 of the money goes to Apple on iOS). No delays for re-prints. Always-on impulse buying. Sales whenever you want. Hell, whack adverts in the comics to get the extra money, we’re used to ads in comics.

Yeah sucks to be working in the brick-and-mortar stores but it is the nature of the world. Formats change and business needs to change with it. People didn’t keep using VHS because they didn’t want the people who’s livelihoods depend on it’s use to be safe. Digital comics are not new, you would not be springing this upon an unsuspecting industry.

Ok rant over, back to work now. Ahem.

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Mental Music Videos

When listening to music I like to construct my own mental video to match it. Certain songs more than others invoke imagary, one such track is “Heartbeat” by Robyn:

A lot of the videos I envisage are influenced by science fiction. The strings playing constantly throughout the track combined with the lyrics give a sad tone, while the electronica sound definitely makes me think of travelling though space. So my video for this has some kind of space-born entity (I actually picture Moya from Farscape) who is heartbroken, speeding away from it’s former lover at the speed of light, passing beautiful nebulae in an attempt to run away from it’s feelings.

Ahh, lovely, lonely sadness in space.

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April Fools Memory

I just remembered something from an April Fools Day some 20 years ago. My primary school teacher was leaving and I was terribly upset. Miss Cooper was brilliant, we went to the same karate club together and she even gave me 1:1 extra karate practice after school (you know, before such things would automatically be assumed nefarious).

So I was at home and being the sensitive soul I am, was sobbing away. Mum decided to try and cheer me up by showing me an article in the local paper about something amazing, aliens being proved real or something, landing in my home town. This momentarily cheered me up until she said it was an April Fools joke, at which point I cried even more. First my primary teacher leaves me, then it turns out aliens aren’t real.

Worst April Fools ever!

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The Naked God: Finished!

I finally finished The Naked God, thereby completing the epic Night’s Dawn trilogy. Again no surprise, I found it to be brilliant.

*Major Spoilers*

There are just a few niggles I had with the book. The ending is very Deus Ex Machina, which in a way was always obvious from the moment Joshua and Syrinx set off to find The Sleeping God, but I feel there should have been some greater challenge once they found it. Not simply just *Bing!* Joshua is given God-like abilities to save the day. His solution was good and interesting, but I didn’t like the way his ability was used to tie up so many threads, especially that of Quinn Dexter. Such a brilliant villain was disposed of all too easily. I was expecting Louise, Fletcher, Powell Manani, Dariat and Tolton to all battle Quinn and outsmart him.

My other niggle is that I can believe in God like machinery that can transport whole solar systems with wormholes, I can believe Al Capone came back from the dead to conquer the galaxy and I can believe in all the different dimensions with vampire like alien souls, but the romance between Joshua and Louise? Nope. Throughout the books the love between Josh and Ione is built up so much to be this love that can never be, you assume that in the end, against all odds they will end up together. But no, he goes and marries the woman he shagged a few times and barely spoke to. He never once expressed any feeling for her other than guilt at leading her on. So to then at the end of it say he loves her and wants to marry her is just very unbelievable to me. Josh should have ended up with Ione and Louise with either Fletcher or Andy.

*End of spoilers*

Anyway they are really minor niggles compared to the rest of the book. I found each of the plot threads to be entertaining and I really do feel like I’ve been on the adventure with them. They are very, very lengthy books but if you’ve got the time and you love epic science fiction, you won’t be disappointed!

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Imagine

I am not naive enough to think we don’t need a military force. But I do like to imagine what we could accomplish with our armed forces if they were used as a Thunderbirds style “International Rescue” and we could bring all that equipment and skill to help out with events like the devastation of Japan.

Imagine if aircraft carriers were mobile hospitals. Imagine if more troops were trained as field medics and engineers to help repair and rebuild people and infrastructure. I wonder how many evac helicopters could be built for the price of a nuclear sub?

Sigh. I guess military spending is not going to go down much in the next century or three. It just seems that there shouldn’t be the need for fundraising for such disasters, as a species we should have a better funded international rescue team. I don’t know how much money the Red Cross receive a year but I bet it’s a fraction of a percent of what the major world powers spend on their military.

Well, back off to my imaginary land of glee where the sun is always shining and money grows on trees.

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For @OnlyRad, iPad App Recommendations

Some Twitterfolk have been murmuring about getting iPads and I think @OnlyRad has just ordered one so I though I’d make a short(ish) list of essentials!

