I’ve just resurrected my LibraryThing account, paid for a “lifetime” membership and ordered a CueCat barcode scanner. For the past half hour I’ve been merrily typing out ISBNs from my books, reliving the days of working in a shop with a broken till. All I needed was a queue of frustrated people and some crap music for the illusion to be complete.

Now in a queue waiting to be munched is 46 of my books. Hopefully soon they’ll all be added to my LibraryThing account, ready for people to look at. I’ve also added a LibraryThing sidebar to my website which shows random book covers. There’s currently a lot of Terry Pratchett books

It’s my aim to keep a catalogue of my books so that I know what not to buy. I’m assuming that LibraryThing will at some point in the future be able to offer me books that I might also like. It’s hard choosing a new book when confronted with so many.

What do you do with half a loaf of slightly hard, stale bread that’s been sitting in the back of the fridge for two weeks? Throw it out? Give it to the birds?

No, you first tip it onto a plate to check for mould, and then make a bread and butter pudding from it.

If you make it correctly, the eggy milk should turn into a sort of egg-custard mix when cooked.

Follow the link to see the recipe (although if you can’t work out how to turn bread, butter, eggs and milk into something edible you shouldn’t go into a kitchen http://www.piku.org.uk/drupal/content/bread-and-butter-pudding

This week is full of interesting things for me to do. On Tuesday it’s work’s Curry Club meeting, Thursday is the Year 10 trip to Alton Towers and then on Friday we break up for half term. After half term there’s only seven weeks of teaching and then we break up for summer.

Oh, and we’re on the computers for PSHE on Tuesday too, so no need to contain my form within our horrible form room for 50 minutes. My form room is a nasty room at the top of part of the school which was built in the 50’s. In the winter it freezes, in the summer it turns into an oven. It’s also devoid of computers which is kind of irritating.

This afternoon me and Amy went to the Blyton Dairy Ice cream parlour. It’s quite a random place, being in the small village of Blyton half way between Scunthorpe and Lincoln. Quite why people would bother driving all the way there just to have an ice cream is slightly baffling, but then again when you have the chance to eat pretty much any flavour of ice cream, it’s not an unpleasant experience The line of people waiting to be served an evident sign that the place is popular. If it were in the Lake District the line would loop twice around the building.

I had a double cone with ginger ice cream and Turkish Delight flavoured ice cream in it. The ginger had actual pieces of ginger in it and was really nice.

While it’s slightly odd driving so far just to buy an ice cream, it was a great afternoon out in the sun

The Proclip attachment for my car arrived the other day. I’ve fitted it, and then mounted the N810 car mount onto the Proclip. I had to drill four small holes in the Proclip to accommodate the N810’s car mount since they provide the Proclip with no holes. Due to the positioning of the Proclip I had to mount my N810 in a vertical orientation otherwise the indicator stick and half the steering wheel got in the way. This isn’t a problem since Maemo Mapper can be told which part of your N810 is pointing upwards.

Since I was driving to Amy’s for the weekend I had an excellent chance to test it out. I’ll put up pictures later.

And we’re done. They’ve been written and copied to my laptop. Now to read them, check for mistakes, print them, sign them all (and their copies) and cut them up.

After the 5th report my signature turns into a meaningless squigggle.

Oh the tedium! 91 reports to write and I’m about half way through. Thank god for Excel and Word’s mail-merge. Having to actually type out 91 kids names from a list would be awful. It’s bad enough having to write their comments.

Reports aren’t a substitution for parents’ evenings. Although it is satisfying being able to explain exactly why someone’s child isn’t reaching their full potential.

When these are done, it’s the Year 10 ones. Whooo.

Printed out the example Space Invaders clone, scribbled all over it to make sense of it. Turns out the old method of learning how to program still works pretty well. I guess I’m a visual learner since the simple act of printing the code onto sheets of paper so I could draw on them caused the code to make sense. I sat on my settee and by cross-referencing the code to the Javadocs was able to work out the boilerplate code from the actual game logic.

I also found the possibly dead, but handy Pixen pixel art package for my Mac.

I’m experimenting with some woolly psychobabble ideas too. My PC is in my office and I do work on it. The work is quite interesting and motivating. I also have my Macbook which I could do work on, if I bought the VMWare Fusion key that I need. My Mac has Eclipse installed though, and the SlickSet stuff all set up. It’s turning into a portable devkit quite nicely, and is currently being my “fun” coding environment.

Sure, I could sit at my PC with its twin 19″ monitors, a mouse and a clacky IBM Model M keyboard and run Eclipse. But my Mac lets me sit in my bedroom and code, or do it downstairs in front of the telly. This portability lets me code when I want to, where I want to. Personal coding is supposed to be fun and amusing, rather than something rigid that you’re paid to do. So anything that makes it more fun is going to help with motivation.

I’ll install Eclipse on my PC at some point, just to check the code runs OK in Windows and Linux. I’ll also commandeer Amy’s PPC iBook to see what it’s like on that too She doesn’t know this yet though

I spent the day with a year 8 form. You know you’re in for a handful when two teaching assistants appear in the room too, and you have the ADHD kid in the room. There’s one kid who simply needs referring to by his first name he’s that loopy. I got him to collect things, count things and give out bits of paper which seemed to keep him amused for a while.

Fortunately the day was really well planned. The kids were mostly in the main hall being talked at by various people. I only had them for 2 and a half periods and in that time they were gluing, cutting and colouring in things. Easy, colourful work to keep idle fingers busy.

It beat spending a day with my form arranging work experience and being in the same room as them for five hours. Not that my form are horrible, it’s just five hours being with the same group winds everyone up.

I have quite a lot of retro computer hardware and old games consoles. It’s not my fault they’re so cheap (or free), and I am in no way trying to live my childhood again

Since I have so many I thought it might be interesting if I took photos of them and wrote a bit about each one. Some of the machines I own are mine from back when I was small and just starting out with the whole computer thing. I still have the very Spectrum that I learned to program on.

I won’t be regurgitating the vital stats about each machine, Wikipedia is full of that anyway. I don’t quite know what my “angle” will be, I’ve seen other retro websites and want to do something personal, but interesting to others apart from me.

Any ideas?