First day at school

Do you remember your first day at primary school? I'm not sure that I do, I can sort of imagine it but I don't know if that is a real memory or an illusion created in my imagination. But that said, i am pretty sure I was nervous. I'm sure I was scared to be leaving my Mum, that I was shy in front of all the other children, that the classroom seemed big and scary. My eldest son is starting primary school in September. Honestly I don't think he is going to feel any of those emotions. He is about the most confident person I have ever met. Honestly he amazes me. We took him for an orientation day at the new school last week. no-one else from his nursery is going to the same primary school so he didn't know anyone. He was taken to take a look at the current reception class full of children. He didn't hesitate, he strolled in, sat down with a group of kids and proclaimed 'Hi Guys, I'm Roman. We can play trains' He immediately made friends and was playing so happily that the teacher let him stay until the end of the school day instead of going home after an hour like he was supposed to. What a wonderful way to go through life. People being cruel to him, not liking him or anything of that nature simply does not exist in his world. He does no see it. Truly every stranger is a friend and every game is there to be joined. I am so proud of my boy and I just pray that the harsh realities of life never break through his happiness and put a dent in that amazing confidence.

What is the point of TK Maxx?

Now, My wife loves TK Maxx. I quite like it myself in the past year or so I have bought very reasonably priced work shoes, hiking boots, jogging bottoms and a few small electrical items. What I don;t like is the lying they do. You see, TK Maxx 10-15 years ago was a very different shop. They only had a handful of stores and the central promise was that they sold branded clothing at prices way below what you would expect. They did this by clever buying. The sourced catalogue return stock, end of line items, bankrupt stock and manufacturer surplus. They bought these things at such low prices that they could sell them at 80% discount and still make a 100% mark up for themselves. Anyone interested at those types of margins should look at http://www.gemwholesale.co.uk where you can buy perfect quality catalogue return clothing from about 7% retail prices (in wholesale quantities unfortunately). Now back then, with this clever purchasing TK Maxx was brilliant. You could go in and find a pair of CK jeans that where selling in the shop next door for £120 priced at just £10 But then TK Maxx got successful. From a handful of stores they now have 240 in the UK and others across Europe. At that size it is little wonder that they can no longer source enough genuine bargain items. Today they are one of the biggest clothing manufacturers in the country. They are more likely to sell their returns and and of line items off to other retailers than purchase them any more. So what do they do? Well, like any huge clothing chain store they manufacture their own clothing. Only they are devious about it. You might see the huge posters in store saying things like "we partner with top brands" Unfortunately what this means is: The approach a premium brand known for quality, they order 100,000 pairs of jeans in Primark quality but ask the brand to stick the high quality logo on them. Then they pluck a RRP out of the air. I need to emphasis that point. The RRP that they claim a you get a percentage saving against - They make it up themselves. RRP means nothing. It has no legal basis. All it means is that TK Maxx has asked the brand they work with to put price tags saying £120 on these cheap jeans. So then TK Maxx get the jeans in their 240 stores. and put a sticker on them saying "RRP £120 OUR PRICE £15" You won't find these jeans for sale in any other store. Never in the history of the world have these jeans been sold anywhere for £120. Now, £15 isn't bad for a pair of jeans. Primark does great business in selling jeans that price - but they are honest and you know what you are getting. If you are shopping in TK Maxx ignore all the lies about RRP - they are cynically exploiting the fact that most people don't realise RRP is utterly meaningless to make you think you are getting a better deal. Have a look at the jeans, feel the quality and decide if you think they are worth the money - don't make the decision based on these fake 'savings' I bought some Karimor hiking boots from TK Maxx recently. They were £20 and pretty good quality. That is a great price and I am very pleased. What I don't like though is the lie on the label that said they should have been priced at £89. That is outright bollocks. See Sports Direct also stock the same boots for £20, I found a dozen stores online selling them for £20. What I didn't find was anywhere that at any time had ever sold them for £89. This is my call: TK Maxx - Get rid of these bogus RRPs. Treat your customers with some respect.

