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Yesterday evening saw myself and Jon enjoying a cosy evening at home. He had only the 25th and 26th off from work but had schlepped into London early on Thursday and Friday so that he could come home at a nice hour of the evening, 5:30 rather than 9:15.

We pottered off to Sainsbury’s to get the tuna and sweetcorn which we needed to my our usual Friday evening comfort meal of… Tuna and Sweetcorn Pasta. We do at the very least make our white sauce from scratch. He bought 4 bottles of Cobra beer for him, and 4 for me, mine sans alcohol of course. The supermarket was reasonably empty which allowed us to endulge in our our favourite evening out past-time - (yes going shopping is as much ‘an evening out’ that we usually manage) namely making remarks ranging from the snide through to the silly to the downright lewd (usually from me as I can be a complete gutter-bunny). Yesterday there wasn’t much to comment on other than the very cruddy looking surplus Christmas crackers and the interesting choice of wares out on display on the temporary shelves that they put at the end of the gondolas. Pringles, Condoms and Lube… that gave us something to snigger at.

Afterwards we came home to two annoyed cats who wanted food, attention in the shape of food, and reparations for our selfish abandonment of them in the form of food. We ignored them and put on the Now Show to start cooking.

Later on that evening we settled down to a perfect scene of domestic tranquility, Jon working with his new Arduino kit which had arrived earlier in the day. After about 10 minutes he disappeared up into the loft to bring down his ‘Boxes o’ Stuff’ which contain other electronics kits and the soldering iron which was the first present he ever bought me. So followed an evening of him soldering and poking code and stuff while I sat and knitted on the matinee jacket I’ve been working on for a few weeks from a vintage 1946 knitting book.

All while listing to audio books on the Slim Devices player… All in all, very geeky, even nerdy at times, and homey.

For lack of anything to do while catching up on laundry before we take the insane night crossing to Dublin on early Sunday morning - which means we will be driving to Holyhead on Saturday evening/night, I’ve started playing again with Widgets in OS X. I’ve resumed poking the mplayer controller widget I started a few months back - I was hoping it would stop me forgetting to record shows form BBC’s listen again (we do have MythTV but I’m told it needs more tweakage ;-p )
Today, I’ve started plugging it together using jQuery. I just can’t be doing with all that getElementById nonsense to be honest.. Hopefully I’ll have something vaguely working before the mad rush to pack starts. At least I have found out how to turn on the debug menu in Safari, since that’s the best browser for testing your widgets before releasing them to the wild it seems.

To turn it on (and it’s not a patch on FireBug, but what is?)

• Quit Safari
• Open a terminal window
• Type defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
• Relaunch  Safari

I did order the Visual Quick Start Widget book ages ago but it seems to be getting  delayed and delayed, at least that is what Amazon tells me. The same has been happening with the Ruby in a Nutshell book, which is most annoying. I had set myself the pre-birth/maternity leave project of learning Ruby, while my husband paints the nursery.

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.

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.