Category: Uncategorized

When searching around for ideas for charitable donations last year we came across Donors Choose, a website that enables you to choose exactly to which project at which schools mostly your donation will go to. They make the admin costs of each project explicit and you can choose part of the project, all of it, or al of it plus the minimal admin cost (to cover the website hosting & admin stuff).

As we’re fortunate enough to be able to give a little here and there, we gave a modest amount to an elementary (primary for those outside the US) school in Brooklyn via this website. We got an initial email in return saying thanks with a promise for more details as to how the kids were using the stuff we paid for, including letters from the kids.

And boy, what more we got! This week we received a letter from the teacher plus 15+ handwritten letters from the 8-9 year-old children plus a bunch of photos of them at work using the stuff we helped them get. It’s truly uplifting stuff.

It is both heart-breaking and scandalous that these kids have to rely on donations in a city as rich as New York and a country with such abundance as America. But it’s also heartening that you can make a direct difference to some kids lives.

It also supports schools in places such as Louisiana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, North Carolina and others and I make no apologies for banging on about it. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a great example of how the web can cut out intermediary costs and get money to where real problems exist, and quickly.

The difference between being and four and a half and three years older than that can be pretty marked.

While driving up Sixth Avenue last weekend, with the Empire State Building looming ever larger into view, M’s first cousin, once removed (to use the official terminology) gave us an apparently accurate and quite detailed synopsis of King Kong, which he’d recently seen.

About 30 secs into it, the younger cousin piped up, “he’s a big monkey!” which he later clarified to “a big gorilla,” after which the synopsis run-down continued.

I’m going to miss such innocence when it’s gone, I know it.

It’s always amusing – well it is to me, anyway – when corporate-speak butts heads with reality in spectacular ways. I face it every day in the IT industry, but have come to realize that the same self-important nonsense is prevalent in every industry.

Take this quote on February 8 from someone called Frank Williams, “We believe we couldn’t have picked a better time to move into this one organisation type structure, because the market is more and more asking for end-to-end solutions by a single supplier…These are very exciting times and this is a great opportunity to pull the UK organisation together.”

Thus says the bloke who recently took over as UK manager of Securitas, which was held up 13 days later to the tune of 50 million pounds ($87m), or thereabouts.

I guess the robbers were waiting for that single, end-to-end supplier thing to take effect so they could nick more dosh?

Well after what was apparently the fourth warmest January in New York City history, it was inevitable we’d get dumped on at some point. And last night/this morning we did. Obviosuly such an event can’t stop kids wanting to go out and run around, but we only got about 20 feet outside the door this morning before we had to stop because boy, was it deep.

There’s some pictures of the kids outside in it in the February 06 folder (as usual you’ll have to log in to see them so if you need a password etc, email us).

There’s also some general pictures of the neighborhood here for viewing without a password, like this one on the corner of our street and many many more that others have taken over at the Flickr NYC pool.

I, like thousands of others, use Google’s Gmail for certain things. It’s a good interface and has an excellent spam filter. Anyway part of what makes Gmail Gmail is its ability to search emails and also to mine the content of those emails to throw up news clips or other things it thinks are related to the content of the email.

I don’t take much notice of such things as I’m there to read email, not catch up on the news, but I couldn’t help noticing the odd things thrown up at the top of Gmail’s spam box. Most of them are recipes including Spam, you know, Hormel’s lovely canned meat product that used to be the main use of the word. Some of my favorites include:

Spam Fajitas – Serves 8, add extra salsa if desired [because just some salsa can’t be enough can it?]
Creamy Spam Broccoli Casserole – Makes 8 servings
Vineyard Spam Salad – Combine grapes, spam, peapods and onions in large bowl [for the more adventurous among you spam lovers]
French Fry Spam Casserole – Bake 30-40 minutes [that has to have been dreamt up by an impoverished student]

but my favorite of all is…..
Ginger Spam Salad – Serves 1, refrigerate overnight

Serves 1? Who would have thought it? He could have got all his mates round to share in the ginger spam salad loveliness. Oh, I see.

Self-managing kids often seems like completely wishful thinking, especially at the end of a long weekend of childcare. but occasionally, they show signs of it, as he has over the past couple of weeks. He decided – exhibiting the autonomous type of self-improvment thinking you perhaps don’t think 4 year-olds are capable of – that it was time he started teaching himself to read in sentences. Not that we had negelected him and left him to his own devices – far from it! But reading in sentences is not explicitly taught at his pre-school.

So one day in January he started reading words, using phonetics to work out any words he didn’t grasp immediately ( occasionally asking for help, obviously) and stringing them together into sentences.

It was one of those spurts of development where the neurons seems to be firing off in greater numbers than normal. he’s also become very curiosu abotu cvalendras, years, days etc (he’s lknown his months and been able to tell us the date each morning for a few months now, thanks in part to the opening titles of the Daily Show, if we’re honest.

Makes us wonder what is next – I know you’re supposed to plan all these things out, but who does that really?

This Arctic Monkeys thing is getting out of hand. First Monday’s NY Times writes a gushing feature on them complete with a picture on the front of the Arts section. And Tuesday, sitting in a hotel in San Francisco, after the newscaster has dealt with the death of Coretta Scott King, they segue as neatly as they ever segue (i.e. not at all) into coverage of Arctic Monkeys, comparingf them to the Beatles. Do you think they might have meant the Monkees and got confused? S’possible. Granted a CBS local affilate in one city is not a measure of the zeitgeist as a whole, but this is getting a bit silly.

We’ve been very lax in the past few months in both posting pictures and pointing you at them. So over the weekend we uploaded a whole lot more, including some from this very weekend, when we took advantage of the balmy weather on Saturday to go to Central Park to play football, although given most of the major areas were cordoned off for the winter, that is somewhat tricky to do.

So if you click here you’ll be taken to all the page where we host all the kids pictures and when you login you’ll see them arranged by month. All of the pictures in November 05, December 05 and January 06 are new. As usual you’ll need a username & password to see them so if you don’t have one already, please email us and we’ll send you one.

By way of a taster this was taken in late December in a London store while Dad was shopping…

…and this one was taken atop Belvedere Castle in Central Park this past Saturday – and I like to think it has a sort of Morrissey-esque quality to it.

We escaped briefly last night to go and see Hard-Fi at the Bowery Ballroom, maintaining that fine Brit-in-NYC tradition of seeing great British bands in much smaller venues that you’d get to see them in NYC. They wre at the Bowery Ballroom, which probably holds about 500, I’d guess.

But were trying a bit too hard to impress the crowd and create an ‘atmosphere’. At one point Richard Archer, the singer said something along the lines of, “I heard you lot in New York were too cool for school, now prove them wrong and make some noise,” to which the bloke behind us said (and I’ m paraphrasing as this is a family website) “%^$#^&@* mate, half of us are from London you @&%*!” Someone else took pictures here

We’ve never had a Christmas tree before as we’ve never spent Christmas Day in Manhattan – we’re always somewhere else. But now he’s got old enough we decided to get one for the kids, so a couple of weeks ago the lad and I wandered round the corner to one of those temporary stands the city sets up each Christmas for these mysterious blokes from somewhere else to sell Christmas trees. We only got a very modest one as we had to have it up high so a cerratin little lady doesn’t grab it.

Anyway Miles decide his name should be Sam, after we discarded ‘Dave’ on the grounds we already have an ficus tree called David, which was also his suggestion. He also chose all the decorations and put the star on top.

And to top it off, for his Winter Festival at school today we made our first attempt to bake that British Christmas tradition into submission with mince pies, which we made from scratch (well the filling only).