blog.the-kid.org

Last night was the beginning of the Informal Consultation period for Aberdeen City Council’s Estates strategy in respect to the proposed Bucksburn/Newhills merging and Stoneywood closure and re-zoning of children to the as-yet-undecided new school and Dyce school.

I felt it was a worthwhile evening. The attendees were split into about 6 smaller forums where ideas were taken on board by a scribe about the parent’s views on the proposals, all groups having the same questions. Myself and Catty were in a group of around 20 parents, predominately Stoneywood parents, however Stoneywood didn’t really have much to say. I took the lead trying to make sure the views of the Bucksburn Parent Council were heard.

The main points I made were:

1. Location of School - We don’t really think there’s any chance of the school being placed on the existing Bucksburn School site. Mark McDonald is against that site as he said in his speech, published on his blog. It’s a brilliant site with country views and although it’s close to the main A96 road it’s not actually ON it however Mark seems to have a vendetta with the site claiming it’s the worst site possible for a school in Aberdeen. Access for pupils is off the Howes Road. However we pretty much reckon the only place is the existing Newhills site. This has issues for parents coming from Bucksburn village and Mugiemoss etc. but where else is there?? The Bankhead site is in the flight path and the farmland above Newhills is further away for everyone! Also in relation to the siting be it at either site we recommend an investment in the development of Howes Road. It’s already closed to traffic making it ideal for children to use for their extended(but still within the magic 2 miles) journey’s.
2. Size of school and in particular size of classes. Bucksburn pupils benefit from their class sizes as they are already. The new school itself will open at full capacity I feel. There are proposed developments for Mugiemoss and others. which is bound to increase the roll. David Leng himself showed the future increases expected just from the developments that already have planning permission. Never mind the ’speculative’ developments from the Rowett land, BP building etc. If it opens full where is the flexibility to include these pupils. If Stoneywood does close, which nobody really expects to happen, there’s an additional intake there as well. Dyce haven’t even been consulted about Stoneywood’s possible rezoning to themselves!
3. ASN Base and the inclusion of the special needs kids. This was also brought up by a special needs worker with regards to Newhills blindness provisions and their inclusion in a new school.
4. Traffic problems this will cause in the area.
5. Safety concerns of the extended travelling.
6. What Aberdeen City Council see as preferential is at times very different from what parents see as preferential, especially in respect to class sizes. ACC want every class to be operating at the very highest limits of what current legislation allows and in fact are designing the new schools on these numbers. Never mind that the Scottish government want to reduce class sizes.

Lots of what I was saying was echoed by parents from Newhills. It seems the consensus is that both schools are embracing the opportunity of a state of the art school and all the benefits that will bring to the pupils. Both schools are concerned about siting and roll however. It seems that Newhills have been in on the back end of these proposals as well, many parents who attended the forum meeting called by Bucksburn last month were shocked to learn of these proposals and the feeling last night was that even that meeting was badly publicised at short notice.

This brings me neatly on to my main bugbear with Bucksburn.

The parents couldn’t care less.

I’m on the parent council at Bucksburn and the main difficulty we have in our role as spokespeople for the views of the parents of Bucksburn pupils is that we don’t actually know what those views are! Parental inclusion is a nightmare. We beg parents to be more involved and we don’t actually have a politically correct idea of why there isn’t more enthusiasm from them.

My personal view is that they don’t give a shit about their kids lives out of the house, that’s for someone else to deal with. You see the same faces every meeting. Every time there’s anything to be discussed. Where are the rest of them? It’s a sad state of affairs when those charged with the care of the children in our community are the very people who are the least interested in that job.

Come on Bucksburn, pull your socks up. The responses from Stoneywood school are fantastic. Newhills too had a bigger turnout last night than Bucksburn and it’s not anything to do with them having more parents, they have more parents who actually give a shit about their children.

One of the things brought up at our last meeting was that parents don’t know what goes on at the parent council. We are going to display the minutes in the display box at the infant doors in future and I’m also about to either redesign the main school website (probably moving it to a better host and using joomla/drupal or something, anything’s gotta be better than frontpage) or start a separate Bucksburn School Council blog/news thing which will also tell of what’s being discussed with the advantage of giving the opportunity for parents who were unable to attend(or don’t care about attending) the meetings, to have their views recorded in writing.

