Thursday, July 21, 2011

New Wheels.

So far this year, I've changed the chain, the rear gear cassette, two inner tubes, the saddle and the headset on my bike. I've now changed the tyres completely. I'm beginning to think I should have changed the bike entirely. Ever since I've had it, I've used big, chunky bobbly tyres; I've now changed these to a pair of Continental semi-slicks that are a good inch narrower and a half-inch thinner. In theory, I should now be gliding along in unimpeded comfort on the road - so why does it feel like I'm doing more work? The whole bike moves differently and the way I'm riding it feels different too, as though I have to work harder to propel it along on the flat, in direct contradiction to what should be happening. I just don't seem to be moving fast enough, even though going up and down hill is distinctly easier and the two timed runs I made suggest otherwise. Maybe I just miss the noisy hum-hum-humm-hummm of the tyres as I increase speed. Anyway, I'll be doing a long run this weekend which should tell me what difference they've made. Now, all I have to do is change the front forks, the front gear set, the brakes (again), the gear cables and the frame, and I should be ready for London-Paris.....
Talking of moving along, I find myself once again moving office at work, for what I think is the ninth time in ten years. We are being heaped into one staffroom with teachers from other groups to create one large, amorphous Adult Learning department. Or something like that. I'm also supposed to be starting a new contract from the 1st August, one that guarantees that I'll have more work for less pay. Yet I've still to have a sniff of a contract to sign. I don't even know how much I'm supposed to be paid. If there's anyone out there who might advise me about the legalities of this, please let me know.

Friday, July 15, 2011

The Violent, Brutal World of Interview Selection Procedures in a Further Education College

We all know that it's a tough old job market out there these days - and in some places, even if you have a job, it can be hard. Several colleges, for example, are re-interviewing their staff for their own jobs. But do any have a job selection procedure quite a brutal as this? This email was recently doing the rounds:

Dear Colleagues,
Further to yesterday’s email from the Principal and to the documentation on the Portal regarding lecturer positions, number of positions and salaries, and following further negotiations with the union, there has been an urgent update on how candidates for jobs shall be selected should there be more than one person applying for any given post.
It has been pointed out that the weighting scheme previously favoured may well be detrimental to the abilities and interests of the applicants. For this reason, we have suggested that an alternative approach shall be deployed in order to choose the ideal person for each post available.
From 27th of May, we will be conducting interviews by cage fight. The cage shall be set up in the college’s front garden, affording a view of the interview to all onlookers. The Principal and Vice-Principals shall be on the balcony overlooking proceedings, while premium views will be available for ticket holders only. It is to be hoped that ticket sales will go some way to mitigating the current budget deficit.
Candidates will be matched as far as possible according to height, weight, age, strength and gender in order to comply with all Equal Opportunities regulations. Each match shall consist of three-minute rounds, continuing until one of the candidates is incapacitated or dead. Weapons, by mutual consent, may be permitted. However, due to Health and Safety considerations, home-made weaponry shall NOT be permitted. In addition, the interview shall be subject to weighting depending on fighting technique, choice of combat clothing, and ability to gouge lumps out of an opponent with a single finger.
In the case where there is only a single candidate, he or she will have an informal fight with wild animals. Again, this shall be weighted, with interviewees required to fight anything from a small, mildly asthmatic rabbit up to an enraged tiger, depending on the interviewee’s age, health and strength.
I hope that you all understand that we have to make wide-ranging changes in order to procure the survival of the college, and this exercise in interviewee selection is the best test of the maxim ‘survival of the fittest’.
Cage fighting training will be made available in due course, and you are all encouraged to attend at least one session. If you survive the first session, that is.
Thank you, and see you all in the fighting pits! 

 Awful. Absolutely awful. ;)   

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Mixed Bag.

This is going to be on of my more meandering posts, as I'm in a meandering sort of mood , something that's fairly typical of me late in the evening. I rarely get as much done as I expect to do, especially when faced by a computer screen. It never ceases to amaze me that I have in front of me a machine that is perfectly capable of launching and running a space mission, or crunching huge amounts of data, or accessing virtually all the knowledge that has been amassed by mankind, and I end up playing Angry Birds or watching a video of a cat falling off something.
In a way, home computing has become far too easy, and with that it makes it too easy to use a computer as just another way of entertaining us. I remember my first computer - a VIC-20, back in 1981. It had an enormous memory of 3kb, which I enlarged to a staggering 16kb by way of a plug in module in the back. It had a tape recorder for storing and downloading programs, and you could download a program in the incredibly fast time of five minutes. And it had 8 colours! Yes, it was limited, and as for the very notion of the internet....well, there was the possibility of dial-up modems, but they were a) bloody expensive and b) nowhere near what computer nerd movies like War Games suggested you could do with them. Yet I learned more from that machine about what computers could and couldn't do than I have from years of being logged on, surfing and blogging and generally playing with the net. The most important lesson was this: You Get Out What You Put In, or, more succinctly, GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). If you dick around on a computer, you just get dross in the end - good outcomes very much depend on remembering that a PC is a subtle, highly flexible tool that can enhance the work you do or open worlds of opportunities, provided that you're willing to work with it.
Talking of garbage, I won't be weeping any time soon for News International's problems. I feel sorry for the journalists who've lost their jobs through no fault of their own, but in the end the revelation of who had had their phones hacked was too disgusting to be ignored. It's been actually quite interesting to see Parliament actually stand up to Rupert Murdoch - it makes you realise that, by and large, the British Parliament is a remarkably feeble and supine creature much of the time. They've only moved in for a decisive kill because they saw that NI was wounded and they could smell blood. I also suspect that our brave and noble MPs had a bit of a schadenfreude moment, and decided it was payback time for all the bollocks they've had to put up with from Rupert Murdoch's stable of media outlets.
However, NI should not be blamed alone. As has been pointed out by several newpapers, the Guardian in particular, the media and politicians have enjoyed, or possibly endured, a weird symbiotic relationship over the last few years. The journalists know that the MPs are spouting arrant guff most of the time, the MPs know they are spouting arrant guff most of the time, but beacuse of their relationship they carry on with this daft gavotte, one side bleating out sundbites and the other side not just writing it down, but positively encouraging it. In some ways, it was inevitable that newspapers would end up deploying the same kind of espionage tactics traditionally associated with spies - get the story, after all, and you have something that will sell your paper.
And let's not forget that someone buys papers or watches satellite tv - the consumers, who see their media as something to entertain, not to inform, as something to keep them amused and tittivated rather than make them think. Of course, it's entirely human nature to watch, listen to, or read about something shocking, amazing, astonishing or whatever - such things take us out the mundane grind of life. Yet there's entertaining someone and doing actions that are clearly morally reprehensible, to put it mildly.
If you look for garbage from your papers, you'll get garbage. If you want to be informed, ignore papers that just produce sensationalism.
well, seems we're back to the start of this entry in a way.
In other news: my cycling is kind of back on track -  I did a somewhat tedious fifty-mile ride down to Basingstoke and back, which served to confirm that I'm pretty much at the necessary fitness levels for the ride to Paris. I was hoping to do a few 1-hour lunchtime rides during the week, but various bits and pieces have prevented me from doing so. And the fundraising seems to be doing OK, as you can probably see from the chart on the right - on which I would ask you to click and sponsor  me!