It’s been eleven hard days since we moved house. Eleven days without our usual internet connection. Although I talked to both Telecom and Quicksilver five days before picking up sticks it has been impossible to get the tubes turned on. In effect, because of the patchy interweb available at the Learning@School conference, I have been on hard rations for two long weeks. It’s not good.
I can’t cope without regular doses of interweb goodness. I have to have it. So, I have been using a data connection on my Nokia 6234 phone and attempting to limit myself to a few megabites a day. Unfortunately I’m not good with constraints.
The other adult in the household has taken to sitting out on the deck and connecting wirelessly to the large educational institution across the road. This is fine for sending and receiving email but it’s not good for surfing.
The youngest member of the household wanders around sadly. Every so often he stops in front of the router willing it to make a connection. He can’t quite understand why our own local network has no link to the outside world. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t have an internet connection. This ‘outage’ is seriously limiting his lifestyle.
It’s quite challenging to be without a service that we now (in our household) take for granted. We get almost all of our news and information via the web. I keep up with a whole lot of sites via RSS feeds – at the moment I daren’t follow my usual pattern in case I totally destroy my cellphone account. A lot of our communication happens over the internet. I’d love to send photos of my new grandson to all and sundry however I just don’t have the bandwidth (of course this could be a blessing in disguise for the hundreds of people in my address book, especially the people who barely know me). Youtube, Google videos and any multimedia is completely out of the question.
I suppose I should be using all of this extra time on my hands to find new and meaningful pastimes (or prepare for upcoming milestone reports). However I can’t. It’s all just too big and too awful to contemplate. I hope that normal service resumes shortly. The latest communications with Telecom and Quicksilver are reasonably promising.
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Counting days has much to commend it Nix – it leads to new insights-
This week, whilst you are preparing your ict_pd cluster milestone report to meet all expected deadlines so that amongst other things your cluster schools can be paid – you might care to ponder the stats from our cluster milestone experiences last year.
Let us call these Clusters, Thing 1 and Thing 2 –
A quick check on the time taken from when the milestone is recorded as arriving at HQ and the time the ms_response letter pings back again makes an interesting maths project
1. Determine the average milestone response time for Thing 1 from the following data- Response times of ms_5 51 days, ms_6 65 days, ms_7 63 days and ms_8 102 days
2. Express this average ms response time in weeks.
3. Determine the average milestone response time for Thing 2 from the following data- Response times of ms_1 50 days, ms_2 66 days, ms_3 60 days and ms_4 102 days
4. Express this average ms response time in weeks.
5. Find a word to describe the usefulness of feedback that arrives so long after the event reported on.
Ours commonly arrive as the next milestone report is being collated.
Makes me suspect that ms response time is not part of everyone’s job description.
Must get back to writing mine – deadlines to be met and all that
6. Predicted response time for ms_9?
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