The Blood is The Life 21-01-2013

• Stop blaming state school pupils for their lack of "confidence"
  as a private school girl who ended up (relatively) poor (and therefore neither one thing nor the other) this article makes some good points although I'm not sure I agree with all of it
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• Mark Thompson: My experiences with smartphone content blocking
  spot on post from Mark
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Description of my job via Upgoer5

So a bunch of people have been doing this "describe your job using only the 1000 most common English words" thing. I've had a go. I don't think it's worked very well.

I phone people up and ask them about who they would like to run things, and if they would like anything done.

I store their answers and then someone else decides whether anything needs to be done about the answers.

Words I was not allowed to use: vote, government, council, local, representative, politician, record, responses.

I think that list of words I wasn't allowed to use is the best illustration one can have of how irrelevant politics is to most people.

My Daughter, the computer whizz

So, when I put Holly to bed tonight she told me she'd like to show me a game she had "written in Notepad". I was thinking she had maybe written a story that had some choose your own adventure elements, cos she's been reading a few choose your own adventure books of late.

"I did two," she said "but the first one's not very good."

So I sat down and she started up her laptop and opened a Dos window.

"I found a video about how to do this on YouTube" she said, as she typed in the filename and hit enter.

And it was a text-based adventure game, but not like a book. It was like those text based adventure games we all used to play as kids. Press l for left, r for right, etc. With plot and humour and twists and silliness and... And this was just the first one! The second one was even better - about four times as long, with proper consequences to your choices, starts directly from windows, and when you've finished the game and hit exit it says "Batttteeerrrryyyy ddyyyyyyying........ goodbye" and then closes the Dos window.

She had a snow day from school today, and this is what she's done with it. Decided she wants to make a game, realised that she doesn't know how to code, researched how to code on the internet and then written TWO games by typing code into Notepad and then running it. In one day. ONE DAY!

This?
This is my stunned face.