The Geeky Brit

A few months ago I switched from using ZoneAlarm Security suite to Windows Live OneCare. My main motivation was the cost, as I had just bought my lovely wife a laptop, and was not too thrilled about spending more money on a separate security suite for that pc. At the time the I switched I got 90 days free, and so I thought hey, why not.

Since then our main home pc has become so slow, that my wife has stopped using it. Then today I read on the BBC that it has failed *another* security test. Microsoft’s response: “We are working on it”.

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I am slowly working on the theme for this site, and I just wanted to let my avid reader(s) that this is taking a little longer than I had anticipated. I am spending my spare time doing this rather than creating blog entries. So watch this space.

There are reports that some teachers in Santa Barbara are being given a pay rise of 9% to be spread over 3 years, at the cost of increasing the class sizes that they teach.

This is a hard one for me to swallow – I do not believe we should make our children’s education suffer just to provide teachers with a pay raise. Now before teachers bombard me with angry comments let me say this. Yes, teaching is an underpaid occupation, and you should be better compensated – but for two reasons. 1. Higher salaries would attract more teachers from relevant industries and 2. With higher salaries, comes higher standards for hiring teaching staff – and a better overall standard for our education system.

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On friday I got accepted into the beta program of Joost – which is going to be, I am pretty sure, the next big thing on the internet. The company founders started something called “Skype” a few years ago, and after their 2.6 Billion dollar buyout by Ebay – they took a couple of years off and then began their new project – peer to peer on demand television.

I first saw a potential for this sort of technology when I saw a colleague of mine watching some peer to peer pirate feed of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I had paid for what I now believe was a pirate feed. I really felt a sucker as his feed seemed more reliable.

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