Catshanghai

Saving money on a teacher’s salary was never easy in the UK, but at least there was a decent pension scheme to offer me a little hope that I was not facing a poverty stricken retirement. At the ripe old age of 31, I got a teaching job at an international school in Shanghai. This [...]

This story was widely reported on DL.TV, Twit and Buzz Out Loud netcasts. Julie Amero of Connecticut could face 40 years imprisonment after being found guilty on four counts of risk of injury to minors. The incident happened when she worked at Kelly Middle School, Windham as a supply teacher in October 2004. As she [...]

As I walked around the former French Concession this weekend, I noticed that my favourite t-shirt designers had opened a shop by the corner of Xinle Lu and Xiangyang Lu in addition to their branch in Changle Lu. The Thing makes fantastic logos on t-shirts, hats, bags and long sleeve tops. If you want a [...]

Severance is a dark satire poking fun at modern British corporate culture. Palisade’s motley crew of sale staff have been busy touring Eastern Europe selling weapons to their former enemies. As a reward for their hardwork, they are taken to the Hungarian countryside for a weekend teambuilding retreat.
The first half of the film plays like [...]

Credit goes to Wang Jian Shuo’s blog for showing the cost of living in Shanghai from a local’s point of view. He also tries to reflect the cost of living for foreigners, but any exercise like this is always going to be difficult to nail down with any degree of accuracy given the [...]

Chinese weddings take place over four legs: house, papers, photos and party.

Leg 1: House
China is getting rich quickly, particularly in big cities. Nevertheless, incomes are still low which means that there is a strong ethos towards saving towards your family’s future stability and prosperity. When you are young, there are two major events that cost [...]

Batteries are a headache, because they keep running out of power at really inconvenient moments. Battery technology can not keep up with the demands of new electronic products. They are also expensive and bad for the environment. Hopefully, this recharger that I heard about on the SlashDotReview netcast should help to solve this [...]

This is a tragic news story about Jennifer Strange, a 28 year old woman from Sacramento, California who died after drinking too much water. She was taking part in a KDND radio station competition to win a Nintendo Wii. Presumably this will win her a Darwin award for her troubles in showing how video games [...]

My 18 month year old Dell desktop recently threw a curveball at me when the hard drive failed. Luckily, I backed up all my important data on to DVDs so I didn’t lose anything when another portable drive failed to mount properly.
A new hard drive with no data was a blank canvas for me to [...]

Demos is an influential think tank based in the UK that has just published a research paper called “Their Space”, commissioned by the National College for School Leadership. Reading this report should be a wake up call to anyone involved in digital education. Demos makes a case to change the way that technology is perceived [...]