Oh No Mummy! (by sarah)

The end of the first week and Jean is awakened and finially we get 'is it a school day?'

'Yes'

'Oh no Mummy! I wanted to stay in bed - I don't want to go to school'

'Don't you want to see your friends and learn things?'

'Yes but its too early'

🙂

Earshot Poetry Night (by sarah)

For anyone who's are Cheltenham this evening I'm going to be reading some of my poems at Slaks Comedy Bar on the Bath Street.

The Headliners of the evening are top poetry dudes from Bristol Byron Vincent and Angie Belcher.

I've seen Byron perform before and lets put it this way - its the only time I've ever seen Alaric truelly engaged whilst listening to poetry.

I am a bit nervous as I haven't read anything since like Febuary so feel a bit rusty!

I have selected four poems as requested:

The Break-Up

Summer Sales

Ana

The Markov Chains of Literature

Out of these only The Markov Chains of Literature has been read out at an event by me namely Tech Adventure earlier this year.

Not entirely sure what the secedule is for the night or how many of the four will be read but I will have on my nice red boots (I was going to wear my glittery heels but walking Jean to school has resulted in hurting shins and clicky pelvis so thought better of it - the boots are flat no heels!).

Why are networks so hard to build? (by alaric)

One of my sidelines is network management.

Often, the problem is this: you have a bunch of sites, each with zero or more external connections out to the wider Internet (or to people who you provide an Internet connection to), and each with zero or more computers that need some level of network connection (be they servers or workstations). Each computer needs to be able to talk to some subset of the other computers, and maybe able to talk to computers out on the Internet or some other external network, and maybe computers on the Internet or some other external network are able to talk to it. And computers may be on public IP addresses, or on a private IP address; in the latter case, if it can talk to other external networks there needs to have a public IP address (possibly shared with others) that its connections are NATed from, and if incoming connections are allowed, there must be a public IP to which those connections are sent to be "forwarded" into the private IP. We can think of those NAT/forwarding public IPs as "virtual IPs", which don't correspond to a physical computer, but seem to by way of some form of port/address translation.

Also, each computer or external network connection needs some level of reliability. Some have low requirements, and we can happily tolerate perhaps up to a day of outage per year; that's mere 99.7% uptime. The fabled "five nines uptime", 99.999%, equates to a maximum of about 30 minutes of downtime a year. And that downtime isn't just used up by equipment failures; if your network's requirements grow and you need to upgrade things to provide more capacity, you might need some downtime to replace and reconfigure things.

In other words, the problem domain is already complex. But the fun's just starting.

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Second Day of School (by sarah)

This morning Jean woke up and on finding out she was going to school again jumped out of bedding saying 'YAY! School!' I wonder how long this will last.

First Day of School (by sarah)

Effeciently or manically I went and bought all of Jean's uniform on Tuesday, then Sunday night once back from David's congrates party I labeled all the clothing with a fabric pen.

We were shock horror organised for her first day and woke up with plenty of time - I got her drink and snack ready.

I even put her hair up so it wouldn't get in her eyes!

She looks really cute and a lot older in her uniform even if the cardigan reaches down to her knees 🙂

And then we headed up the Hill.

Once at the playground she hovered nervously with us whilst a neighbour took our photo - the family all together 🙂

When the bell rang some preconditioning thing from Pre-school cut in and she automatically queued up the other children.

I did find it a bit tearful though I didn't actually cry - not really sure why but I sort of just stood there staring at the door when they'd all gone in.

She loved school and was excited to find out she would be going back again which was sweet 🙂