Category Archives: Micro

Posts that go to to micro.blogs/johnjohnston

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Read: Pew by Catherine Lacey ★★★★☆ 📚
The main character has little memory and their sex, colour, age and origin are all in doubt. They are discovered in church and meet the locals, good folks to their own thinking, without talking Pew revels them to us. We never find out about Pew and the ending is ambiguous.

But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time

The book begins with a quote from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – which I’ve not read for a long time.

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Today is the day. North Lanarkshire is retiring our communication application FirstClass. Uses in schools for e-mail, file storage and discussion forums.
 
I remember starting in North Lanarkshire in October 2008. I saw FirstClass for the first time. Even then it’s UI looked a little outdated. Over the years I can to appreciate some of it qualities. Excellent usability on a very poor mobile signal. Compared to other email solutions it feels very lightweight, in a good way.
 
I learnt a little of its other features, some of which were good, some a bit clunky (the web publishing).
 
At the end of my time at the computer centre, FirstClass developed a web frontend. This was a more modern UI, but I only saw that briefly. NLC continued to use the desktop application.
 
While I was an ICT dev officer I spent a lot of time in firstClass. After returning to the classroom I continued to use it every day. It will be strange not to open it up anymore.

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Read: Burning Your Own by Glenn Patterson ★★★★☆ 📚 1969, Mal is 10. I’d have been 11. Mal lives in a estate in Northern Ireland. Great, horrible, atmosphere. Football with his pals and building bonfires with civil rights and politics in the background.