I don’t know why I watch the politics show, every time I see Wendy Alexander I feel like ripping out my ears and eyes. When are the Labour party in Scotland going to realise they lost the election because of their negativity towards the SNP? There’s no way that the Labour party in Scotland can continue on this path and expect a rise in popularity.

It’s even filtered down to local level here in Aberdeen. Recently I’ve been to a few meetings with the council in my position on the school council of my kids’ school over the budget cuts and estates strategy. We held a meeting a while back, attended by fellow ABZ blogger and local councillor Mark McDonald(SNP) and Labour councillor Barney Crockett. We were looking for answers which, however unpopular, Mark was trying to give. Barney just wanted to dwell on the failures of the council, pointing the finger of blame on the SNP, and score political points.

WE DON’T WANT THIS!!!!

As far as I am concerned Labour can piss right off until they lose the chip from their shoulders and focus on the issues. They insist on this campaign of negativity and I for one am tired of it. We’ve had it for over a year now.

CHANGE THE FUCKING RECORD!!!!

It’ll all be alright in a day or so. I’m using the CSS Naked Day plugin to do it for me.

More information can be found about Naked CSS day here and here.

Also, happy birthday Lisa(my sister) who has strangely overtaken me in her Earth years age to be 28 today.

You are hereby invited to the meeting tonight at 7PM in Bucksburn School. Anyone with an interest in the provision of education in the Bucksburn community should attend or have representation there. There will be MPs and local councillors present to answer questions and hopefully set minds at ease with regards to budget cuts, future (housing) developments, how education is to be funded in future.

If you have kids in any of the schools feeding Bankhead (esp. Bucksburn, Newhills and Stoneywood) you are well advised to attend.

Oh, and there’s coffee…

btk

/me extends props to the writers of that episode of “In the Night Garden…”

In the Night Garden… has taken it’s time in getting my attention. The daft names and un oo ee (1 2 3) stuff turned me off it. (OK I am aware I’m not the target demographic but meh) A couple of days ago though they put out an episode where Iggle Piggle lost his blanket. He only went and dropped it on the Pontypines houses didn’t he! Haaaaahaha. Those Pontypines are mental, especially when trapped under a giant blanket. Mr Pontypine tried phoning Iggle Piggle on the trubblyphone(sp?) but Iggle Piggle was like, “I have no idea who’s on the phone!”

Iggle Piggle is pure comedy. The way he walks and leans is brilliant. Nice one beeb, glad to see there’s at least some original programming coming out of my license fee.

well, that’s not entirely true, they totally rock, until you tear 2 of them while putting the washing in the dryer.

Doctor, can you take the pain and leave the swelling…

thing is, it was 2 weeks ago I did it. Will the pain never end? Well MM from blogshares kindly found out some info for me which unfortunately said if it’s a bad one(which it’s bound to be, I’ve never had anything less than extreme, and I keep good health! In fact I don’t know of ANY man who’s ever had just a cold…) it can take 12 weeks!

Bugger

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to post about for a while and kept forgetting. Since the hot topic on this blog still is the Pot Noodle post it seems that people want to hear of consumer woes. Well, here’s the first(2nd).

Tesco packaging. Not the products within. I’m happy with the quality of the goods, just not the packaging…

This is a fairly broad subject so I’ll narrow it down to my three main areas of concern.

1. Tesco 6 pint milk bottles. These are a total bitch. The problem here is that they have too short a neck so when you finish pouring your milk and return the bottle to an upright position they have a backflow-drip-down-the-bottle issue. Other stores have a slightly extended neck or “cut away” section below the neck to overcome this. Tesco don’t, so you then have a mop up issue every time you want a cuppa or cereal. This brings me nicely on to issue 2…

2. Tesco own brand cereals. These are a pain in the nads. I’m specifically thinking of rice crispies here but I’m certain this’ll apply to most of their cereals. What’s with the unopenable inner bags??? You get into the box fine then you are confronted by a bag sealed by what may be the best plastic bonding glue ever created. 3M should buy the recipe. You begin to open it and it lulls you in. I’m safe, you’re going slow, nothing can go wrong… Then it says HAHA! PWNED!! and bursts it’s ass, now, you are opening it slowly to avoid this but due to the chemical make up of the thing it results in a massive gash down the whole bag. Might as well have some toast, but…

3. Tesco stayfresh loaves. I have yet to buy a S/F loaf that isn’t burst. I can only assume they manufacture the foily bags in the same way they manufacture the regular bags but it obviously doesn’t have the ’stretch’ required. This results in the bag having, at least one but usually two, holes where the stresses were too much. Look for yourselves next time you’re in Tesco. The S/F loaves have holes in the ends of the bags where it’s ‘tucked in’ at the non-openable end. Usually I’d not bother about this but the whole point of a stayfresh loaf is THE FOIL BAG MAKES IT KEEP LONGER!!!

