Grammar school - bargain education - demanding postage stamps with menaces

A bag of chips
Today we went to look at a propective school in Edmonton, North London so surfing took a rest. The depressing event required the measure of spiritual lift that only a bag of chips can fulfil.

North London is a reliable place to find chip shops - Hackney has one (Faulkners), Islington's Upper Street has a couple and here's another in Edmonton. I'd call it 'traditional' which means they sell no kebab but they do sell you a huge bag of chips. I'd also call this a complete meal that creates the best rush of cholesterol you can buy. It comes in flavours: cooking oil, fried chicken or fish. However we needed cheering up after this:

How to feel miserable in a couple of hours

Edmonton, North London is home to a state funded grammar school that parents clamber to get their kids into. For the reasonably well to-do, Latymer is a no-cost option to a private school. The school open day was packed, its organisation shambolic and the atmosphere seething and tense. To suffer this is the price you pay to come here. Without reflecting on the quality of the teaching that takes place, we came away that free brings its disadvantages. Hec if they're this good at marketing, just imagine how you're going to be treated as a customer.

The school's popularity has generated unusual rudeness towards parents. While teachers were only too pleased to explain their craft, the school admin staff were off-putting, discouraging and blatently rude. Their message: you're very unlikely to get your child in here, we don't need your business, go away. And this is what my taxes pay for. After years of my arguing that publicly funded education (or 'state education') was the best way, this is embarrassing.

Hilariously, this school, which clearly spends very little effort or money on marketing pleads poverty to the visiting parents. They insist on a payment to handle each application for a place. The price is a book of stamps or an asked-for shamelessly two pounds. And they're quite rude about it!

Contrast this to the annual school fairs in Islington and Hackney where some schools were happy to press a few £££ worth of glossy print in your hand. Because of an imminent move out of range of those schools we were not able to consider these schools. Nevertheless they left us with a good feeling about state schooling. The Latymer School sadly shamed it. I hope their PR improves.

Latymer grammar school - bargain education - demanding postage stamps with menaces

How to while away some time: try digital video

Here's a tip you'd easily miss. Buy the very latest greatest digital camcorder and then put it in the cupboard for a few years while computers become fast enough, and the software gets good enough to edit digital video. Be sure to do this on a PC rather than a Mac because this ensures a level of usuability we're looking for. Better still buy a Sony Camcorder in the MicroMV format range, open the box, find the recommendation and information on where to buy Pinnacle Studio 7 DV Editing software and of course buy it. You should then discover that Pinnacle have a facinating marketing dept that lets it's imagination rip with their product's capabilities. Were you into using up time, you may experience massive disappointment to find it worked - but that's not the case. Next email tech support and wait for no answer. Wait and do nothing for a year till Studio 8 is released and now works with Sony's MicroMV. Get this and pass the time with error messages that say 'Capture error'. Puzzle further, peruse tech support to find that it didn't work on release. Nexr realise why the person on the box shot is smiling. She got Pinnacle to refund her money and got herself a life and an Apple Imac. I use a PC and must therefore cheer myself up with food.

Update
Sony need to take the blame for inventing this format in the first place. The Sony (Memory Stick) Company is known for inventing things that connect only to Sony. To be fair it was brave of Pinnacle to try to build a bridge between the format and the rest of the world. There's hope as today Pinnacle's US Product Manager agreed that there had been a delay in the compatibility with Sony MicroMV and it is being rectified right now.offers this statement to explain things: "While MicroMV support was planned for the initial release of Studio 8, unforeseen difficulties were encountered in supporting this new format. We are working closely with Sony to resolve these difficulties, and a free Studio 8.3 update with full MicroMV support should be available on the 15th September.".
The patch didn't arrive. As Pinnacle's webboard shows us, setting a date does not make things happen.

Pic: You'd really smile if you got your money back

Today the computer has a rest
Thanks to some woe at the ISP, much of the day's work was blitzed. Life has come to a halt. There is niet, nought and nothing to click on. There is niet to eat also so this nietness is complete. All that's now deemed edible is on the larder baking shelf - and this Plain Chocolate flavour block quickly won the battle for my attention. A bag of Ground Nuts was envious. The Glace Cherries were gutted.
After all that, and a few bites later, this bar has never seen chocolate. It may have briefly looked at some but it learned nothing from that. It's taste and texture cannot be recommended to readers. This cooking chocolate is to chocolate, what Windows XP is to anything else. It's a cosmetic covering to hide whatever's beneath it.

Pic: Cooking chocolate - cure for chocolate addiction

Play shopping for shops on the web

If you buy technology on the web, the firms pretty soon sort themselves out into good and less good. Give yourself a budget of a few grand and award points to the shopping sites using these criteria.

Point one is for the site with all the information you need to buy. Dabs.com do this excellently and get a deserved point here.

Point two is for whether the site shows a genuine stock level and do actually deliver. A few firms have done this excellently. Award negative points if a firm says it’s in stock and then, when you've ordered, sends a whingy email reinterpreting the meaning of 'in stock'.

Point three is for how well they split orders when things are in or out of stock.

Point four is whether they do anything at any speed when you click Checkout. (Order something from cclcomputers.com, wait a few days and then cancel and go elsewhere. Dabs.com win awards for their site but what they mean by next day delivery is measured by the days on planet Pluto. Dabs always disappoints. Ebuyer never disappoints as long as you realise that the firm really wants to go out of business. This this they do by messing up often.

Point five is negative marks for all the excuses you will get when the wrong things are sent, things don't work.

Point six is for a customer helpline that's effective. Several firms (e.g. Dabs, Ebuyer) have 'virtual customer helplines' meaning that there's a number but the response time is a ridiculous seven days.

I’ll return to this later, but first there’s money to be shed

What to do on the web: Play the signup game:
Here's a game for two if you have a friend, through you can still play and gain a thrill on your tod. To get started, go to a website which features a 'register for free' service and sign in. After you register you'll receive a confirmatory email (which you can have sent to your barely-usable Hotmail account). You use the info on the email to sign back into the site.

How the scoring works: Every site you successfully sign into gains you two points. Every site that rejects you, despite your checking that email, gains you TEN points. To get the high scores you really need to sign up with a pay as you go ISP where you'll get rejected trying to dial up via a modem. As well as winning points, the cost of the calls adds a lot of tension, and fun to the game! Places to start include Tiscali where you can sign up for a £15 a month deal, try to change it later but have your 'sign into the account' rejected repeatedly. You gain loads of points for that. At some point Tiscali will change the log in procedure without telling you such that you will need a completely different User ID and password to the one you have been sent. This means only one thing: you win that game, no problem!


I decide it's time to do a cookery course?
If you too could barely scrape a pass in toast mangement, you'll be wondering if there's a way to a brighter future though learning to prepare food well. There's the prospect of a chunk of your leisure life becoming pleasurable balanced against the pleasure you'd gain learning things on the web. If you've been following our progress todate you'll appreciate this latest discovery: there are cookery sites on the web and it's taken me this long to find one.