Blog silence

Sorry, folks. The blogging well is a bit dry at the moment here. I'm on a steep learning curve at work sorting out all the oldies going home from hospital, and I'm also busy revising bed mobility and hoist transfers for this round of teaching the first year students.

I have also been distracted by the discovery of a rather addictive game called Bejeweled. One of my patients at work (95 years old, with a stroke that has knocked off a reasonable amount of her language and cognition) used to play it in her pre-stroke days. When her daughter showed me the game on their laptop, I thought I should download it myself. To investigate its therapeutic potential, of course. Now I can't seem to stop playing it.... And when I tried to use it with her at work, I realised how much damage the stroke had done. Her processing speed was too slow for it to really be useful or even enjoyable for her anymore.

So now I am going to have to cure myself of this annoying addiction. Thank goodness the kids have the iPad at school during the day so I can get a few other things done....

I just signed up for a workshop on using iPads in the classroom....

....for learning support and special education (information here). I'm really excited about it. It will be great to have up to date information on good apps when I take the next round of OT students back into the school. It's looking like I will be returning to the same school as last time, which is good too. Now that I've done the hard yards getting to know the teachers, it will (hopefully) be much easier to get into the classrooms and work with them. I'd really love for us to be able to do lots more performance analysis in situ this time, looking at the kids doing a task in class and doing some joint problem solving to address difficulties in a more "on the spot" way, rather than withdrawing the kids to work at the side of the room, or in the library like we did last time. It would be great to think we could leave the teachers with some skills so that they feel like they can take some steps to address kids' difficulties themselves, rather than relying on the therapists for a quick fix (and it's very rarely a quick fix, by the way....sadly, we don't possess any magic bullets here).

So now we just need to buy the iPad and I'll be all set to go.

i-

i-phone

i-pod

i-mac

i-pad 2 (out today).

i know someone with all of the above.

To me, having that many Apple products is verging on the ridiculous. But....for the person concerned, this is a status symbol....having all of them just screams "it's all about 'me'" (or should I say "i"?)

And while we are on the subject of iMacs..

Straight after I put up the last entry I found this blog post on the Cult of Mac.

Very interesting. Have we been sucked in?

I do think the purchasing experience was set up as if we were buying into one great big happy family of Mac owners. Lots of smiling salesmen in blue Apple T-shirts oh so keen to sell us lots of very expensive computer equipment and to welcome us (back) into the Apple fold. The way they latched onto us was almost disconcerting...dare I say it was almost cult-like??

We did manage to turn down the offer to have them all line up and applaud as we loaded the shopping trolley and wheeled our new computer and printer out of the shop. That would have been way too embarrassing...

What's not to love about a faster computer though? And hopefully this one won't need all the anti-virus updates that slowly killed off our laptop.

The new computer...

Is up and running. I am in shock at how fast it is.

Why didn't we buy this ages ago??

We have a new computer

An iMac. Woohoo!!

But it is still sitting in its box because a data transfer from our old computer was included in the deal (which they said they would prefer to do before setting it up) and so we now have to take the new computer and the old laptop back to the shop so that they can transfer the data and set it up for us. We can't do this till tomorrow.

It's very hard to resist ripping open the box after months of dealing with our slow old laptop and lots of wishing that we could throw it at the wall.

I think the laptop knows it is about to be replaced though. Since we have had the new one sitting in the corner in the box, the laptop seems to have discovered speed it didn't know it possessed and is working much better. Good news for me since I am about to hit the recipe sites to find something to make as a main meal for a pot luck Christmas in July...our usual standby curries and macaroni cheeses don't really seem festive enough.