I begin my long school placement tomorrow. I’m at this school until July and then it’s the end of the course. This new school is one of those places that whenever I mention I’m going there I get a very odd look. The same kind of look you’d maybe give to someone who’s just announced they have 24 hours left to live.

I’m doing my best to ignore them, I’ll see what it’s like tomorrow. Half the time it’s just gossip that spreads and nobody really knows, they just pass it on without thinking. Other times they’re right though, so I’ll see.

I did a test run to the place this afternoon. According to Google it should have taken 20 minutes. This is complete nonsense, it takes fifteen just to drive into town! The journey there took me an hour - I got to see the delights of Huddersfield Town Centre’s bizarre route to Leeds. For some reason you’re sent from the fire station left and around the town, rather than right and and through. It’s really silly. Go left and it adds three sets of traffic lights and three times the distance to your route. Go right and there are two pedestrian crossings before turning up at the same roundabout as before. I’ll miss all this out though and take the back street behind the gas works, it only has one set of lights on it.

Getting into the school might be fun, there’s building work going on there and right outside the school driveway is a set of lights, two junctions and a biiiig row of cones. Merging with that will be entertaining I’m sure. They want me there for half nine tomorrow so I’ll get the joy of sitting in the traffic to Huddersfield as well as the traffic to Bradford. Hooray.

Need to iron a load of shirts and work out what pointless paperwork needs taking. Hopefully it’ll go smoothly, the people who usually deal with student teachers have left, so this could be an entertaining placement.

Never mind, as they say - “It’s a learning experience”. Right, and so is being slowly roasted…

On the plus side the school shuts at 2:15. Yes I finish at a quarter past two. I do begin at eight but then again I used to get to my last school for eight so that’s no big change. Bring it on kiddies, let’s see what you’ve got

Found this, it sounds much more fun than the usual WEP/WPA/Mac Address blocking we do…

Upside-Down-Ternet

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I’ve ordered a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet which should arrive in a few days

I’ve just signed up for 10 gig of storage at rsync.net it does exactly what it says on the tin. I have a large amount of space and can simply rsync stuff to it. No farty web frontends, Windows-only uploaders or crap like that. Shovelling the data up there is taking a while though, I hope I never have to do a full restore!

I was going to use a computer at my parents’ house, but it didn’t work properly. They have a dynamic IP address so finding it on the Internet was tricky. Not helped by their crappy router disconnecting at least once a day.

Once I’ve done the initial upload, subsequent backups will be quicker. I’m Going to have to make some sort of redundant backup at home too. I have quite a lot of data that would either take too long to recreate or be lost forever if my server died. It may seem a little excessive having 10 gig of offsite storage for a bunch of digital photos, text documents and source code, but if you’ve ever lost data due to a machine breaking or pilot error it’ll make more sense. I could just burn the lot to DVDs, but that’d require me to be bothered, remember somehow what I’d already backed up and to verify the DVDs still work later on. I have CDRs in my collection that are either scratched, delaminating or just don’t work very well any more.

Off site storage is the way to go. Google holds most of my mail, my RSS subscriptions and my Firefox browser status. I have my bookmarks on del.icio.us and this diary lives on my webhost (which is different to my ISP so I can switch ISPs without too much hassle).

What’d be really good is a BitTorrent style backup system where everybody on the Internet holds some data from other people. Rather than uploading data to a specific machine, the network as a whole could take it from you and give some back. It’d all be encrypted and turned into little meaningless blocks of data. With several billion people on the Internet we’d only need to hold a few gigs of data each.

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