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Little-Miss

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  1. Little-Miss
    On Tuesday at 1:20pm a huge fire broke out in the attic of our school. It took 4+ hours to get under control and out due to how our old Victorian building roof was constructed. We have a hall with 3 classrooms coming off each side. The fire wiped out 3 classrooms underneath the attic where the fire started, and destroyed the roof in the hall ending up with most of it collapsing. The rest of the juniors is completely water logged.
     
    I'm still have flashbacks of the day. Half an hour before i had just replaced a projector lamp in one of the destroyed classrooms (tut!) and had gone with my collegue (Premises Manager) to fix a blind (We help each other). The fire bell went and i looked at a group of teachers in the classroom and said "i'm a fire marshall and i havent heard of any drill".
     
    So we all filtered out on to the playground. Now this is this image that has stuck with me....the plumes of smoke pouring out of the gable ends and kids being moved into the infant playground.
     
    We went into Marshall mode running in to check where we could without going across the hall. Came out again at the front of the school and ran round to open gates and check other areas we could get too, made sure fire brigade were coming. when we got back to the junior playground there was so much smoke. This was only 5 minutes or so since we'd ran round the school. It was so thick and acrid we had to move the kids completely off site to a bingo hall up the road.
     
    We stood in the corner of the junior playground as the FIRST fire engine turned up, helping the guys. This is when it started to hit us that this was a major event.
     
    The smoke eventually got too thick for us to stand there and we moved up to the infant playground.....
     
    The rest is a bit of a blur. At one point i ran in to save the servers with a fireman (lol!) The rest of the time was just stood on the side of the road watching our beloved building go up in flames.
     
    We had at least 15 fire engines by the end of it. We were looking on the sides of the vehicle to see where it had come from, every corner of Birmingham! They were fantastic, kept us informed every step of the way.
     
    When the fire was eventually out (as in flames anyway). I was allowed back upstairs to my desk, which is completely untouched thankfully to grab my stuff.
     
    There was so much water! About 4 inches of water to wade through, and that's the entire junior side.
     
    The next day was the hardest. Very eerie. Went in as far as we could. Wasnt a pretty sight. Lots of half eaten sandwiches, very Mary Celeste.
     
    Turns out to have been a faulty light socket or something in the attic. Just cant get over the speed at which it went up. It seems we didnt have any proper walls (fire stops!?) between the different sections of roof. So the fire had free reign. Apparently this is common in our age of school (100ish years old) so we are now unfortunately an example for other schools.
     
    Everyone was safe. 640 kids plus 90 odd staff all out and safe and for that i am very grateful but i still cant help being down about whats happened. Sorry Will and Kate, i just wasnt in the mood for your big day. I'm sure i can catch it again!
     
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-13212758
  2. Little-Miss
    As I was such a good girl last year I decided to ask Santa for an Internet Tablet (Having a slight obsession with gadgets and not wanting to be left out of the current trend I thought it was only right!). I knew Santa wasn’t going to buy me an iPad so I asked for an Archos 101.
     
    First impressions of the Archos was how light it was, weighing in at 480g it was a mere feather compared to the RM Slate (slab) that I held for a while at BETT (yes I know, bad comparison as the Slate is pretty much a laptop etc etc) but the Archos is very comfortable to carry around.
     
    My version is the 8gig but there is a 16 available, both extendable with a microSD. It has a 10.1 inch capacitive screen, hence the name, a camera on the front, kick stand, full size USB, micro USB and a HDMI port....Oh and it supports Flash.
     
    Being only £250 to buy, it does feel rather plastic and has a slight flex to it; if you hold it in a certain place it presses on the screen from behind and makes a pretty ripple effect.
     
    When using any of the ports, you never quite feel that the cables are pushed in enough, but they don’t go any further, not massively keen on that. The one thing I found quite amusing is the placement of power port. When I first plugged it in to juice it up, I didn’t really look at where i was sticking the power supply and stuck it in the hole nearest to the power button but was a bit worried when i noticed it wasn’t charging, on closer inspection it turned out i had stuck it in the earphone socket (bit of a fail). Whilst browsing on the internet, turns out that I’m not the only one who did that!
     
    It came with Eclair but was quickly updated to Froyo once connected to the wireless. It comes pre-installed with the Archos marketplace called “AppsLib” which is targeted at large screen tablets. Over Christmas it ground to a halt (due to unexpected demand!?) so i was left with an android tablet that i couldn’t download apps to. Out of frustration and after a bit of a hack i found on t’internet i was able to install Androids Market Place and have all the usual apps available to me. When Appslib eventually came back to life there was sod all on there, this is obviously changing all the time as people start developing more apps specifically for tablets.
     
    It’s pretty speedy for the price (it has a 1Ghz Arm Cortex processor), the screen is very responsive. It does have it moments of laggyness and has hung a couple of times requiring a reset (but to be honest I’m probably not using the most memory friendly of apps).
     
    The screen is great to watch movies on, sound is good too. Using it in portrait mode is a bit meh....the screen just isn’t as crisp.
     
    All in all im please with my little Tablet and id definitely recommend it to fans of the Android OS and those who just want a decent priced tablet to play with, without having to fork out for an iPad.
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