It was the leaving do for one of the people at work. Conveniently the leaving party was held in town, meaning I could just drive down the road and not get lost. After finding one carpark that wanted me to pay £2.70 for an hour I went across the road to another carpark that was totally free!

As an added convenience I happened to meet someone else from work who was going to the party, and after visiting the cash machine we met another person… then three more. It was like some covert operation with people all randomly meeting up together

The food was excellent, and because we were in before half six it was half price. Combined with a £5 deposit already paid, our bill - for 14 of us - came to a mere £46! Yep, £3 each for some excellent food So excellent that, not having any change (I’d brought 30 quid, expecting to pay £15-£20 or so) I had my meal paid for by one of the people I work with.

Free food wins every time

We left them £40 in tips too…

I hope not, Microsoft don’t like it… You may recall I had my XBox 360 stolen earlier in January. Well today I received an email in my inbox that was a little odd; in the “hello, we’re the bank and want to know why your card has just been used in Japan” style odd. After checking it for being a hoax or phishing email (I even went to the XBox Live website to confirm the phone number) I gave them a ring. First though, here’s the email:

Dear James,

We are trying to reach You to verify Your Xbox 360 console serial number, because another customer has called in wanting to register the same number.

It would be very helpful, if You could call us back and let us know, if You have sold or given Your Xbox away. If that is not the case, maybe we have the serial number written down incorrectly. Could You verify the 12-digit number on the back of the console (under the bar code, usually ending in 05).

Please give us a call back or reply to this email.

Best wishes,

Xbox Customer Support

So I gave them a ring. It was a freephone number, which is good considering I spent about 90% of the call on hold. Amusingly my call was routed to the US where a nice helpful person took my details and gave me a bit of a help when I got my address wrong and couldn’t remember my phone number. Top tip: when you move house, update your XBox details too!

So far the call was fairly routine and getting a little tedious. This soon changed when I mentioned my 360 had been stolen, not sold or given away. I had to have my call escalated to a supervisor - who seemed to be Danish, just where is my call going? - he took some more details, including my correct phone number, and said I would be called within 48 hours as this was very important and they would need some more information from me.

Looks like the new owner of my stolen XBox 360 has just kicked the giant wasps nest known as Microsoft. I hope they’ve got their receipt, I’ve got mine with the serial number on, and a crime reference number from the police.

I hold no hope of anything much happening except the 360 being banned from XBLA, but still… it’s interesting to follow.

They’re done, no more until next year. Thank fuck.

That is all.

I have spent a rather chilled out day completing most of my form’s reports. It’s suitably tedious and I managed to put it off until about 2pm. My house is now very clean and tidy as a result and I have created a fantastic Excel spreadsheet and Word template so I can mail-merge the comments easily.

Guess I’d best get on with writing the comments then.

I had my NQT singing off interview today. I passed, the interview was cut short by me having to go and actually teach a lesson.

Have learned many things this year, mostly things not to do, will apply them next year. Next year will be better, I know what I’m supposed to be doing now!

I’ve just spent a wonderful day with a group of year 9 students doing an “ICT Booster Day”. No, really, it was wonderful. No sarcasm there for once. Why was it wonderful?

Well when you’re training to be a teacher you have this mental image of what teaching is, and then a dim memory of being at school and what it was really like. You imagine it to be a bit like the adverts, with bright, intelligent interested children asking you why the sky is blue, where baby whales come from and why water doesn’t run off the bottom of the Earth. Your own experiences at school probably contain a few memories of teachers you liked, and quite a few memories of teachers you hated and were a little bastard for.

Then, as a trainee teacher you get put in a classroom and discover what’s in your head doesn’t match what’s in your classroom.

Well not today. The kids were making a website, editing video and making a leaflet. With the exception of three students, everyone was really interested and keen and in addition to learning stuff, they actually had fun.

Now to work out how to apply this to normal every day teaching.

Subscribe in a reader

I read a lot of things in Google Reader, it being possibly the best RSS reader on the planet. One of its main benefits over traditional readers is the ability to share feed items. And the true power is the ability to make an RSS feed of your shared items. Since some of you might find the feeds I read interesting, here’s an RSS feed of my favourite things.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/piku_random

It’s constantly updated, usually daily, as I find new things to read and tag. Consider it a meta-feed of other feeds. Each item in the feed will take you to someone else’s blog or website. I track 88 different sites using Google Reader, quite a lot of them being technology related or just plain weird.

This is more than simple, mindless blog regurgitation that the web is full of. I’m offering no commentary, no explanations of the stuff I find. If I read something interesting I’ll share it and it’ll appear in the above RSS feed. Subscribe to the RSS feed and you can also get a nice flow of random, interesting stuff.

Some of the sites I regularly visit include

• Coding Horror
• Daily Dilbert (in colour, without Flash!)
• Hack-a-Day
• XKCD
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

So open wide and accept the firehose of incoming data

When at Uni training to be a teacher we were introduced to the concept known as “work life balance”. The idea being you leave your work at work, and don’t bring it home, the intention being to stop us going crazy.

