Reklame og utdanning

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Er det bare meg, eller slår reklame for utdanning oftere feil enn reklame generellt? Akkurat nå har bussene i Trondheim reklameplakater for mange forskjellige utdanninger (jeg mistenker at søknadsfristen for opptak til universiteter og høyskoler til høsten nærmer seg…), og særlig to har fått meg til å lure på hva de som lagde reklamen tenkte på.

Den første er fra Campus Christiania (og hvor dumt er det navnet, egentlig?) om at kreativitet kan læres. Vel og bra, men de som har lagd plakaten kunne kanskje trengt en oppfrisker? Noe så nitrist og intetsigende er det lenge siden jeg har sett…

Den andre er fra Dronning Mauds, for førskolelærerutdanningen: Ingen barn er like.  Det er en plakat med bilde av barn i forskjellige positurer, noen med kostyme, og titler som “Filosofen”, “Prinsessen”, “Hjelperen” osv. – og så en del plakater med bare ett av barna. På hovedplakaten er tittelen “Hvis du tror at alle barn er like har du mye å lære.” Generellt får dette meg til å tenke flere ting: A. Hvis du har så lite menneskeinnsikt at du tror at alle barn er like bør du vel helst ikke få lov til å bli førskolelærer. B. Sier de ikke implisitt at hvis du ikke tror at alle barn er like er du utlært? C. Vil vi egentlig ha førskolelærere fra en institusjon som tror at alle barn kan puttes i bås? (Barn er selvsagt ikke like, men de passer tydeligvis inn i et knippe enkelt definerbare kategorier.) Osv. Slett ikke det reklamebyrået var ute etter å formidle, mistenker jeg.

#%¤&#¤

Mirthful 5 Comments

Tine har tydeligvis funnet ut at de skal sette sånn plastduppedittåpner på alle melkekartongene sine. Ikke at det ikke er enkelt og greit og sånt når man skal åpne og helle, men for oss som skyller, bretter og stapper er det noe herk. Hvordan mener de at man skal få 6 bretta kartonger ned i den 7. når det er sånne digre plastklumper i veien, egentlig?

Som sagt:  #%¤&#¤

Swearing at the computer

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This week at work so far has been spent swearing at the computer. Not that that doesn’t happen now and again, a few times a day perhaps, most weeks, but this week it has been worse than usual. You see, our IT people decided to upgrade our Microsoft Office Suite. Yeah, we now have Office 2007. This is not a good thing. Here are some examples of why:

What’s with the colour scheme? In Word I can chose between blue background with blue type, grey background with grey type and charcoal background with – uhm – whiteish type. The charcoal is too black and dreary for me (besides, white type on black is NOT easy on the eyes in the long run). The two others are fine, I suppose, since – with glasses – my eyesight is pretty normal. I’d hate to have poor eyesight and trying to make sense of this, though.

Instead of nested windows, each document opens in it’s own window. Fine. There are advantages and drawbacks to both approaches, and this is not new in Office 2007. However, what IS new is that if you use the “close window” cross in the upper right hand corner when you have only one document open you close both the document and the programme. There is no “close open document” button handily available. Well, there is now – though at upper left rather than upper right – I had to go into settings and dig it out.

The “Print” button, the equivalent of “ctrl+p”, is not immediately available (though it is now, I dug that out, too).

They MOVED THE BLOODY SEND BUTTON in the create new message window in Outlook. Now I have to search for it every time (yeah, I know, I’ll get used to it).

If you select a piece of text and place you cursor over it, a “handy” little box pops up with likely buttons – bold, italics and so on. Which means that if you move you cursor over the selected text in order to replace the cursor and change the selection (because, say, it “helpfully” selected a word more than you wanted when all you wanted was to select a few words in a sentence and delete them) you end up clicking the bloody bold button because you click before you really think and the “handy” box takes a second to appear anyway and so is only just there in time to register the actual click but wasn’t visible when your finger started moving down on the mouse button.

In Excel you can select a column (or row), right click and choose “Insert” and it will insert a column (or row) in front (or above). You can also select a cell, right click, select “Insert…” and get a dialogue box with a few choices. However, as far as I can see you can’t make a selection and then go to a menu to choose “Insert row below”, “Insert column before” and so on. Not a big thing, I guess, but I like being able to do things the way I used to do them…

There is more. However, I suppose that’s plenty for now.

The week hasn’t been all bad, though. For example, my brother sent me a link to this Onion story, which pretty much made my week, despite Microsoft:

Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book

I rather like:

Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.

You could see it coming

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Well, if you’ve been around for a while, that is.

Dear Santa,

We are once more coming up to Christmas, and though I have pretty much everything I could wish for there are always one or two little odds and ends. Material girl, that’s me.

Again, I think I’ve been reasonably good. I’ve probably annoyed a few people, but, really, people get annoyed so easily and one can’t be universally popular – even you struggle with that so what chance do the rest of us have?

Thanks for clearing Rowling’s calendar so that she was able to finish Book 7 at last, btw, it was much appreciated (and not only by myself, as far as I can gather).

