theoddsock.com

I was more than usually bemused on reading this article on the BBC news website about a school’s pilot of using RFID tags to track? - No, wait they claimed it wasn’t for tracking. Monitor? Who knows, but the gist is that they have an RFID tag woven into the school badge on student’s sweaters.

The school wrote to student’s parents saying that it would allow for automatic registration when they entered a classroom - correct me if I’m wrong, I only managed 5 weeks of teacher training, isn’t that sort of tracking students’ movements?

The RFID tag is to hold information such as the student’s academic record, targets and so on which teachers can access using a hand-held computer. Now surely a good teacher should know the children in their class well enough to know that with out having to scan them in like groceries at the beginning of class. I am then reminded of Eddie Izzard’s routine involving food scanners at supermarkets, when the only interesting thing is when it doesn’t go beep…. will each child have a handy 50 digit number to type in?
I wonder if they have realised that the students might be able to wreck all kinds of havoc akin to thwarting attempts of ‘tracking the evil alien monsters through the bowels of the ship/factory what-have-you’ by swapping sweaters, removing the badges, getting one of them to wear a bunch of sweaters, etc.

This also brings to mind the hidden tracking device mentioned in The Phantom Menace - any attempt to escape and ‘pow-splat’ - they blow you up, according to Anakin, and after three films many people probably wished that tag was still in place.

I generally find it amusing that something that was earlier touted as a great thing to be on groceries so that our smart Fridges could do our shopping over the internet for us, is now being applied for “not” tracking school children, and is so obviously open to abuse either by the children circumventing it or by other undesireables based on the information that it is needlessly storing.
As it is RFID tags shouldn’t contain anything other than a unique id, hence the ID, that is used for looking up the data held elsewhere, otherwise the information on the card/tag could be altered and if is that is the only source for the information….. then the whole system is seriously geborken.

This wonderful pun-age didn’t occur to me until later when I was uploading the photos to Facebook.

Today we had the 20 week scan. It looks like we are expecting a girl, lack of any thing that was obviously indicative of a boy. And she is a right mover!  She even managed a headstand/tumble. This was good to know as last night I’d spent 20 minutes laying in the bath with a plastic duck on my bump waiting for some kicks while we descended into the enevitable Hunt for Red October quotes.

However, all the moving made life a bit difficult for the sonographer. We had to take a 10 minute break so I could wander around to try and get her to move to a position such that her heart could be checked - only once I’d jumped up and down a bit did we manage to get to see all the other things they needed to check out.

Thankfully everything is coming along as it should. My mum has already noted that she will probably have the Glasser overbite, but has a lovely nose.

The scary thing tho about the scans is when they look at the face straight on, you have to curb the ‘ye-argh!’ reaction, is it a Naausican or a baby skeletor??

So, Hello, World from Amelia Elizabeth!

“How’s my makeup?’ or ‘I’ve got fingers!’

Those of you who read this blog will probably recall that I put off a round of IUI treatment to go to ‘Vanilla’ @Media back in June.

Yesterday was Day 1 of the AJAX flavour of @Media, and I will still have nightmares about the pickled carrots they served at the buffet lunch.

The talks were good, those by Derek Featherstone and Stuart Langridge were the highlights for me.

The day was, alas, bookended by some particularly horrid experiences, mainly on the theme of being 5 months pregnant with a bad back and legs, and being shoved and kicked on the Tube and glared at as i made my way down a FCC train carriage to my husband who had tried to keep a seat for his ‘imaginary pregnant wife’, he gave me his seat, but I did burst into tears due to the shear stress of the day, so I hope those people who thought that he’d just made it up to have a place for his bag are suitably mollified.

So I am spending today at home working and trying to recover mobility sufficiently to do my no less unpleasant in a different way commute to Cambridge tomorrow. And also regain my faith in humanity enough that I don’t go on a rampage through the office
I will post something better/nicer about the talks I enjoyed at a later stage, but at the moment most of my brain power has dwindle, and I’m about able myself mugs of cocoa and think about intranets.