Busted! Porcupine sharing my sicilian snakes

Having had some mysterious midnight mischief taking more than a fair share of my sicilian snakes (cucuzza) below my office window, I finally captured the beasty on our newly acquired trail camera with an almost covert infrared flash.  It was always going to be a toss-up between this porcupine and a monster rabbit (impressive teeth marks on the left-overs...!  

Now to work out where this large porcupine is getting into our fenced-off house camp!

So they still think an ICT class at school will produce coding geek???

 So I got wind of a story -  ** IT teaching in need of 'reform' **

The teaching of computer science needs to be reformed to make it more relevant to modern needs, says the UK government < http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15923113 >


Old foggies ... they still have it wrong.  Do you really think that an ICT class at secondary school offering M$FT C# will do anything more than give Anders Hejlsberg's ego a boost? 

I don't think so - simply because kids who wanna be geeks would rather be doing stuff with current programming languages - C# is essentially a Java rip off - and there's way cooler programming language out there dealing with contemporary distributed framework issues.  And there's no way they'll be doing game development in a classroom of a mediocre country school!

Android platform and imminent Linux alternatives, free from the M$FT litigation dazzle, will soon represent the coding environment of choice, and all the poor kiddies forced to learn C# @ school will be lost to the cause! There's no way any secondary education system is going develop curriculum content which will embrace universal coding options.  No one ICT teacher in a secondary school is going to be able to teach such diverse skill, so it will typically be an appointment with some M$FT A+, N+ or MCSE qualification... with the end result a closed system suited to further M$FT exploitation.

Sorry to sound so cynical, but I've heard this bullshit too many times.  Kids who wanna be geeks will become geeks through networking with other wanna be geeks and having unlimited access to the right tools. Not be listening to an inevitably disenfranchised teacher in a goverment secondary school.

Summer garden produce

A morning harvest of Sicilian 'snake' (also known as cucuzza), patty pans (yellow and green variants), gem squashes and the first "doodhies" (Indian long gourd) of the season...there's no reason to patronise the long-distance veg deliveries of Fruit 'n Veg when you can get most everything in your own kitchen garden.

Phew! Finally! The Ministry's web site is up!

Good news - the Ministry of Education web site is now working.

check out http://www.moe.gov.na

Now to try and find all those ETSIP reports on progress in the Tech!Na implementation plan...


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oh dear ... Omalaeti haven't managed to repair the mafrii.com links!  AND, worse still, the original link to the Ministry's most valuable resource - EMIS - is still not fixed - http://emis.edsnet.na

Brakwater firestorm

With a howling gale blowing in from the west, this firestorm kept us busy with flames flaring up >10 metres high.  Our neighbouring farms lost tens of thousands of hectares of grazing over three days of burning.