Sort it out Tesco!! (and I’ll happily accept a million clubcard points for bringing this to your attention and staying loyal to Tesco!)

I had a little get together with a fiesta this morning in Tesco’s car park. Result, Ford 1 Fiat 0.

Stupid bubbly-goggle-arsed Multipla took a direct hit to the rear light cluster.

Stupid scrappies at Overton said they don’t have one(light cluster) for me so I’m about to pillage the Astro for an amber bulb to get round the “no white light” rule until I get a new one off the interwebs.

Caurs eh, who’d ha’e them?

I just spent the morning trawling through site after site looking for information on how to get a CD ROM visible as a boot device on Catty’s laptop, a Sony VAIO FPS115E, apparently. Everywhere reckons it can’t be done however….

Pressing F2 into the BIOS on start-up and navigating to the Boot tab gives us the options, something like floppy,optical,HD and network. CD ROM isn’t there, however, placing the hard disk as the last boot device(highlight the disk and press “-” until it’s at the bottom) then pressing the N key, then the D key, makes the system look for “devices not yet installed” or something.

This seems to make the CD bootable.

Now, I’m off to finish installing Linux on it…..

I just spent what feels like my lifetime widgetizing the sidebar. Well part of the time was finding a workaround for the id=links validation bug and part was finding a way to widget-wrap the theme switcher. Still, it’s now good to go for easy manipulation my-side.

I did this as billie-jo’s blog is widgetised and recently I’ve been adding hundreds of links at a time to the blogs for blogshares purposes. Adding them to this blog and my blogshares blog was disgustingly difficult to do with all the navigating the back end to get to the sidebar file, then putting the links in the right place without messing anything up, yuck! with billie-jo’s I just opened a text widget and threw the links in there. So, now I can do this here too! woohoo!

was kinda sucky wasn’t it. Beadle’s dead. Heath Ledger’s dead. I’m a year older. Damn!

The new motor broke too, stupid thing threw a shoe and went lame. I’m in the middle of fixing it, each morning I check to make sure it’s not fallen(been blown - wtf is up with those winds eh?) off the jack.

Here’s to February, may it be better than January (which actually wasn’t all bad.)

and errr, who turned off the heating?

It’s my birthday today, I’m 24 again. If someone was desperately thinking of what to get me might I suggest one of these. Or indeed tickets to meet and greet anyone on THE LIST

Not only do I personally save the planet by downgrading the car as reported earlier, but a fellow blogger is doing their bit by freecycling their old kit. It’s cool to see a familiar nickname in the daily digest. You know who you are. I’ve been a freecycler for a wee while now and still haven’t gotten rid of anything, (I have given away stuff on Gumtree though, I’m not all bad!) small steps eh. I did help a lovely couple from the freecycle forums out one night with a lift with a bit of plywood. But that doesn’t count. I still need to find that first thing to give away I just got rid of my old Nokia(see here) so there, naaanaananaaanaa . Perhaps Catty’s laptop will find it’s way out the door soon, pain in the arse that it’s being at the moment…

I knew we were all nice people really! Keep up the good, umm, work, yeah!

btk

No longer shall Internet Explorer users be penalised for attempting to read my site. It should now display (almost) perfectly in any browser. Curse you list padding.

Now, off to brag to Liam who was having similar issues….

btk

The kids were supposed to go back to school today but due to the “broken heating” they have another day off. Jammie little gits, it’s like something from an Enid Blyton story. I didn’t think this happened anymore. Still, gets us into the routine, anyone with kids knows how important the routine is. I’ve been told since I was a boy about getting into good routine, going to bed earlier the day before you’re due back to get into the routine. It’s all bollocks of course. You drag your weary arse out of bed just in time to get the kids up, fed dressed and out to school. They of course think you are trying to kill them just because you had the audacity to wake them up pre-10AM.

