Daytime callers

Hal

“Hello, may I speak to Mr MacLean, please?”
“Certainly, may I ask who is calling?”
“Yes, its xxxx from Pure Insurance. Are you Mr MacLean?”
“I am.”
“May I interest you in free cover costing 99p a day?”
“You may not. But you could interest me in why you are calling me. Do you check your lists agains the TPS service?”
“erm… yes, we do…”
“In which case you will be aware that this number is registered and I am entitled to take action against your company.”
“Erm… I’m sorry, I am just doing my job…”
“Yes. Badly.”
“Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”
“You betcha!”

slight pause, muffled voices.

“Hello, Mr MacLean?”
“Yes”
“My name is xxxx . I’m very sorry to have troubled you, please accept my apologies on behalf of the company”
“I’m not sure that is good enough. Why are you people ringing me in the middle of my working day? You clearly do not check the TPS lists.”
“I assure you we do, but I will manually delete your number from our records to ensure that you do not hear from us again. I am very sorry that you have been troubled…”

And so went my first call of the lunchtime period for the first day working at home in goodness knows how long. I really ought to be kinder to these folk who are ‘only doing their job’. Trouble is, I find it too difficult to see it their way, and it’s too much fun to tie them in knots. And some days I’m just plain grumpy!

New iMacs for the company

Hal

So the time has come to think about the macs we have got at Cleveratom and how we want to plan for the future. Our trusty G4’s are reaching the point where we no longer use them – even video editing (so long the staple job of these machines) is faster on my Macbook Pro, easier to do and portable, too.

So what to do? We have a rather nice 1.25GHz dual processor G4 (Mirror drive drawer) which has been sat quietly for a month or two now, a 733MHz single processor ‘quicksilver’ machine from the same era, and another highly upgraded G4, running as a dual 1.2GHz (upgrade card) with two SATA drives as a raid array, additional firewire ports and USB2 ports added on. Any offers?

In their place we have just bought some shiny new iMacs which are now taking on the role of office machines, general purpose desktop kit. They look excellent – we used them at BETT on the stand and they were worthy enough to draw a few people over just because they look so good! Wireless keyboards, wireless mouse (although I personally don’t like the bluetooth connection struggling each time the machine boots), these are smart pieces of equipment.

So it appears to be crunch time for ‘Jolly Roger’, ‘Birdseye’ and ‘Jumbo’… is there a nice home for them to go to?

BETT 2008 Review, January 9th – 12th at Olympia

Hal

For the first time ever, Cleveratom became an exhibitor in their own right at the BETT show in Olympia during the week of 9th January 2008. This involved renting the space ( a shell scheme area 4m x 4m on the main hall gallery outside the organisers’ office), creating a stand and buying the graphics and frames needed, and renting the remainder of the equipment. It was a small fortune to do, but overall very worthwhile.

The event itself is huge. Now easily filling both the Grand hall and the National hall, plus both galleries, there are probably a thousand companies hawking their wares and services. In addition, the feature stand in the main hall showcases a number of different approaches to education – this year the message was ‘Learner Voice’. Headed up by Stephen Heppell, the feature stand involved a number of different consultants and practitioners giving talks and presentations, but also hosted some groups of children making use of hardware to do some tasks such as film making with a sony PSP (yep – a PSP.. just add a camera!), using interactive whiteboards and the fabulous Asus EeePC. I was delighted to be a presenter on that stand on each day of the show.

The Cleveratom stand had a large number of visitors despite not being in a particularly busy area. Friends from previous projects appeared over the four days and we were reminded of just how busy the company has been. Older friends from Ultralab days were welcomed, too and we hope more people are now aware of just what it is we can do to hep them integrate learning and ICT more effectively.

We were showcasing a single product on our stand – PLiP – in conjunction with Edison Schools. The PLiP tool (Personalised Learning in Practice) is the software we created to support the process which Edison professionals deliver in schools. We were delighted to have Kevin, Tim, Deborah, Sue and Julie supporting us on the stand and helping to promote the process.

My overriding memory of the week is that there is a lot still to do to encourage people to engage with personalisation of learning and not make it become a buzz phrase – learner voice is equally important and we have to guard against tokenistic approaches to this, too. many companies are developing virtual learning solutions but to many are still trying to build a walled garden for the learner, replicating the functionality of the social spaces that children gravitate towards and therefore introducing a layer of complexity that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. There are some chinks of light in the forest of VLE, though. Notable is Dan Sivak and his company ‘CDSM’ with the ‘My Learning Space’ product, and ‘LP+’ which appears to have risen from almost nowhere to prominence in a very short time.

As the coming weeks unfold, more reflection on the show will appear and perhaps more sense will be made of what was a very hectic time. On a more personal level I want to remember to use soft soles on my shoes in future, and add insoles to those, too! Also, a big thank you to Matt Eaves, Alex Blanc, Nick Platts and Hais Deakin for working so hard throughout the week. Additionally, I’d like to thank Jack and colleagues from Skyline Whitespace who helped us make sense of the frames we used for the stand, and to Skyline for helping us achieve a very special look and feel to the space. 

Asus EeePC review

Hal

Not a review as such, more of a report about day to day use, really.. I’ve had my EeePC since Christmas day, so not so much of a well worn user test as a first impressions kind of thing.

