I did it again… left my sodding interior light on and drained the car battery. I’m going to buy a battery charger I think. One of those portable things might be worth it.

Fortunately I have jumpleads, and with the help of a neighbour had my car running within minutes. Of course first I rang work to tell them I would be late and to expect me in a few hours (going on worse case scenario here of having to catch the bus). I arrived a mere 15 minutes later than normal, but still in plenty of time to be ready.

Or “BDS” as it’s known. They warn new teachers about this, and how some days just seem to fall apart or never get started. Supposedly the trick is to not take it out on the kids. I think I managed this, but it’s not easy when you have some grinning idiot purposefully trying to throw a bag full of spanners into your neatly tuned lesson plan.

I think today I was subconsciously trying to see just how bad my day could go. I didn’t feel great for any specific reason from the minute I woke up. I’m fairly sure several good things happened today, but since I was in a “let’s focus on the crap things happening today” frame of mind they totally skipped me by.

Here’s a short version of today…

• My car seat was inexplicably stuck on its runners, making it impossible for me to get into my car
• Period 1, my kids moan “this is boring” and then stop listening. When I get them to do the work they say “we don’t know what to do” and seem confused about why.
• Period 2, the software I wanted to use didn’t work so I had to make up a backup lesson. This worked fairly well actually.
• Period 3, two of my kids decide that hitting each other in the head is a great way to pass the time. One of them gets sent to sit with another teacher.
• Period 4, the vast majority of this class seemed totally unable to shut up and listen. I issued a record breaking six detentions in that lesson.
• Period 5 was free and quite nice
• Period 6 saw me emergency covering two kids and confiscating a bottle of alcohol hand cleaner from another kid (wtf? where did that come from?). One of the kids turned his PC off so I moved him to the middle of the room, he then decided to mess with his phone so I took it off him. He then went mostly nuts so I got rid of him with another teacher. Turns out he has a “time out” card to help him manage his anger problems. Well if I’d known that I would have been a bit more tactful with him. Stupid bugger.

So yeah. Tomorrow I now get to waste my break telling kids off. Mind you, if they don’t turn up I’m keeping them behind after school.

Normal service will be resumed shortly, stay tuned.

Here is Todd. Todd is a dog. See Todd run, run Todd, run!

From Random

Except earlier on today Todd couldn’t run in the sun, he had to wait, which was no fun. No fun at all. He was stuck in the kitchen with nothing to do.

OK, enough of that before it turns into a warped version of The Cat in the Hat

I’d been asked by my parents, who are off in Spain at the moment being rained on (the rain in Spain falls mainly on the tourists), to look after the dog for two days while my sister was at work doing long shifts. They’d agreed to leave me a key so I could get in. This suited me, I needed to visit Steve, who I used to work with and he lives down the road from my parents. So off I set.

I arrived at my parents and obtained the key. Then things went a bit pear-shaped as I discovered the back door was bolted from the inside, and I only had a back door key. Oh dear. The irony of this situation was not lost on me - here I was on the wrong side of a locked back door contemplating whether I could break in - not to steal laptops and Xbox 360s but to let out a by now rather wound up dog.

I texted my parents to let them know I was at home, but locked out. I also texted my sister asking where she worked so I could call her a moron in person, and maybe get the front door key. Making it fully clear that any dog mess found in the house was her problem to deal with.

She rang me back and gave me directions. We’ll skip the driving to her work and collecting the key, it was as boring as it sounds and contained no interesting drama. I came home and let myself in.

Wanting to get off to Steve’s to do some important stuff I let the dog out so it could have a crap. Only it wasn’t interested, and after five minutes of being prompted to go and pee, I put it back in the kitchen and said I’d be back later.

Off I went to Steve’s, I showed off my Macbook and we did some work. It got dark and I came home about six pm. It’s quite fun walking a black dog in the dark, it wanders off and waits for you to catch up. If you’re not paying attention it’ll remind you by nipping at your kneecaps.

I will take it out for a proper walk tomorrow to make up for being stuffed in the kitchen all day.

I’m at Amy’s in wonderful Scunthorpe. We’ve been cleaning her house now that her grotty housemate has gone. His room contained stuff that makes those “how clean is your house” programmes look tame. It’s now safe to enter and no longer smells funny. I’d have some pictures but was too busy trying to suck everything up the hoover.

While doing this we were treated to front-row seats at a small fight outside the pub across the road. There was a lot of shouting, shoving and swearing going on so we phoned the coppers. By the time a police car had screamed past (not bothering to stop) they’d got bored and dispersed.

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

This is most exciting… I’ve just won 850,000 great pounds sterling. I wonder if there are also “average pounds sterling” too for people who don’t win the first prize?

And Jullian Anderson wants to give the money to me. Is she from some cheap X-Files ripoff or something?Â

Attn: Sir/Madam
————————————————————————————————
We happily announce to you that your email has won in the  BRITISH LOTTERY CHRISTMAS CHARITY BONAZA ONLINE PROMO PROGRAMME.
————————————————————————————————And you have subsequently emerged a winner and therefore entitled to a substantial amount of 850,000 (EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND GREAT POUNDS STERLING) with TICKET NUMBER:22-20-77745-564.
—————————————————————————————————
kINDLY CONTACT:
Contact Name: Barr.Daniel Graham
Email: barr.danielgraham_claimsdept@hotmail.com

INFORMATION REQUESTED:
1,full Names,2,Age,3,Contact address,4,Marital Status5,Occupation 6 Your country of origin,7,Telephone

Regards,
Mrs Jullian Anderson.
British Lottery Programmer Co-Ordinat

Do this…

piku@vortex:~/www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-content/plugins$ ls arkayne-site-to-site-related-content/
arkayne-options.php  arkayne.php  readme.txt
piku@vortex:~/www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-content/plugins$ less arkayne-site-to-site-related-content/readme.txt
piku@vortex:~/www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-content/plugins$ mv * ..
mv: cannot move `themes’ to a subdirectory of itself, `../themes’

Yes, I just moved  the contents of my WordPress “plugins” directory into the main WordPress directory. This has the effect of totally breaking WordPress beyond repair.

All I can say is thank god for scrollback in PuTTY, Notepad and a tiny bit of shell scripting.

PEBKAC PEBKAC PEBKAC!

Look at what the Stupids have come up with as a logo for the 2012 Olympics…

Here’s a link to the BBC story about it. You can comment on it too

Please click the link below, mostly out of curiosity to see if it makes any difference, but also because that logo is so bad; kids in my classes have made better things!

Online petition - Change The London 2012 Logo

It’s been a while since I posted one of these :)  Take your pick from the following;

The BadVista campaign is an advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free (as in freedom) software alternatives.

http://badvista.fsf.org/

or

DefectiveByDesign.org is a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors. The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market.

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/

and of course, don’t forget

 Sixteen hexadecimal digits that unlock the wonder of most currently released HD-DVD titles from the surly clutches of the AACS revenue content protection system.

link

hijack-hacked-linksys-wireless-router

Read on for an amusing tale of what happens when people fail to change the default settings in their hardware. I’ve got a wireless network, my neighbour seems to as well. Fortunately for him he has WPA, fortunately for me I have MAC address filtering.

Unfortunately for me I have a Belkin router that doesn’t work properly