2010 — 14 September: Tuesday

Ofsted1 is not impressed with the state of UK school education. From what little I see of the end product these days, neither am I, but that could just be because I'm a grumpy old man. If "More than a fifth of school-age students in England have been diagnosed with some form of special educational need"2 then we're in trouble. (Source.)

It occurs to me that schooldays were not the happiest of my life. Nor of my son's. So much for "educashun, educashun".

It's a grey day

I await my summons to the Royal hospital in Winchester in four hours or so to pick my friend Roger up and deliver him back to Eileen. It's fair to say that I don't much like hospitals at the best of times, and try to avoid them as a general principle. Must be something to do with my irrational prejudice against the Intelligent Design gang.

It's 10:35 and a recent email delivery confirmation from Staples has given me some hope that I may yet get an undamaged pair of bookcases tomorrow. About time too.

Speaking of time, I found another faded old snapshot on which my Epson scanner's colour restoration worked a lot better than Photoshop's this time. Click the pic to see the final result.

Christa, Linda, and me in Old Windsor, 1974

The shadowy presence at my feet was my brother-in-law Karl, wielding the camera. That's his wife, Linda, standing between me and Christa in front of the entrance to our little rented flat in Old Windsor in late 1974. Christa was recovering from recent surgery on her left shoulder, but was as cheerful as ever.

On a return trip to Old Windsor in November 1996 — when I gave a talk on Java to the ISTC — we discovered to our dismay that both the flat (our happy home for the first 17 months of our marriage) and its grounds had all been swept away by a tidal wave of yuppie housing estate development. You really can never go back, can you?

KOL

I was unfamiliar with the acronym. Source and snippet:

Perhaps the most remarkable recent exchange with a KOL emerged in an investigation of Joseph Biederman, a child psychiatrist at Harvard University. In a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, Biederman was accused of promising positive research results to the company in exchange for funding. A hint of Biederman's self-opinion emerged in a deposition, where a lawyer asked him about his academic ranking.
Biederman: "To move in the ranks from one rank, for example, at Harvard, there is instructor, from instructor you move to assistant professor, from assistant professor you move to associate professor, from associate professor you move to full professor."
Lawyer: "Full professor?"
Biederman: "Mm-hmm."
Lawyer: "What rank are you?"
Biederman: "Full professor."
Lawyer: "What's after that?"
Biederman: "God."
Lawyer: "Did you say God?"
Biederman: "Yeah."

Carl Elliott in The Chronicle


Key Opinion Leader, indeed.

The Happy Return

Not just a book by CS Forester, but the state my friend Roger is in after a clean bill of health. I've just got back from picking him up. I also (aside to Christa) found and reversed neatly into the one spare slot in the car park nearest to his treatment ward. Result! Time (13:25) for a bite to eat, a spot of supplies shopping, and (just maybe) an expotition in search of a cuppa. I also have an evening meal and video appointment over with Mike, but I'm predicting he probably won't want to see "Temple Grandin". For a film I was going to watch the day it arrived, I'm not doing terribly well, so far.

Could this be...

... the same "IBM" that I worked for? Wonder if the fragrant Mr Moffat (a 54 year old, with 31 years service) was regarded as a "KOL"?

... former IBM senior executive Robert Moffat... has been handed six months porridge for passing on inside information about Big Blue and AMD. He was sentenced by US District Judge Deborah Batts yesterday, who took umbrage at the fact that he had spent over 30 years at IBM. He could've retired on a pension a million times larger than a hack's salary but it obviously wasn't enough for Moffat. "Why the defendant betrayed the only employer he has had for his entire career has not been addressed," Batts said, according to Bloomberg. "His astounding breach of his fiduciary duty to his employer is why he is here."

Spencer Dalziel in The Inquirer


Neatly put, I reckon. People high up (very high up, in this stinky scallywag's case) in Big Bizz rarely seem to understand the word "Enough". And often seem to think they are far above the commonplace morality of the peons they clamber over.

Albert Einstein...

... has just surfaced among the raspberries I'd earmarked for my breakfast tomorrow, dagnabbit. "Refrigerate after purchase" next time, David.

Fruit

Time I wasn't here.

  

Footnotes

1  No, I have no idea what "Ofsted" stands for, but nor does their home page tell me. Nor their FAQs, nor their site map.
2  It's now 15 years since Peter was selected as one (of just two) "exceptionally gifted" children to attend a fully-funded weekend of intensive exercises in Wiltshire. The event was cancelled due to "insufficient interest".