During the day we hope to have various areas of the school set aside for each of the decades the school has been opened, with music and school related pictures and memories from that era, and if possible, staff! We are hoping that as many ex staff, pupils and Governors can be persuaded to attend as possible, and hopefully be up for a photo shoot too!
We are looking to reopen the ‘tuck shop’ for a one off session, as well and opening the Sports Hall for a soft play/bouncy play and GW sporting hero’s area, we may even have a chance to open the school canteen for a small taste of a ‘last George Ward School dinner’! The event will finish with a final assembly at 4pm where we hope a few speeches from various headmasters/dignitaries may occur.

There are lots of other ideas for the day still being finalised to make this a fab ‘goodbye’ but we will need your help with getting this publicised and was wondering if you could advertise this for us in your media? We need to get in contact with anyone who has any photos, memorabilia or just wants to write into us with their old school memories, which could be displayed on the day in the various areas, all would be gratefully accepted.

Please forward any correspondence to the school at George Ward School, Melksham, Wiltshire, SN12 8DQ or via email to goodbye@georgeward.wilts.sch.uk or check out our school website at www.georgeward.wilts.sch.uk where we will have up to date notices as plans progress along with a direct link for any comments and memories to be sent in.

Your help in contacting any ex staff or pupils would be invaluable.

Thank you
Liz Dimond
GWSA
George Ward School,
Melksham
Wiltshire

First up, I’d like to say that the lack of an SD card reader really doesn’t bug me. All my photos are stored in iPhoto, I transfer them there via a cable from my camera. And this is, perhaps, one of the reasons why people seem to hate the fact there is no viable file system on the iPad. Windows users are used to dragging files around, Mac users (with the introduction to iLife) have enjoyed the magic of self-organised photos, movies and music. Windows users have applications available to them, but many dont see to use them, Mac users seem to like the increased productivity iPhoto and iTunes gives them.
I believe in a number of years, all these files will be gone. File space and network speeds will mean that compression is no longer needed, so people will only have to concern themselves with Photos, Documents, Music, Spreadsheets, Movies, etc…Apple know that the desktop isn’t ready yet, but the mobile platforms of today are.
Having said all of that, Apple have created an accessory for connecting a camera via USB or by using a SD card.

The lack of Flash doesn’t worry me either. I visit very few sites that require Flash to get the most out of the site. Most Flash on the web seems to drive adverts. It’s a shame that Flash games won’t run, but I tend not to play games that often…
Flash videos can go, with the introduction of H.264, YouTube doesn’t need Flash and neither does a number of other sites offering video streaming.

iPad. I guess it could conjure the image of an Apple branded nappy:

However, I feel the name has slightly more technical and historical background.
In the late 1980’s Xerox PARC’s Mark Weiser coined the phrase “ubiquitous computer”, a term to mean “computing all around us”. He believed that we were entering a new era in computing. We’d had the mainframes (one computer to many people), we’d had desktops (one computer to one person), but now we were entering the ubiquitous era, with many small (perhaps task specific) computers serving many people in everyday life.
PARC created three devices in the early-mid 1990’s, the tab, the pad and the board.
The tab, a small palm device that ran applications on a server and the GUI on the device, it encouraged computing on the go and had the vision of always being connected to the network.
The board, similar to an interactive whiteboard today, allowing many people to interact with it both over the network and physically.
The pad, a smaller more personal board, one could use a tab to drive a board. Pads ran on workstations with forwarded graphics.
Today’s iPad, in my mind, fulfils pretty much what the Xerox PARC Pad tried to accomplish almost two decades ago. The iPhone/iPod Touch is similar to the tab.

The iPad’s hardware is something to marvle at. Whatever Apple have in there it’s super power efficient as Apple claim the iPad will last for ten hours on a single battery charge, and it all squeezes into an incredibly thin package.
The tablet is powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip. The A4 chip is a CPU and GPU all on one chip. I’m guessing the added bonus of having this combination is perhaps less power consumption and added room in a cramped space. I can see the next-gen iPhone having an Apple chip. The A4 drives all of the applications and the 9.7″ screen which runs at a 1024×768 resolution.
The three capacities given are 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, each costs $100 more than the previous.
Apart from that, I think it will be interesting to see the first break-apart.

