Crazy Diamond

Pretty **** cup final, Walsall/Oldham v Portsmouth at Fratton Park.

Ordered mine today.

Maps have always been **** on iPhones in my experience. I made the mistake of relying on them to get somewhere for an important meeting, ended up 20 minutes late.

There in itself lies another problem. There should not be competition between exam boards, and naturally there will be. I think I sat exams under two or three.

Not even going to lie, my maths is absolutely terrible. As I said before, I have no idea how I pased my GCSE and even then it was the lower paper. I spoke to someone yesterday who was in the first year to do GCSEs. She said back then you only had coursework in English. Look at it now, it's nearly every subject. I'm not sure that's right. She also made the point which I was unaware of, which is that there will only be a certain number of people allowed to get certain grades (I think that's what she said.) Whilst I disagree with that idea, I still believe change is absolutely necessary and has been for quite some time.

Where was the decent point? Sorry: LOL wear woz the dcnt point?!11!! lmao

Sorry but I can't read four year old.

I've no idea how much data I use. I don't think it's much. I'll check Twitter and use Safari a little bit each day, nothing more than that. To be honest I don't even need the unlimited texts and calls, but it's nice to know I won't get stung for using more than I normally do on the odd occasion.

After all that on the phone yesterday about iPhone 5 contracts being crap, I very nearly bought one last night. 32GB phone, £26 a month or so for unlimited texts and calls, 1GB data, £299 for the phone. Not bad at all actually. Will probably get that deal at some point.

We weren't 'newly promoted' though. You're quite right however, as is everyone else who points out that this isn't really a big deal - at the moment.

Equally HTH, Arsenal and other Premier League clubs used to similar footballs, unlike us with what the Football League have given us over the past seven years? HTH BTW.

How many did we make against United? Loads. Some of them were quite innocent, others suicidal. Reading did the same against Spurs, kept making individual errors, slipping up, bad touches, everywhere. Is it the Premier League ball I wonder? West Ham obviously doing well despite the ball, if my theory is right, because it's in the air most of the time...

O2 rang today to tell me I could have either an upgrade or an improved contract. When I told the guy on the other end that I had a 3GS he asked if I was waiting for the iPhone 5. I said "I'm interested, but not at your contract prices" - his reply "Yeah they're ridiculous aren't they." Fantastic sales routine!

They can when you're around. Never do any wrong in fact. It's a simple question, and as Smirking_Saint has asked, it's meant to be realistic is it not?

Again, since when did a manager hire or fire a DoF, or tell them what they can and can't do?

For starters Bexy, I went to one of the top secondary schools in the country, having started out at a primary school that was one of the worst, so as far as the mis-management goes I remain to be totally convinced, but certainly there's a case for it. I had to play catch up in year two because in year one when I was educated in London (my family moved when I was six) I hadn't been taught very basic language, literature or mathematics. English is probably my strongest subject now, my maths never caught up. I'm utterly hopeless at maths - which again proves my point. I managed to get a C and I swear I had failed, and this was having taken the 'lower' or 'you can't do maths so you're going to go in with the troublemakers' paper. Does it mean that someone who can't read and write within a specified time is unemployable? To a degree, yes, actually. A fair number of people who pass GCSEs these days look as if they can't read and write anyway, as thedelldays said. As for extreme cases such as the example you have highlighted, they should be viewed as that, extreme cases. Kids these days get a lot more help than they ever used to. Children that have any number of labels thrust upon them (ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia etc) are all well looked after, more than some people would care to acknowledge. A friend of mine who had very basic dyslexia, if any, was given three hours to do a one hour exam and a computer to type his answers. 'Overly simplistic pass or fail' - so what, there is an inbetween these days? "I didn't quite pass, but I didn't quite fail, so I'm going to Purgatory College'" ? Exams have been around for centuries, and it's only now that we start to question them. Funny that, isn't it...

Did you take GCSE exams? I wonder, because if you did, you’d realise how flawed they are. I did GCSEs, and all the negative press you hear about them is spot on. They're designed so that it's hard to fail for a start. I was allowed to choose between taking a more difficult or simpler paper in electronics, for example. The difference in the papers being that the 'higher' paper had difficult questions and a higher pass mark; the 'lower' paper had easier questions and a lower pass mark. Explain to me how that's any good to anyone. I can also recount the coursework I did in science. Being told 'don't write that, write this' was one thing, getting your coursework back up to three times to make improvements so that you achieved at least a grade C on it was quite another. Then there's being separated by gender when the underachievers are spotted. I was put in an all-male class because I was deemed an underachiever. The underachievers, coincidentally, were the troublemakers that under stricter schools from an age gone by would have been long since excluded. So rather than be helped, I was put in a class full of toe-rags that went around stabbing each other with compasses and insulting their teachers. Sorry, but not 'coping well in exam conditions' is not an argument for me. You might as well have a reality for kids that don't 'cope well in the real world'. GCSEs were designed so that hardly anyone failed. And let's be honest, the position of education secretary is the most thankless in government. 'WHY ARE GCSEs TOO EASY?' you hear everyone cry when results improve year on year. 'WHY ARE OUR KIDS FAILING THIS TIME?' you heard when results then went down for the first time in decades. A bit of logic is required here. There are universities charging outrageous fees. Why? Because there are too many students that have been promised university places, no matter how intelligent they are or how important their subject is. Why do they all want to go to university? Because they managed to get an A level pretty easily, some by doing doss courses. How did they get to college to do A levels? Because they took GCSE exams that were difficult to fail and were sold a vision of a bright future once they had taken their 'rightful' place at university. To go to university and get a degree used to be an honour and a privilege. It is now an expectation. Something went badly wrong - it began with GCSEs and the 1997 Labour government. Agreed.

Their website is worse than ours which is saying something. They've just opened a new stand at Kingsmeadow but unfortunately there's a lot of unrest over their manager Terry Brown. He let go a lot of players in the summer, didn't replace them and is now panic buying. They've had the same coaching set up (one coach) since the Ryman league days and are struggling with the demands of the Football League. A bad result today and he could be off.

Before my time, don't know why I think this but... Colin Clarke, possibly?

Will do. Cheers for the heads up. I was thinking of upgrading to the 4S not so long ago as I think my 3GS is going senile. I'm just not sure if I can justify spending a lot per month for very little use.

That sounds way too good to be true. Anyway, unlimited data and texts is way more than I need!

What's that then? Yeah that occurred to me. Hmm. Sounds like what I've got at the moment. I send texts and make calls that little that it's down to £16.50 a month - but I use my iPhone every day for music and apps. Cheers for the info, I might get one on contract and then after a bit ask if I can change. My ex used to text me so much that I had to get more texts on my contract in order to not get billed each month a massive amount for exceeding my tariff. I might ask if I can do the opposite, get it reduced because I'm not using it enough. Might be possible. In fact, O2 rang me once to say I was paying £43 odd a month, and I was getting ripped off. That's how I came to get the cheap option with the option to change at the end of each month.

I bought an iPhone 3GS or whatever back in about... 2009? Still got it, but I downgraded the contract from about £37 a month to £16.50 a month, simply because I wasn't getting value for money. If I got an iPhone 5, would there be anything to stop me putting the sim with my cheap contract on it into the new phone and using it? I don't want to pay for a new iPhone and then have to pay a stupidly large contract (£40ish) and only send a few texts and make a few calls.

Says how bad the Scots are then, given their mauling by the USA.

Quite. I'd argue it's more miraculous that someone has not encountered a problem with Steam in two years. Your luck may well run out with 2013, JPTCount. The FM12 updates thread is full of Steam error posts.