Well on a normal day that would be the case but this morning I actually had everyone up, bright as buttons and ready to go. Stupid school heating.

Since I’ve not blogged for a while, Happy New Year 2008 and Merry Christmas 2007. I missed my 2nd blogging birthday which according to my research is the 26th November(ironically I DID post that day!). The essential updates are… the car is still here, partnered now with another, friendlier beast and quite possibly one of the best looking cars ever made…

…OK that’s not necessarily true, especially in purple. Luckily you can’t see what it looks like from the driving position. I got it in Blackburn, Lancs and filled her up. Cost about £60-ish. I drove home, via Kilwinning(this was on Christmas Eve) and was still on the same tank of diesel on Hogmanay! That’s astonishing for me. The same trip in the Astro would have had me filling up again before Kilwinning and again at Aberdeen at £90 a pop or £270 for what cost me £60-odd. Savings galore!

I also traded in my trusty Nokia 3510i after about 5 years worth of use. It’s not broken or anything I just decided that this time I’d keep the free upgrade for myself instead of giving it to Catty. I now have a Nokia 7500 Prism instead and I must say I’m well chuffed with it. Normally I am like, who cares what it can do as long as it can make and receive calls and texts I’m fine. I have a digital camera I have an mp3 player, both do their jobs better than a phone. But bugger me this is neat, it’s got an Opera mini browser so I can soif da webs and bluetooth! Bluetooth ffs. How did I cope without it! It’s a pity the other phone didn’t have it and I’d have saved myself an hour of manually inputting names and numbers. Still, them’s the breaks. It also takes pictures pretty well(see car photo above!) so I reckon it’s a keeper.

We had a Hogmanay party here, well not a huge party but a good one nonetheless. Few friends few drinks few laughs all good. Cat, a friend of ours and fantastic chef, asked the other week if there was anything she should bring. We said well if she wanted to do a couple of nibbles that’d be great. Hogmanay comes and Cat and Brian(yes the same Brian as this story) arrive and I need to go help them out the car with this…

Good eh! We all felt like pigs by the time we went to bed but it was worth it!

Right, that’s you up to date I think, so I’ll leave you with this picture from our Christmas morning which I think shows the magic as it should be(although Catty won’t thank me for this one)….

Have a good 2008 guys.

btk

It’s been a long time coming. She’s been slowly bleeding to death for months now. Then there was the strange noises coming from her innermost workings. Yes, my car’s been showing it’s age for a while…

…ok perhaps that’s not the worst news in the world. Still it means I can’t get around anywhere during the run up to Christmas. Crap! She’s been leaking and burning fluids recently, anytime I’d go out in the rain she was like Hansel leaving her trail to follow home. Unfortunately the transmission fluid leak was directly above the exhaust so any time you gave it some welly it went only slightly quicker in a massive cloud of smoke!

It needs (I think) it’s transmission overhauled. The flywheel was loose after sitting for the summer unused. I think it’s taken the rest of the car with it. When I went to get the kids from school it was very juddery. Then trying to start it resulted in screeeech. I had to leave it at the school and walk back! Anyone who knows me knows that’s a major deal!

Still it’ll keep the likes of Misssy happy since it’s no longer spewing it’s guts over the road or exhaling it’s poisonous gases for all to breathe in. I’m gutted.

So what’s next… I either fix that one(as Catty says) or look for something else. She says I can’t get something else until that’s sorted and sold. Women!

I suppose the walk home did us good though.

If anyone’s passing it later, don’t torch it or break in please, I took the sat-nav with me!

I doubt anyone noticed but the-kid.org was offline for a few days there. I’ve changed hosts to GoDaddy.com so everything should be uber-stable now. I had been hosting with a friend of mine who has a reseller account for nothing, but I guess you get what you pay for! lol  I really appreciate the hosting though Aaron so cheers.  :cool:

This post is also an apology in advance to Aberdeen Blogs if I mess everything up during the change.

Thank god for that!