Yeah, work life balance meet the real world.

What they should be teaching new teachers is not how to manage their work and life, but how to adlib on the spot and make stuff up as they go along. Little coping mechanisms for when It All Goes Wrong, or when someone springs a surprise.

Like tomorrow. I have an all day ICT Booster day where me and another teacher are taking 15 year 9 students and doing a full day of ICT with them. Fine, should be OK if the kids don’t turn into idiots. Only I forgot to set some cover work for the lesson I should normally be teaching on Thursday morning.

If this was my training year I’d now be sat up till 10pm planning a lesson, making resources and generally having a bit of a controlled panic. Instead I’m writing this. Tomorrow I will go into work and pick out a random cover lesson from our pile, print off the worksheets (after modiftying them a bit) and leave them in the classroom. Job done.

They can make me a poster about Internet Safety. That’ll do. The non IT trained cover teacher can then just wander about trying to persuade the kids to keep off the Internet.

Oh, supposedly I have to write some year 12 reports for kids I taught six months ago. Right… OK… well I’ll do that in between my year 10 reports, planning next week’s lessons and preparing for my NQT final interview on Friday. Or I won’t. If they want reports they can ask for them.

Managing workload is easy - do the important stuff and leave the rest until someone asks for it. If it’s not important they’ll not ask again. And do the ten minute quick stuff immediately. Think of it as the Getting Things Done philosophy combined with the Dilbert mentality.

Monthly curry meeting tomorrow

Help me! I’m drowning in Year 10 reports. I have my entire form’s reports to collate, sort, read and comment on. It’s a paper shuffling nightmare of biblical proportions. I’m half way through reading them and making notes, and already I want to burn the lot. It’s not helped by finding mistakes and having to ask for some to be reprinted… and conversely having the same requests made of me from other year 10 tutors.

English teachers are the worse, they pick out random grammatical errors but rather than explain how to fix it, simply circle the offending word and leave you to guess what’s wrong. I’ll start circling random IT layout errors then - oh that circle? well you started in Times New Roman size 12, but then this line is in size 11, and this paragraph is 2 pixels to the right compared to the rest. Also, pressing space loads of times to line things up is poor, go away and learn about tables. This report is hand written… please get with the 1990s and use a word processor.

This is a little present I cooked up (literally) for Amy’s birthday. It’s a passable rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System done in the medium of sponge cake and icing.

The cake mix is a fairly standard combination of eggs, flour, sugar and butter/margarine. Google is full of cake recipes, go wild. Bake it at 200c until cooked and then leave to cool on a rack. Since I only had round cake tins I had to chop the cakes to shape resulting in a slightly square looking Nintendo. I was tempted to turn it into a Game Cube cake but didn’t have enough cake to do a cube.

The cake consists of two layers of sponge with a layer of buttercream in the middle (combine butter and sugar together, resist eating it). The outsides being coated in buttercream to help the icing stick.

The icing is the premade ready-to-roll variety, a favourite of lazy and busy cooks all over. Deciding to throw past Christmas cake icing experience out the window I opted to ice each side separately rather than draping one large piece of icing over the whole cake and smoothing it down. You can’t see the joins because I used a wet knife to smooth the whole thing.

The distinctive NES patterns and detail were first marked using a sharp knife and then coloured using food colouring and a clean paintbrush; the knife marks helping to prevent the colouring from bleeding into surrounding cake. I was skeptical how well painting icing would work out, but the results ended up much better than I thought. The stripes on the top were done using black decorative ‘writing’ icing in a tube, as were the Nintendo logo on the front and the power LED. The buttons are two pieces of icing.

Early games consoles such as the NES are good candidates for geeky cakes. They’re just squares or rectangles without too many complicated details. If you can bake and have limited art skills this kind of thing is easily accomplished in an afternoon.

I wasn’t aiming to create an accurate rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System, just something that looked like one. All the non-geeks at the party asked what the weird stripy cake was all about, while everyone else thought it quite amusing.

Tips

• Use plenty of icing sugar to prevent the icing from sticking to your hands, rolling pin and chopping board
• Clean, sharp knives cut icing with clean, sharp lines
• Icing becomes surprisingly pliable when slightly warm and smoothing out bumps and weird parts is easy if the area is given a light but fast rub until the surface feels smooth
• If you get food colouring splats on the wrong parts of the cake, pick them off with a knife and smooth over the resulting hole
• Do not eat too much of the icing, you will feel ill after approximately a golf-ball’s worth and positively awful (but very hyperactive) after a fist-sized glob
• It’s a cake, don’t expect sharp corners or fine detail
• Do not tell the recipient about the little mistakes you’ve noticed because you’ve been staring at the cake for three hours, they won’t notice nor will they care. If it looks OK and tastes good the operation is a success
• Cookery is like hacking or programming, approach it in the same way