Britmums

Well, Britmums is just around the corner. I haven't blogged as much as I hoped but I am pleased to be back in the saddle. My biggest aim now will be to just continue the momentum and keep blogging. There is something incredibly cathartic about getting things down on paper and even more so knowing that people actually read it. I am lookign forward to meeting the authors of the blogs I follow on the weekend.

Healthy start vouchers

It's been a busy few days here.

Yesterday I saw something I still can't quite believe.

I was in Iceland (alas the shop not the country) and there was a pregnant woman arguing violently after being told she couldn't use her government healthy start fresh food vouchers to buy frozen pizzas.

The lady seemed to be of the impression that allowing the government provided free food voucher designed to encourage women to eat healthily during pregnacy to only be redeemed against healthy food amounted to a 'police state' and was prepared to have a stand up row about it.

The crown jewel in her argument against Iceland limiting redemption of the vouchers to fresh vegetables was thus:

"you are talking fucking bullshit you twat, at Morrison's I can use them to pay for my cigarettes"

Lucky unborn child.

A lovely summer afternoon

This afternoon I took the kids to watch the fog swimming in a river that runs through a nearby meadow.

It was so hot and the water looked too nice to resist and we all ended up going for a paddle. Bliss

Sunday Soapbox Lord Adonis: The Great Cnut

Everyone remembers learning about Cnut the great at school because all the sniggering that occurred every time his name was mentioned. If there is one legend you remember about King Canute it is that he tried to stop the advancing tide and ended up with egg on his face and seaweed in his pants.

On Radio 4's Any Questions today I found myself listening to the most absurd political debate about pornography and the internet. What was so absurd was the long queue of people eagerly and forcefully making statements about something they clearly had absolutely no understanding of.

There was a very worthy panel. But it was Lord Adonis who sticks in my mind, mostly because he will most likely have a hand in whatever policy they push through.

The Question was: Shouldn't we do something to stop child pornography online with sub questions should all online pornography be controlled or monitored and how do we protect children from accessing pornography online.

It is a really important question and that is why I can't believe the ignorance around the issue at the heart of government.

Lord Adonis made the following recommendation.

ISPs should block all pornographic content (legal and illegal) and people that want to access pornography should have to apply, their details would be recorded and this should deter them from being tempted to access illegal types of pornography.

It seems like a great simple solution right? Almost the entire board and most of the audience agreed with him. No-one there seemed to have any understanding of the internet so unfortunately no-one stood up to tell him is would just be making a big Cnut of himself.

A little while back, after a lot of hard work and debate all British ISPs were forced to block the file sharing site Piratebay.com because it was frequently used to illegally share copyright material.

 This was a watershed moment in the evolution of the internet. After this landmark decision the internet will never be the same again...apart from....well.....erm...... if you want to access Piratebay you can just go here http://unblockedpiratebay.com/  or to any one of of 10,000 mirror sites that appeared online within hours of the power being cut. If you look on that link you can even download some software that allows you to make your own pirate bay mirror site - that is a site that goes to piratebay.com, copies ALL of the information word for word in real time and presents it identically under a different web address.

I am not particularly tech savvy but if somehow the found a way to block these proxy sites as they appeared then here are just a few other ways you might access Piratebay. I am sharing this information freely because it is well known by everyone, except it appears by Lord Adonis and co.

VPN - Virtual Private Network. You can get a VPN service for free online and use it instantly. In basic terms a VPN creates a tunnel that goes from your computer, through your ISP and to a third party server that can be operated anywhere in the world. Your ISP (or anyone, hackers, the government, the police, interpol, included) cannot access the information inside of this tunnel. Your ISP has absolutely no way of ever knowing what site you are accessing or what information you are sharing and neither does any other third party.  With a VPN even the websites you visit don't every know who you are. I use a VPN every day on my work laptop. It allows me to log into the intranet system at my head office and access private company information while keeping it private from hackers.