And first impressions are very very good indeed! OK, so the screen is a bit small, but it is bright and clear and very usable. The keyboard is the toughest thing to use, IMO as the keys are soooo small, and one or two seem a little out of place – the right hand shift key, backspace and one or two others. However, these are small issues, and really not worth dwelling on.

I have a 2Gb SD card pretty much permanently in the slot so as to have that little bit more storage, but with the price of USB sticks falling so fast it won’t be long until I slot in a 16Gb one internally, I think. Thiswil, of course, require some internal surgery, but others have already done similar by mounting a USB port in some space inside the machine. This *will* invalidate the warranty, but could be a useful addition and make the EeePC even more usable for day-to-day stuff.

Just tonight I installed ‘Fire FTP’ as an add on to Firefox and it is lovely – I can now get in to the servers I need to get in to without having a new app taking up space.

Battery life when asleep isn’t tremendous, so don’t leave it a day or two and then think it will work without power… it won’t, but all in all the power is pretty good. Remember to charge it up!

You absolutely really *must* enable the advanced mode to get a standard desktop type experience. For those not sure, you need to delve a little into the terminal, use ‘apt-get’ to download two things and hey ho, you’re away. The advanced layout is very familiar to anyone who has used a windows machine but is somehow… nicer. The EeePC will revert to standard (easy) mode if you re-start, so I need to find a way to prevent that happening.

I know that there are plenty of mods around, and even though he has had it but a few days, my colleague Nick has added a touch screen which looks and behaves perfectly. I may have to do that to this one… although not yet. I can’t help thinking a touch screen would be easier to use, mind you.

This entire entry has been typed on the EeePC and there may be some errors in what I am typing. Sorry… I am sitting in a small hotel room in Bayswater, London, getting ready for the BETT show tomorrow. It’s late, but not late enough to prevent me turning the Asus on one more time! There you go… I’m hooked on this lovely little device… 🙂

So this is Christmas…

Hal

What a heck of a year.

Having been made redundant this time last year it has been a whirlwind, with barely any time at all to stop and think, let alone blog. At some points in the year I really didn’t think I’d get to December in one piece, let alone smiling.

And when you least expect it (well, I know it happens regularly) there creeps up another Christmas to hurtle you into the following year… BUT not before you have time to sit down and enjoy yet another rendition of the Great Escape or something like that. And always accompanied by enough wine and mince pies to sink a small boat, it seems (certainly feels like it – where are my running shoes?).

The other side of all this is that every now and then a kind relative or loved one bestows on you a gift of such magnitude that you don’t know what to say, and can only reflect on how hideously inappropriate your own gift to them was by comparison. So what to do when there is not one, but two such gifts in the same year? It has been difficult to find time to enjoy them at all yet!

First up is the pretty magnificent XBox 360, complete with games including Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. Not that this is a particularly new gadgt to the market, but for ages now I’ve been plodding along with a standard XBox (now for sale, fully working, loadsa games!) which has done me proud over the years. However, when I plugged in the new ‘360’ using HD leads into my Sony Bravia LCD TV I was simply blown away. The graphics are awesome compared to before and the detail in the games is ridiculously good. What really makes it for me though is the wireless controllers. Oh yes! At last…. an end to the trailing cables all over the front room! I haven’t had much chance to put it through its paces yet, but will do so over the next few months, no doubt! One thing I definitely won’t be doing is subscribing to XBox ‘Live’ though – the last time saw me get ‘fragged’ within seconds of joining a game and then being charged for the privilege! heh… serves me right, I suppose… but have you ever tried to unsubscribe from it? It’s almost as bad as getting out of dinner with the mother in law. It *can* be done, but you need a strong stomach to get through the process.

Second up was a complete surprise – the Asus EEE PC. This is the smallest laptop I’ve ever held, has no hard drive, 4GB RAM and runs a flavour of linux. It has wi-fi, a web cam, plenty of USB slots, a slot for SD cards and a pretty slick look and feel all round.

As a Mac user, it seems reasonable to want to load on a version of MacOSX – so that’s the first thing I’ll do. Yes, I know it wasn’t designed to, but the thing is, this little gadget is crying out to be modified, played around with and generally taken to any limit you want to try. If it all goes horribly wrong, use the included install disc (you’ll need an external CD drive) to reinstall back to factory settings again. Brilliant.

I may even attempt to get Windows running on it too… but how cool would it be to have a selection of USB drives which have any operating system you want on them… go into the BIOS, set the boot order, plug in the flavour of drive you want and away you go… It’s crying out to be done, in my opinion. In fact, I’d be very surprised if it hadn’t already been done by someone somewhere.

These are magnificent ‘hobbyist’ devices, apart from anything else. They seem ideal for school use, too and have enough about them to be a pretty useful lightweight alternative to that 17″ macBook you’ve been lugging all over the place (well, OK, I’ll*still* lug that all over the place). All in all they are a winner. But don’t take my word for it… check out any review you like!

So, a brilliant year in lots of ways, capped off with some extraordinarily fabulous gifts that will see me well into the future. My thanks to all who have helped, supported, paid, cajoled, cheered, cried and generally been there along the way. I almost can’t believe it has been possible 🙂