I like Thursdays, they’re easy. To begin with I have a small group of year 9 students who are quite low ability. We spend most of the lesson doing easy work that keeps them occupied. Then I have a period where I assist in a maths lesson, followed by year 12 groups for three lessons. Year 12s mostly shut up and cause no hassle. After that it’s a free period. The only ballache is an NQT meeting that I have to go to at 3pm for an hour.

Today I had a maths cover lesson last period, rather than a free lesson. Not to worry, these things end up being somewhat amusing. This one was in the grotty little maths computer room. So the kids played educational games on the Internet and I planned some work. We all got along and everything was great.

Oh, except it was raining all day. A great storm blew over us during the morning somehow causing lots of kids to become soaked to the skin. They don’t have to stay outside when it rains, so we have no idea how they get so wet.

Well, we do… they do it on purpose so they can go home. Our kids are sneaky like that. So we tell them they can’t go home if they get wet. So they get their phones out at break and to their parents, with quite a good bit of acting, make it sound like the world’s ending and that the school is under six foot of water. Last year there was a pretty bad flood around here, so the parents ring the school and demand their kids come home immediately. Oh yeah, and for a while it sleeted enough to cover the ground sending the kids into orbit.

And you know what? In my day it was exactly the same, although the snow really was knee deep. Since I used to live within walking distance of my house I was always allowed to go home; this being back before the concept of child safety existed, way back in the dim days of 1991. “What? it’s snowing and you live up the road? OK, bye then keep safe”. Strangely enough that was also the time when I suddenly had loads of friends who were also staying at my house

My other domain, piku.co.uk was up for renewal at the start of the year. I filled in the required forms and gave away a whole £15 to my hosting provider.

Last week I got a letter from Nominet asking when I’d like to pay them £80 to renew piku.co.uk for another two years. Eh? £80? and why when I have just renewed it? I set an email off to my hosting provider.

It turned out that my domain hadn’t been renewed because my card details were incorrect. I phoned them back, getting through in about five rings; I like my hosting provider, they employ intelligent humans who can actually help you. I supplied card details and after an hour received an invoice by email. Job done.

… or so I thought …

I got another email off my hosting provider asking me to ring them to renew my domain. Now I was confused. I wrote them a reply saying I’d paid it, had an invoice and that also the money had gone out of my account. They then went “ah… ok then sorry” and told Nominet to renew it for me.

As you can tell I’m not particularly bothered. At no point was my domain unresolvable, and since I was speaking to humans who knew what was going on (just seeming to have internal problems telling each other) everything was fine. Also the year before last I forgot to pay them for my hosting and they were very good about it, turning my account back on for two days so I could use their web service to renew it.

Today was one of those days…

First I couldn’t find a power lead for the projector I was using, so had to run across half the school - at the beginning of a lesson - to find another one. Then one of the kids who was supposed to be in detention ran off. There was then two lessons where I utterly utterly failed to teach a meaningful database lesson to my year 8 groups.

I hate MS Access… I really do. It’s totally user hostile. Its file locking system makes it insanely hard to use with more than one person. I made a database for my kids to query, I wanted them to just look up some data - not modify it or save anything. Oh no, Access won’t allow this the database needs copying to somewhere else first.

Or it gives out mental errors when primary keys aren’t created properly. Or it refuses to exit because you have a dialog open, and the dialog won’t go away because you’ve entered invalid data into a field, but can’t edit this data because trying to causes the error to appear again.

Or it has the confusing system of asking where you want to save your database before adding anything to it.

Windows’ idea of file locking is a bit retarded too. One of my kids accidentally found the answers to a little quiz I was running. He opened it up and started cheating like mad. Naturally I wanted to get rid of this file, but without drawing attention to it. In Unix I could have simply deleted the file and told the kid to close his copy down. Oh no, can’t do that in Windows, the file is “in use”. Can’t even rename it.

Try telling 18 kids to close a file so you can delete it. Try doing that to 18 kids who have just worked out what’s in the file.

My cold’s going away. I felt quite fresh and awake today, with only the odd random bout of coughing and spluttering. My ability to bounce my voice off the back walls of my classrooms has returned.

Today contained a very long and slightly tedious set of meetings after work that went on for a bit too long.

I spent today in bed. My cold or whatever I have seems to have gone away, leaving just a slightly satisfying cough to put up with. Hopefully that’ll go away soon too.

Today me, Amy and her mental dog went to Cleethorpes to do what the British do at the seaside - wander about and moan about other people not controlling their dogs. We also had a flask of tea, some sandwiches and, because Amy’s dog was wearing a backpack, many confused and amused looks

We must be one of the few countries that visits the seaside when it’s winter and cold. Nobody was in the water, but that’s only because the water was a mile away due to being low tide. Had the water been closer to the seafront, there would have been someone in it going gently blue.

I’m glad today is Friday. I spent most of my lessons trying to cough my insides out, much to the amusement of my classes. Off to Cleethorpes tomorrow to suck in the sea air.

Tonight was the meeting of our school “curry club”. It’s an after school club where we go out to a different curryhouse each time and consume the finest spicy brown foods. The place we went to had broken heating and was quite empty. The food was good though and I don’t think I’ll need to eat until Saturday

Voice has mostly come back, green goo is less lumpy, and the cough is starting to drive me insane. I blow my nose, stuff comes out. Then I need to do it again, and again, then a coughing/retching fit starts up. Or I have a random nosebleed.

Being ill is fun, you should try it. I have a headache from coughing so much and my nose is sore from blowing it all the time.

The insurance man (or “Loss adjuster”) came around to do some paperwork. He just managed to take down all my details before his laptop battery died; he’d been processing lots of claims for the recent floods and insane rain. A simple burglary must have made a nice variation for his day.

He saw my retro console collection and remarked that at least the good stuff had been left behind He needs to go away and check some of the fine print on my policy and will let me know by Friday.

Voice slightly better, the green lumpy goo continues to come forth. Plus I’m developing a really irritating cough.

My god this is unbelieveable. My voice is totally knackered, the best I can manage is a strangled squeak. It’s like being 13 again with my voice dropping several octaves or jumping up a few half way through words.

The kids think it’s hilarious and like to point this out.