Category Archives: Jon

McDonalds Goes To School

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As part of Freya’s current food project at school, some of the children have assembled a McDonald’s pastiche which was displayed on the wall in the play/dining area. Jo alerted me to this, so I took a proper look for myself. True enough, there were a couple of pictures of the children standing outside a local “restaurant”, along with some paper-art burgers and, most worrying of all, french-fry boxes on which the children’s names were written as “McAlice” and so on.

I mentioned to one of the educators that I thought this was not something I wish my daughter to see every day, and I was greeted with mild empathy and excuses for the display. I then wrote an open letter to the school, explaining that we have no problem with junk-food being discussed, but for it to be given a face in the form of a brand-name was tantamount to free advertising.

The offending posters have been taken down, and I await further comments to arise from my letter being discussed in a future teacher meeting. It is a testament to McDonald’s marketing that no-one in the nursery school found this synonymity concerning; one of the first comments I received was “if it makes you feel better there are pictures of vegetables on the walls, too”. It doesn’t, since there is no company called “Vegetable”; I would be equally anxious if pictures of Nike products were used in a clothes project.

Sadly, when I was in the dining area of my school the next day, I saw a similar pastiche about food in Arabic. Amongst the vegetables and fruit loomed two french-fry cartons. Thankfully, they were almost indistinguishable, and were hidden by the other foodstuffs and the hugeness of the dining room itself, something which cannot be achieved in Freya’s school.

Boys Will Be Boys

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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes it is only worth two, but those two in themselves are worth more than a thousand words. Or something like that.

I was searching through the Jysk website to try and find a picture of the wicked hand-chair that we bought for Freya today for a mere £10, when I came across the children’s bedroom section. I would not have paid to much attention to the page, but for the two pictures shown, illustrating what one could do with a few Jysk products and no imagination.

First, something for the small lady in your life:

And now for something completely different:

The only things missing from the latter bedroom is a couple of beer-cans and a few porn mags under the bed. I’m not saying that this is a totally unjust picture of the world we live in, where girls jump about in their pinkdom, singing carefree songs about the colour purple, but this is pandering to gender-stereotypes.

Oh, those were the two words I was meaning when I wrote about two words being worth more than a thousand. Or something like that.

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An Evening Playing Games (Of The Wrong Kind)

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For the year we have been living in our flat we have been going through a mini-port to connect to the internet. This has, apart from the fact that we shouldn’t have to, been of no real concern. Everything we need to do gets done, and with no loss of bandwidth. Until yesterday.

I’ve been considering the best way to connect Jo’s Nintendo DS for online play of Animal Crossing: Wild World. The first option is to purchase a wi-fi router, which will also allow us to connect the unowned Nintendo Wii and X-Box 360, as well as securing us for the wi-fi future.

Ideally we’d like to get the router that our IP provides free of charge, but despite their claims on the website we cannot have one. It appears that the station which we are connected to has compatibility issues with our IP’s modems. This is a ridiculous set of circumstances, and the only thing for us to do is await some kind of executive decision to manufacture new modems that do not suffer this problem.

Another option is to buy a wi-fi router ourselves, and simply place it between our current modem and the computer. This would hopefully work (mental note: contact Jack to make sure), but I decided on a cheaper and easier solution: a wifi USB dongle.

All I have to do is run the software, attach the dongle, turn on the DS, and let the hardware do the maths. I’ve done this, and it doesn’t work (the DS connection to the computer works, but not to the server), so I search the internet for a solution. One idea is to run an updated version of the software, after going through several steps to remove all trace of the original. After fiddling about for a while I am rid of the offending software and reinstall the new, improved upgrade. This time I can’t even laod the software, getting a “Internet sharing error (6)” message. So, I uninstall the new version, using the same method as I went through the first time, and installed the old version. Same message appears.

Jo rings up our IP server, gets the miniport taken away, we realise we can’t connect at all to the internet, and go back to to the miniport (this part of the story is condensed, but involves both a minor success and complete failure of connecting to the internet).

After all this, we are back to a regular connection (no miniport), whilst being unable to connect to the Animal Crossing server. All in all, a waste of time time very well spent.

Now, I love technology, and am constantly amazed just how well .exe files work, considering the infinite amount of hardware set-ups available. When working on their own, hardware does a sterling job, but it’s when it comes to interacting that things really go arse up.

I shall be in contact with Jack to talk about the wi-fi router.

My Life As A Bag-Man

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When I went to do the recycling yesterday I had a usual poke around the containers to see what junk other people had thrown away. I do this probably because of some hunter/gatherer instinct, but have nonetheless been rewarded before. Scavenging this time I came across an 85-year jubilee plate from one of Stockholm’s football teams, Djurgården.

Initially I took it to work, since I was on my way there anyway, to see if some Djurgården fan would like to take it off my hands. Then the hoarder in me took over, and, realising that this was a 1000-run limited edition, I stashed it back into my bag.

This piece of memorabilia was issued in 1978, a fact I’d overlooked due to the rather good quality of the plate. I reckon that in a couple of hundred years it may even be worth a few bob. Even if none of my relatives are the ones to cash in on it, I like the idea of saving it for some future generation Antique Roadshow asking some innocent bod the eternal question: “So, have you ever thought how much it might be worth?”

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Laurel And Hardy Looking Good

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My bosses at school are incompetent. This is a fact I’ve lived with for pretty much the five years I have been employed there, and for most of the time I am at peace with it, since it suits my purposes: I have the freedom to do what I like.

The main boss, the headmistress, is approaching old-age (hastened, no doubt, by alcohol), and tries to keep a tight reign on her baby. This would be admirable if it weren’t for the fact that she lies out of her arse, seldom fulfills her word, and seems to have no idea about the laws that govern the running of a school.

Along with her is the joke that is the headmaster. He is a dyslexic Arab whose grip of the Swedish language is slight, and, despite having an amiable demeanour on the surface, seems to have made some terrible accusations and comments to a few of the women employees. He is the right hand to Maria, and they are completely inapt at knowing what each other (and themselves, come to think of it) is doing.

I am not alone in this opinion, I guarantee, and it is only now, when I feel confident about my role as a teacher, that I can be bothered to put it writing. If The Office hadn’t have already been written, then my school would have surely given Ricky Gervais enough ideas for about 8 seasons.