Hurrah! I remembered to check back on the thread I commented in last week. There’s been an update and a fix posted. I’ll copy it here too for future reference.

If you have Canola and the OGG packages installed, you might notice that OGG files don’t “stop” and the next track never starts playing - unless the “next track” button is pressed. This is to do with MPlayer not handling OGG files correctly. To fix it fire up a terminal and edit the following file

/home/user/.atabake/config

(you might need to apt-get install nano first unless there’s a text editor on your N800 already that can load hidden files)

Then look in the file for this part

[media]
mp3 = oms
mp4 = oms
…

after the last line of that section, add a line that says

ogg = oms

then just save the file and relaunch Canola. It should then work correctly

Monday afternoons, period 6 can be a bit traumatic. I have a class of rather nice, intelligent year 9 students that is somewhat let down by three utter pillocks being in the same room. It’s amazing how three kids acting like idiots can turn the rest of the class into total disarray.

This lesson I had some support. While lining the kids up their head of year just happened to be walking down the corridor, and just happened to stop and take an interest in the kids. Then another teacher wanted to borrow a computer for a few minutes to do some work.

Curiously this made the kids nice and quiet and I managed to get a proper, sensible lesson completed where the kids demonstrated they could not only do the work, but understood it too. Really, some of the kids jumped up three National Curriculum levels in that lesson.

The way I had support was good. It was all subtly done so not to undermine what I was trying to do - there’s no point in the kids being quiet when there’s another teacher in the room, but the minute they walk out the room things go nuts again.

It helped that the disruptive kids were either excluded or “ill” that day too. Maybe there is a god of NQTs

My washer likes to try and shake my house down when going into Hyperspin. The kitchen floor is a suspended floor consisting of beams poking out the walls with floorboards on the top. With 30-odd kilos of washing machine bouncing around on top the whole house shudders in a slightly alarming way. In an attempt to dampen the gyrations I went off to Homebase and came back with some concrete slabs.

Two slabs are now under the washer, and four more are outside by my car so I don’t get mud into it. The ones under the washer seem to have made a difference since the pots and pans on my shelves no longer vibrate and rattle. The floor still shakes enough to make eyeballs vibrate though.

It’s a three day week this week. On Thursday all the NUT members go on strike so the school is closed to students, and on Friday it’s an INSET day. I’m not in the NUT so I will be in work, but don’t worry - I won’t be doing anything that would ordinarily be done by an NUT member. Mostly I’ll be sorting out lessons and all the other little things that get put aside during the week.

Here it is. A blue Fiat Panda 2005 edition. Like I mentioned in the previous post, I got it from my parents after my mum crashed it.

It’s been repaired since, and is now almost as shiny as when it came out the factory. I had a good look around it, and apart from some very new looking bits inside the engine bay you’d never know it’d been this badly mangled. If your car ever looks this bad, you’re looking at £2000 worth of repair btw.

It’s quite a difference to my old car. Power steering is possibly one of the best things invented. The ability to park with ease can’t be underestimated. The car has an even more powered “city” mode that means I can turn the wheel with a fingertip for even tighter parking spots. I had the radio out yesterday to try and fit my old one since it has an AUX input for my N800. Unfortunately the Fiat radio is non-standard, and contains a non-standard cage. The facia is a giant square thing so while I could connect my old radio up electronically and have it work, there would be no way to secure it into the car. It’s frustrating being defeated by a few bits of metal and plastic. Looks like I’m back on the RF transmitter again and the associated wiring mess.

I had a slightly surreal and amusing time at Carcraft though. We were all sat around a table after looking at my car and going “that’s an interesting noise it makes”, when they produced a piece of paper and gave it to me. Thinking it was some valuation I gave it a glance.

… then looked again slightly confused …

It wasn’t a valuation, it was a printout of my Livejournal entry for the other day. Somehow, presumably through my email address or a lucky Google search, they’d managed to find my LJ and printed it out for a good laugh. It did explain the odd comments they made while looking at my car

They made selling my car nice and easy. They looked at it, then I  just had to show various bits of paperwork to prove it was mine, and that I was who I claimed to be. That was all I had to do. They even allow dogs in the showroom which prevented Amy and Twinkle from having to wait outside in the cold and strong winds.

So, to the Carcraft / webuyanycar.com (go on, admit it, your name is a little daft) people - hello!

Like many people, I read the Dilbert strips. They’re amusing and poke fun at the types of people I have worked for. Having been a long-term subscriber to the Daily Dilbert email, I almost missed the steaming pile of gash that is the “new” Dilbert website.

Really… why? Just… why?

Do I want to share a comic with friends? Yep. Do I want to do this with some Flash-based viewer? NO! The old method of sending URLs around is easy. Do I want to comment on comics? No, not really… look at the quality of comments on YouTube for a good reason why. Do I want to put my own text into the strips? No… and I don’t want to sit and read through other people’s idea of “funny” either.