Reading Apps

I use RSS feeds extensively to keep up to date with all my favourite websites, in fact the only websites I manually visit are BBC News and Facebook. If you’re using Google Reader then the app for you is Reeder (£2.99). It’s slick, simple and offers nice options like sharing articles and a Readability function that can retrieve the whole article for those RSS feeds that only have the first paragraph or so of a story.

Next up is the Kindle app (Free). I prefer it over iBooks because Kindle books are cheaper and you can read them on a PC, Mac, Android and eventually within any web browser so you’re future proofing your eBooks.

Comics wise you can’t go wrong with Comics. Sure most comics are a year old but it’s good for catching up with older stuff. It has lots of publishers on board (including Marvel and DC) and I think all but the Marvel ones can also be viewed online too. Each comic is about £1.19 which is pretty good.

If you come across a lot of ‘must read’ links throughout the day, you should get yourself Instapaper (£2.99). A large number of apps support it and you can use a bookmarklet to send links to your Instapaper account. When you launch Instapaper it downloads all the articles, strips out the ads and presents it in a very simple way for you to enjoy on or offline at your leisure.

The iPad reads a lot of popular file formats off the bat, but if you want a great file reader you need GoodReader (£2.99). I read a lot of PDFs and have found GoodReader essential, not only for it’s easy organisation of your files but the fact that it connects to my Dropbox account and pretty much any other cloud service you will need. They are constantly improving it and it’s PDF annotation features are matching some PDF apps that cost almost 10 times as much.

Productivity Apps

The built in Calendar is ok but very basic. If you want better integration with online calendars (like Google Calendar), and a decent todo list/organiser, go for Informant HD (£8.99). It’s pricey but worth it if you like to organise your life.

For note taking, I only recently got this but it’s fantastic, Springpad (free). It is also available on other platforms including it’s website and all notes sync automatically. You can attach links, files, locations and more to your notes and you can even present them on a pinboard. In addition to this you can share your notes with others so it would also be great for organising parties/events or even collaborating with work as you can set notes to be public.

The iPad isn’t really a creation device, it’s a consumption device but if you really want them, the Numbers, Keynote and Pages (£5.99 each) apps by Apple are pretty good. If you’re after a database app, you can’t go wrong with Bento (£2.99) either.

Misc Apps

I have tried out a large proportion of the Twitter apps, and the winner for me is Twitterific (free, in-app purchase to remove ads). The reason being it’s simple, stable and it colour codes replies, DMs and mentions differently so if you’re skimming it’s very easy to see when people are talking to or about you. The official Twitter app is pretty and simple, and Osfoora is great if you want all the bells and whistles such as managing lists and using GPS to show you the locations of where other people are tweeting, but Twitterific is the one I always go back to.

For the lazy amongst us, getting up and going to the next room to see if a file has downloaded on your other computer is just too much. SplashTop (£2.99, free version also available) to the rescue! It’s a very simple VNC style app that lets you connect to your PC/Mac and control it remotely. The best part is the speed and quality is good enough to watch videos, so if you want to see a Flash video, get it streaming on your PC and watch on your iPad. I did this with 4OD to watch the first series of Misfits and it worked a treat.

IMDB is one of the most frequent websites I use. It’s a database of movies, tv shows, computer games and more that has information on actors, directors, writers, crew etc. The essential website to answer the question “Ooooh, what have we seen her in before?”. The app is just as good as the website with a nice interface. It is also free!

Also for the lazies who can’t be bothered to get the remote (or you know, are not at home!) is the TV Guide app (free). Has listings for all the UK channels and if you have Sky+, you can even remotely tell your Sky+ box to record something.

Games

I have a lot games on my iPad so I will just narrow it down to 3 essentials.

First up is Infinity Blade (£1.79). It’s a simple premise, you duel opponents on your way to defeat some evil guy. You can dodge, parry, attack and use spells. It’s very addictive and the graphics are stunningly amazing. If you want to show off the power of your iPad, this app is essential.

Next up is Plants vs. Zombies (£3.99). Zombies want to eat your brain and your only defence is an army of plants. It’s a tower defence style game and it’s brilliant.

Finally is Cut the Rope (£1.19). A piece of candy needs to travel from the rope to the little monster using the physics of swinging the ropes, bubbles, blowers and teleporters. It’s not too challenging until the newer levels, easy to pick up and play

 

So there’s the best apps I’ve come across so far, but of course half the fun is looking for new and exciting ones so it is by no means a definitive list.

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