The Geeky Brit

Quirkies are reporting that a hair salon in my beautifull hometown of York has successfully applied for a drinks licence. Yes, this means they can serve you a traditional English pint whilst trimming your hair. This may sound strange to americans, but to a Brit this makes perfect sense. You may notice around the UK there are a lot of people with long hair, this is because they do not see the neccessity of making time away from the pub just to get their hair cut. I foresee a future of very short haired yorkies….

A few months ago I switched from using ZoneAlarm Security suite to Windows Live OneCare. My main motivation was the cost, as I had just bought my lovely wife a laptop, and was not too thrilled about spending more money on a separate security suite for that pc. At the time the I switched I got 90 days free, and so I thought hey, why not.

Since then our main home pc has become so slow, that my wife has stopped using it. Then today I read on the BBC that it has failed *another* security test. Microsoft’s response: “We are working on it”.

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I am slowly working on the theme for this site, and I just wanted to let my avid reader(s) that this is taking a little longer than I had anticipated. I am spending my spare time doing this rather than creating blog entries. So watch this space.

There are reports that some teachers in Santa Barbara are being given a pay rise of 9% to be spread over 3 years, at the cost of increasing the class sizes that they teach.

This is a hard one for me to swallow – I do not believe we should make our children’s education suffer just to provide teachers with a pay raise. Now before teachers bombard me with angry comments let me say this. Yes, teaching is an underpaid occupation, and you should be better compensated – but for two reasons. 1. Higher salaries would attract more teachers from relevant industries and 2. With higher salaries, comes higher standards for hiring teaching staff – and a better overall standard for our education system.

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