I hope the daily emails continue to use embedded images, rather than this nasty Flash thing. Wrapping a picture inside a Flash viewer is just so illogical it sounds exactly like the kind of woolly-brained thinking that Dilbert pokes fun at.

YouTube = good use of Flash
Dilbert = bad use of Flash

After trying to read something on tabletblog.com my work PC decided to curl up its toes and fall over. MSIE completely failed to do anything until I’d repeatedly mashed the “X” in the corner and someone noticed. How did I trigger this fatal death of my web browser? Did I run some crazy Javascript or ActiveX control? No, I did the outrageous thing of clicking on a hyperlink.

Helpfully Microsoft offered me some further information about the crash. Here it is:

Problem caused by Windows

This problem was caused by Windows, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. Currently, there is no solution for the problem that you reported.

Also, when attempting to edit things on my Wordpress site I got this moronic error from our stupid web filter:

Access to the page:

http://www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-admin/edit-comments.php

… has been denied for the following reason:

Weighted phrase limit exceeded.

Whisky Tango Foxtrot…

And of course, I have now completely forgotten what I was doing.

I phoned my current insurers to find out how much it would cost to transfer my current car’s insurance onto the car I am getting on Saturday. The helpful man on the phone informed me it would be £76 extra and that I have three months of insurance left. After that I will have acquired 3 years no-claims and that’ll make my next renewal cheaper.

So instead of my insurance being a whole £300 a year, it’ll be the not too bad £375. That’s for fully comprehensive with the usual stuff and the ability to drive other people’s cars - a feature that is useful at times.

It’s still not stopped raining yet so I can’t T-Cut the scratches out of the paintwork.

The roads around here are awful. On my way home tonight there was a lot of water on the road, and somehow a large amount of oil or diesel had spread itself across the surface too. Every time I set off my wheels span, and stopping was a bit like driving on ice. When I got home I ran my fingers over the tyres and they smelled of diesel. Hopefully it’ll get washed away in the rain overnight.

Tired of pushing my finger across the trackpad on my Mac laptop I bought a mouse yesterday. It’s a Genius Traveler 525 Laser Mouse. The main feature that made me buy it was the £12.99 price tag and its insanely high 1600dpi resolution - supposedly caused by the laser in the mouse. If there is a laser it’s not a visible light laser since I can’t see anything out the bottom.

The mouse is quite good really. There is a “4D” scroll area on the top that senses the direction my finger is moving, allowing documents to be scrolled horizontally and vertically. There are two special buttons on the top of the mouse that switch applications and do something Internet Explorer specific.

Genius, makers of the Laser Mouse have evidently seen an Apple Mighty Mouse. The top of the Laser Mouse has no left or right buttons. Instead the whole shell tilts either left or right depending on which mouse button is desired. This means you can either click with a finger, as usual, or tilt your entire hand, or use any finger that’s on the correct side.

The mouse isn’t very large, and the cable is quite long and thin, and the blue light on the 4D touch pad is somewhat distracting. However, for £12.99 I can’t really complain.

During Easter my mum managed to crash her car. Somehow they got a replacement, then this week the garage holding the crashed car phoned to say it’d been repaired and was ready for collection. As a result they now have a “spare” car and need to do something with it. Which is where I come in…

I have a 1999 Peugeot 106 that is mechanically sound, but has some entertaining clanks, bangs and shuddering noises. Problem is, I can’t quite afford to get a new car.

… or so I thought.

My parents will sell me their car, using the flexible Parental Loan System and its fantastic introductory 0% rate. All I need to do is get rid of my old car, which thanks to the bonkers named webuyanycar.com was a straight-forward affair to book.

On Saturday I’ll take my car to Carcraft in Rochdale, sell it then be collected by my parents and go to their house. I just need to find a large wad of documents to prove I own my car and hopefully it should be about as difficult as getting a Macbook repaired was.

According to the website, my car is worth £525 (subject to inspection). If so that’s great, but even if they give me £300 I’ll be happy.

I’d best wash it and T-Cut out the scratches

You know, it’ll feel good driving a car that doesn’t double in value when I put my laptop into it

The TV has just told me I can text “mate” to 80333 to receive the first initial of my future husband/wife. This feat of superior mind powerz costs a mere £1.50.

Yes. £1.50 for some automated robot to send me a letter of the alphabet.

Who the hell signs up for this crap? Evidently there are a lot of stupid people on the planet to make this even viable. People dense enough to waste £1.50 on a message that contains a letter of the alphabet.

So… how can I take advantage of them too? The way I see it, if you’re thick enough to do this, or have that much cash to waste, you deserve exploiting.

Tell you what, give me 50p through my PayPal tip jar and I will send you 26 letters, one of which is guaranteed to be the first letter of your future mate (subject to you getting one, of course).