I think all pages are valid now. What a nightmare that is to get to work though. In wordpress your css isn’t in one sheet its a combination of several, but validating at w3c just gives you line numbers from the page. You then have to trawl through your stylesheets/template to find the problems. To be fair though most problems were with the sidebar, which has most hackage done by me.

It’s a pity that this theme doesn’t work properly in internet explorer(sidebar slides down) and even when it does it breaks the <ul> and <li> effects (and in doing so becomes non-compliant!)

If anyone wants to check out the code for me feel free! Oh and if anyone spots a page (ignoring the webcam stream) that’s not compliant please leave me the link in a comment. Cheers

…Suzie and Penny in the village shop.

BULLSHIT!!

I am certain now from numerous Balamory watchings that Suzie and Penny absolutely despise each other. Watch for yourselves..

I was at a jobs fair the other day in the AECC with a mate. After we’d been headhunted (ok that didn’t happen) we checked out some of the jobs on the board. I wrote down the ones that most intrigued me and thought I’d share…

Title:- Temp HR Generalist

What I think that means:- A Temp HR Generalist is a very wide encompassing position…for a while. Companies need people who they can make do whatever they say without fear of “that’s not in my job description”. Generalists, especially temp generalists, fit this position. A temp Generalist has no clout in a company at all. An HR generalist is there just to make up the numbers in the HR department, I mean you couldn’t put a Generalist in charge of hiring and firing could you ?

Title:- Draughts Person

What I think that means:- Well, we all know what a draughtsperson does, but how about a draughts person(two words). Logically speaking this must be someone who does things with draughts. Perhaps they can play lengthy draughts games, or perhaps they just eat lots of curry/chilli…

Title:- West African Accountant

What I think that means:- I’m fairly sure this job title is against employment laws. You can’t normally dictate what nationality a future employee will be…

Title:- Document Advisor

What I think this means:- I have never worked in an office before but I’m fairly sure this is a made up job for tax reasons. Documents don’t need advice, they need filed.

Title:- Wealth Advisors

What I think this means:- The boy who runs to the bookies for the boss. Duties include advising the boss of any wins/losses and corresponding amounts. This title could also be a bank manager (which is basically the same job.)

In other news, as soon as we went in the door I was approached by none other than a representative of the council shoving a free pen in my hand and telling me to get on their website for a look at available jobs. Who knows, I might do that! HA!

I can’t log in to the stv forums, never have been able to. Logging in just returns me to the login page! I can’t msg admin about it because I’m not logged in!!!!!!!

Doesn’t matter if i use FF or IE6. I haven’t tried a linux distro yet but I’m sure that wont matter either. I’ve also specifically added various stv.tv addresses to my cookies ALLOW list.

Sort it out stv, I can’t be the only one. There are loads of new signups with 0 posts to their name.

As part of my current, do jobs for non-cash rewards thing, I’ve come across this site and signed up. If you are a good person* you will too! If you do join, and need me to do something or borrow something you should remember the way to a man’s heart…

btk

*if you don’t join this of course, you are indeed a bad person

ME! Again!!

That’s right for the second year running one of my creations* has won a “best costume” at the school. In fact this year I outdid myself picking up 2, yes that’s right, count them, TWO gongs. Danielle and Jordan swept the floor at the young ones party winning both available awards. Here are some pictures of the modelled items…

This might sound to the lay person like some trivial nonsense from a typical adoring dad. WRONG! This carries serious playground kudos. You might think you are just picking up your kids at 3 o’clock but no. It’s akin to a type of warfare, where the sly look is king. I’m now immune from the scoffing of the mothers in the playground for a good fortnight or so. That my friends, is priceless.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s great isn’t it? I’ve spent parts of the last week working on the kids costumes. Billie-Jo is gonna be a snooker table, Danielle is Marge Simpson, Jordan is a Leprechaun. Can you see a theme? No? They are all green.

In a related story our living room curtains no longer drag on the floor.

She’s gone out for the day with her friend and I am babysitting (that’s 6 kids in total!) I suppose it’s just as well they are here or I’d be lost again. I was also left an instruction! Woohoo. The washing is now ON though so I find myself with free-ish time(the kids aren’t crying yet and playing happily out the back door.)

I was going to hit blogshares but their database is broken. I was going to update my mp3 dooda but can’t really get into the mood. Oh well, I suppose I’ll go beat a child at some game or other.

Life’s hard isn’t it!