A Proxy Server - very simple basically a website within a website. Go to a proxy server site then from the brower inside your browser you can completely anonymously surf the web. 

a Tor Network - another type of private network, a small piece of software you download onto your computer that allows you to surf the web entirely anonymously by using direct peer to peer encrypted file sharing. If you want to know how secure a Tor network is then google 'The Silk Road" The silk road is a ebay type site that operates on Tor. It sells everything - drugs, weapons, illegal information. There are hundred of UK sellers on there and advertising and sell drugs or illegal items completely anonymously (payment by untrackable bitcoins) The police can see all this activity, they are fully aware of it but there is absolutely nothing they can do because they cannot track any of the people on there. 

Encrypted peer to peer  - If you had an internet friend in a country where Piratebay is not blocked you could ask them to download the information you want and email to you in an encrypted form that your ISP couldn't read.

Foreign ISP You could by a sim card from France telecom and use it in your phone to access piratebay

There - I am not internet savvy but I have listed 6 instant ways around an ISP block. I have no doubt that my kids are going to be 10x smarter with the internet than I am.

So Lord Adonis, suggesting that you could somehow control access to internet pornography by blocking it at ISP shows a frankly startling level of ignorance and arrogance that you felt yourself informed enough to comment at all.

Your suggestion makes about as much sense of this: Trying to stop spiders entering your home by putting a police search roadblock on your driveway.

The reason this really annoys me is because we have a very very serious problem. Child pornography and Children being exposed to pornography are horrific things. We need to take this threat very very seriously. This means pumping massive amounts of money into developing technologies that could actually address this problem.

Instead what we have is out of touch digital philistines spending far too long talking a lot of hot air basically just trying to come up with something that sounds about right to keep the Daily Mail reading voters happy that something is being done.

That creates a really dangerous situation. It would be like telling car owners you have put some new technology in their car that makes it impossible for them to crash. Self important buffoons with no understanding of the internal combustion engine can make long pompous speeches about how they are fixing the problem of car crashes.   In one sweep you suddenly car drivers stop taking personal responsibility for their driving, they stop being aware of the dangers and acting to minimize them. Seat belts get undone, eyes are taken off the road. You can imagine the consequences.

Pass a law putting an ISP block on pornography and  the internet will have created 100,000 work around before the ink is dry.

Where does that leave us? Parents anxious to protect our children from inappropriate online content? It doesn't take much to imagine suddenly hearing parents casually saying "I don't need to check anything that my kids do online now because the ISPs block it all now don't they" Suddenly Laptops are allowed in bedroom with closed doors again. Internet histories stop getting checked, Software that you can install, configure and monitor to safeguard your children stops being used.

And while we sit in blissful ignorance our children become victims of the vile things you can find online.

Boys club

Eliza is off to Cypher today in London. Her car is out of action and I didn't want to be stranded in our middle of no-where home without mine so I agreed to drop her at the station.

At 6am this morning we were dragging sleeping children from their beds, putting overcoats on and taking Mummy to the station. Roman was very excited and kept telling me he has never been out in his jim-jams before (he clearly has a very short memory but it was cute anyway)

So now we have a boys day. Me my two sons and the dog.

It is the first day of July, the sun is shining, I have just been paid, the world is our oyster. I have been planning adventures and things to do all week. Trying to work out the best fun we can have.

Well so far all my good plans have come to nothing. We are all in our pants (apart from the dog), we are snuggled under a duvet on the sofa (including the dog), we are eating cream cheese on toast and are reading a stack of books from Top That Publishing that we have collected over the years.

I really don't want to waste the weather and feel a bit guilty but this is lovely. We don't get the chance to do this much and I ma really enjoying it. I am just hoping now that the boys fall asleep so I can have a nap! 6am is too early for a Saturday.