  1. World peace. Yes, I know, I never give up. Consider it as an expression of faith.
  2. A permanent job would be kinda nice. One I would actually enjoy even better.
  3. An external flash – with adjustable lamp direction (for example: this or this).
  4. The book “Ur-Pippi” by Astrid Lindgren in Swedish.
  5. Photoshop CS3 (I wish).
  6. Health and longevity for my nearest and dearest and for the following authors/artists (and any others I may have forgotten): Robin Hobb, J.K. Rowling, Stephen Fry, Jo Nesbø, Ole Paus, Bjørn Eidsvåg, Alanis Morisette, Michael Wiehe, Michael Parkinson, Håkon Gullvåg, Rosamunde Pilcher, Bill Bryson, Kate Atkinson, Bob Dylan and Jasper Fforde. You know why.
  7. Non Stop. As usual.
  8. One of those horribly expensive sewing machines. Preferably Husqvarna, but I’d be willing to consider Pfaff. One that does embroidery – where I can design the patterns myself – would be cool, but failing that, one with a gazillion fancy seams would make me very happy. Or an overlock. That would certainly make me happy, too.

Bambi on ice

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This weekend we were at the cabin in Finnskogen. And I saw something I’ve never seen before and probably will never see again, and which has to rate among the top three most absurd things I’ve ever seen (very possibly it’s THE most absurd thing I’ve ever seen, I certainly can’t think of any contenders off the top of my head).

Here goes: On Saturday we were driving from the cabin deep in the woods to my grandparents’ house not so deep in the woods. For the first part of the journey the road is almost-two-lanes and not very well travelled. It’s November, and almost winter, and that morning there were patches of ice on the road. My father – who was driving – came a little too fast into a turning where there was ice, and started to skid just a little. Just around the corner there’s a bloody great big moose in the middle of the road. Not the most unusual sight at Finnskogen, but enough to make us a bit jumpy considering the driver had less than perfect control over the car.  However, we obviously made the poor moose jump, too (what’s that they say: It’s more afraid of you than you are of it?), because he jumped, skidded and slid and…

landed on his ass and slid – back legs out to the side, front legs frantically scrabbling for a hold – across the road.

Now, seriously? I thought this sort of thing only happended in Disney pictures.

Once he got to the side of the road he got a hold, got onto all four legs again and stalked off, feeling, one must assume, really embarassed. “Jeeez. Did they have to come around the corner and startle me like that? I bet they’re laughing their heads off now.” We were. “It would be just my luck if they had a video camera running. I’ll be all over YouTube by this evening.” Well. We didn’t, unfortunately. I actually had my camera on my lap, but I was too flabbergasted to even think about taking pictures before it was way too late.

The pledge

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I, Mirthful, pledge that I shall abstain from the purchase of “new” manufactured items of clothing, for the period of 2 months. I pledge that I shall refashion, renovate, recycle preloved items for myself with my own hands in fabric, yarn or other medium for the term of my contract. I pledge that I will share the love and post a photo of my refashioned, renovoated, recycled, crafted or created item of clothing on the Wardrobe Refashion blog, so that others may share the joy that thy thriftyness brings! Signed Mirthful.

*********

And so it begins. I thought I’d try this for 2 months to start with, which is kind of a cheat as I can quite easily go 2 months without buying any new clothes even without a pledge – I often have a hard time finding anything I actually want in the shops (though I will probably find lots of items I actually want now that I’ve pledged not to…).

Ah well

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What do you do when you have a blog and nothing in particular to write about? You fill it with silly quizzes and memes, that’s what. What, what?

 

Your Score: Pure Nerd

91 % Nerd, 47% Geek, 43% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the “dork.” No-longer. Being smart isn’t as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Congratulations!

THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

 

Thanks to Tone for providing the link and for scoring higher than me on dorkiness :D

Incidentally, in my sociolect or whatever you’d call it, the differentiation in the definitions of geek and nerd is pretty much the other way around. Not that it matters.

I worry about myself sometimes

Mirthful 1 Comment

I think I’ve mentioned before that in addition to getting earworms, I also get poetry or bits of blank verse stuck in my head – sometimes for days. I’ve recently realised this also happens with short phrases, or even words. For example, a month or two ago I had the word “pasilurken” floating around in my head, popping up to the surface of my consciousness and submerging again at irregular intervals, and I couldn’t decide whether to be more annoyed or amused.

Now in that case, obviously, it was the unusualness of the word that caught my fancy. At other times, quite ordinary words get stuck, and then twisted. Like soup. Innocuous enough, as words go, right? Well, the other night it reduced me to tears of amusement. It went like this: I had soup for lunch. Then, at bedtime, I commented something my husband said with “surprise” (our normal slang for “what else is new?”). As usual, he countered with a bad pun “If the soup rises, please try to make it to the bathroom in time”. And as usual, I laughed. (I laugh at bad puns, especially my husband’s bad puns. This is one of many reasons he claims I am easily amused.) We then turned off the lights and proceeded to attempt to fall asleep. The word “soup” and the word “rise” continued to float around in my head, though. Some time later, I snorted out loud. My ever trusty brain had presented me with the alternative Hemingway title “The soup also rises”. My husband wanted to know what was so funny. I tried to explain, but realised it really wasn’t particularly funny, and so started laughing harder (impeccable logic), so it took a while before I managed to fill him in.

I worry about myself sometimes…