Saturday, December 23, 2006
A warning for parents
A true story I read on a forum:
There's a nine year old boy and he has a seven year old sister. This is a boy of the world which means he is growing up and, specifically, doesn't believe in Father Christmas any more. His seven year old sister won't believe him when he tells her that Santa Claus is not real and points out that the sherry, mince pie and carrot they put out on Christmas Eve always disappear by Christmas morning.
The boy devises a cunning experiment. He tells his sister to count the carrots in the bag of carrots in the vegetable rack before they go to bed and again in the morning.
Sure enough, on Christmas morning, when the boy's sister counts the carrots in the carrot bag, there is one more than there was the night before. Not only that, but one of the carrots on the top looks remarkably similar to Rudolph's. The children rush in to Mummy and Daddy's bedroom, where awkward questions have to be answered.
The moral is that children aren't stupid, just inexperienced.
In our household, when I was young, we didn't bother with the carrot, just the sherry and mince pie. I suspect that if I had tried a similar experiment but marking the level of sherry in the bottle instead of the number of carrots in the bag, it wouldn't have worked.
There's a nine year old boy and he has a seven year old sister. This is a boy of the world which means he is growing up and, specifically, doesn't believe in Father Christmas any more. His seven year old sister won't believe him when he tells her that Santa Claus is not real and points out that the sherry, mince pie and carrot they put out on Christmas Eve always disappear by Christmas morning.
The boy devises a cunning experiment. He tells his sister to count the carrots in the bag of carrots in the vegetable rack before they go to bed and again in the morning.
Sure enough, on Christmas morning, when the boy's sister counts the carrots in the carrot bag, there is one more than there was the night before. Not only that, but one of the carrots on the top looks remarkably similar to Rudolph's. The children rush in to Mummy and Daddy's bedroom, where awkward questions have to be answered.
The moral is that children aren't stupid, just inexperienced.
In our household, when I was young, we didn't bother with the carrot, just the sherry and mince pie. I suspect that if I had tried a similar experiment but marking the level of sherry in the bottle instead of the number of carrots in the bag, it wouldn't have worked.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
A link and a rant
Link
A mundane story about an auction leads to an unfortunate headline.
Rant
There's new software at Blogger.com in beta. I'm not using it yet, because
a) I'd need to get a Google account - they don't seem to be able to use my existing credentials.
b) It's in beta. As an IT person, I know that means that it's not production quality. I have no intention of trusting my blog to beta software. In fact, I find it highly unethical that Google is pushing this non-production quality software onto its users so hard. When I sign in now, I have to go through a screen that tries to persuade me to transfer my blog to this unfinished software. There's also a big banner add at the top of my accont page that's doing the same thing. This is nothing more than spam.