Pricing isn’t too bad. The 16GB model is $499 as of 31/1/10 that’s £312.79! Perhaps Apple will up this to £350, though I fancy that they’ll charge around £400 for it.

I’d like to see how the iPad is recieved when it is released. I’m also looking forward to seeing the second and third generation iPads.

Over 1000 stories for me to look at…I’m never going to have the time!

Ingredients include:
8 blocks of Bournville chocolate
1 teaspoon of sugar
Mug of milk (I used semi-skimmed)
Pinch of allspice

I measured a mug of milk (as much as I wanted), and transfered the milk into a saucepan.  Putting the hob on high I popped on the saucepan.  While stiring with a whisk I added a few pinches of allspice (as I didn’t have cinemon or mixed spice) and a teaspoon of sugar.
When the milk started to steam I added four blocks of chocolates (I broke them up before adding them) and started to stir vigorously with the whisk, when they had melted I added another four block of chocolate.  Having done it, I think next time I might grate the eight blocks to save a little time.
When the chocolate had melted I continued to whisk until the milk was bubbly then poured into my mug again.  If I had had it, a squiring of cream would have been a very nice addition!

The old 6200 has been dropped in photo chemicals, dropped many a time and has been run over by the Faye’s KA.  This new one seems to have broken because it has a small amount of photo chemicals dripped over it…

Why oh why isn’t technology today more robust?  Or at least as robust as it used to be…Yes, phone manufacturers want you to upgrade your phone every now and again, but every six months!?

So what’s new?  I’ve left Camberley, worked for the MoD over the summer and am now back in Aber living with Faye (hopefully a film of the flat coming soon).  Since being in Aber I have bought a new desk, a new chair (which is annoyingly not here), a pair of new monitors and a new shiney computer.

Let’s talk about the monitors to start off with, two 22″ things from Samsung (SyncMaster T220 apparently), here they are:

As you can see from the picture, a nice wide desk that is also quite long.  Plenty of room for lots of crap!

So, that are these screens attached to?

• 2 x Quad-Core Xeons (5500)
• 6GB of RAM (DDR3 1066MHz)
• 3 x Hard drives, (1 x 640GB, 2 x 500GB)
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 120
• 2 x DVD±RDL/DVD±RW/CD-RW drives
• Wi-Fi & Bluetooth

Guessing that you’ve either heard me shout it about, or have guesst that, yes, it’s a Mac Pro!  Here’s some pics of it:

I do love it,  I’ve quickly found that 6GB of memory isn’t very much at all, not once you start ripping DVD’s and starting up virtual machines….I’ve found that the 64-bit apps do run quite a bit faster, and don’t really take up much more memory than their 32-bit equivilants.

I still have my trusty MacBook, I’m running ChronoSync to keep the two machines in check, though I’m hoping to develop an open alternative in the next year or two.

Some last pictures before I finish this off, one of my main desk, and another of my desk from last year:

Heading over to Camino’s web site, I found the team thanking all the beta testers

Looking at the preview page, it still looks like they are plugging the beta.  However, I guess if you download the beta it will ask you to update to the latest version.

All in all I can’t see much difference to the fourth beta, though no doubt it’s more stable, etc etc etc…

The fourth beta came out 18th September this year, a month and a half later and we get the RC.  Hopefully Camino 2.0 will offcially be along shortly.

How exciting!  I may get it around Tuesday (fingers crossed), so that’ll mean I’ll get to install it before I go back to Aber next Friday

If so, here is a script that will allow you to bulk download:  getpics.sh
As you can see, it isn’t the best quality script ever, but it does the job.

A word of warning, it connects to the internet once to see what page youve specified, plu as many time as you have photos.

To view a whole album (and this download a whole album) add “?start=all” (no quotes) to the end of your URL.

Requirements:
Bash
curl
Internet connection
A photobucket page that shows the “Direct Link” text box