During the past week this place has gone from a couple of rooms with our stuff piled in to somewhere we can sit and watch TV while eating our tea. The BT man came to put a phoneline in, I’ve moved most of my contact details for all the banks and places to this address. I even have my fishtank set up (minus the fish, the water needs time to settle first). The only thing missing is my ADSL, I have to wait until sometime next week for them to begin moving that.

And I have no money left. It’s all gone, spent it on “stuff” - everything from a giant TV aerial, plants, washing machine pipes, pots, pans, lightbulbs, and a rather nice stand to put my fishtank on. Fortunately the first installment of my student loan comes on Monday and I’ll also be applying for the training bursary. Once those payments start coming in I can begin to predict how much money I won’t have at the end of each month.

I can’t decide which I want more - an XBox 360 or a Freeview box with HDD. Having watched Freeview I could quite happily live without the ability to timeshift and record things, it’s repeated so much anyway that missing a program isn’t a big deal. Then again, I have six games consoles already, surely another one won’t make a difference (but this one plays pretty images when playing music! it has more modern games! I won’t have to power up my PC to listen to music! etc… etc…).

The washing machine leaks from its waste hose where I attempted to connect it back together and the Freeview signal isn’t great, it drops out every so often. Never mind, this is the beginning.

I arrived home last night and when I woke this morning was told I need to find somewhere to live before the end of this week. This makes sense, I go back to the Lakes for three weeks and then leave there for good. On the 11th of September University starts and I need somewhere to live before that begins.

So I rang the estate agents whos renting part wasn’t open on a weekend. They said they’d phone me on Monday. I also phoned some random advert from the paper. There’s a two bedroom terraced house to rent for the insanely cheap price of £395 a month, and it was even still for rent when I phoned. I arranged to go and see it at 5pm today, so until then went into town to look at other places and to go shopping.

I now have a Motorola Slvr phone which is like the RAZR but without the flip top. It’s quite nice really and hasn’t started to irritate me yet.

Come 5pm and we all go to look at this place - me and my sister, my mum and my dad. It’s quite a nice place, and one of the rooms is incredibly small - you can just about get a bed into it and that’s it. The rest of the house is also small, but it’s amazing how things can be rearranged to make the space more useful. We’re going to sign contracts and pay money tomorrow.

Last week I got a confirmation letter from Huddersfield Uni saying I had a place on the 2006/2007 PGCE IT course. Today I got a letter from the Student Loans Company saying I was now £4,000 in debt (with the silly low interest rate and almost pointless repayment system).

So in September I’ll be back at Uni training to be a teacher. It’ll be quite a change from wandering about outside. Will being in a room full of kids drive me mad?

Probably not. I remember thinking the same when I started doing this job, and I appear to have coped quite well. Teaching kids will be different to taking them climbing and ghyll scrambling, but some parts will be the same. If I can get 16 kids to do Orienteering in the rain for an hour and a half I can make 30 of them learn how to create spreadsheets and wordprocessing documents.

New photos up by the way…

I’ve received some forms and things from Huddersfield Uni. I had to fill out a health form to say I wasn’t ill or insane and then post it back to them.

Once that’s done they should hopefully send me a letter confirming I have a place on their course.

Fun

The shop is very boring and quiet. I painted white lines on the stairs this week. Watching the paint dry was the most excitement I had all week.

I went to my interview. It wasn’t that bad. We were given a shedload of paperwork to fill in to keep us busy while they performed group interviews and personal ones.

The group one consisted of standing in front of a small group of other potential candidates and explaining what you thought the qualities were that a good teacher had. The personal interview was quite in-depth, with the person who would be my tutor examining and questioning random things from my application.

He said I’d be well suited to being a teacher, but the decision isn’t entirely his to make so I now have to wait for official confirmation.

Prior to the interview I went to my dad’s school to see what it was like. It was pretty much how I remember school being, only newer technology and more interesting things to teach them. I was also shown around the various server rooms by the main IT technician, which was fun

Huddersfield Uni want to interview me for the teacher training course they’re running next year. The interview will last all morning and consist of a private interview, a group one and some written tasks. I bet it won’t be as interesting as the interview for Newlands, it doesn’t seem to be a requirement that trainee teachers can jump into cold water. I’ll have to wake my brain up from where ever it’s been hiding for the past three years. Need to get some clothes too.

Finished Uni, I now have a 2:2 in BSc (Hons) Software Engineering. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Last week I was playing with my clock, rolling the UNIX time counter over its Epoch. I managed to confuse a mailing list I’m on: LBC Archives. Well, my bedroom does look surprisingly small on the outside, so it could be a TARDIS (but a broken one, it’s smaller inside than it looks).

Finished the first three Adrian Mole books. He’s a right drippy bugger One more to go (The wilderness years). Then I’ve got a book on Alan Turing to read (Alan Turing - The Enigma).

Exam results are out tomorrow. I’m making the trek into Manchester to see what I’ve got. It’ll only cost me £2.10 on the bus - what a bargain! (and the government wonder why people don’t use the busses as much. For £2.10 you can park all day in Manchester, plus you don’t have to sit on a grotty 30yr old bus).

Have almost finished the first three Adrian Mole books, I started them last weekend. One more to go. Things written in a diary-format are interesting to read, aren’t they

Takes me 10 minutes to get to work. I nolonger feel like collapsing at the top of the big hill that separates my house from work. I need a speedo, I want to know how fast I’m going…

Just installed The Internet Junkbuster, fetched a blocklist and now my browsing experience is so much better. I can read Dilbert without having to look at 3 large banner ads.

We had our general election. Very boring and organised affair. Nothing interesting happened, we’re stuck with Labour again.

I have now properly finished Uni, I went in on Thursday and gave a talk to our project supervisor, the person who set the project, and an independent person (who’s sole purpose was to keep time). Before this we (as a group) demonstrated our project. It worked! Well, the messageboard we’d created didn’t, so out of desperation we pressed the ‘reset database’ button we’d created and… success!. Went out after for food, there’s a great Chinese all-you-can-eat restaurant on Witworth Street, Manchester (it’s next to an NCP carpark, opposite the casino). I managed to eat three platefuls of pretty good quality food, then a bowl of what was supposedly ‘grass jelly’ but turned out to be normal, boring orange jelly. Coconut agar jelly is a bit weird, it has no flavour and would bounce if dropped on the floor.

I have downloaded my website to my home PC and am editing it there. So far I’ve fixed the filtering controls on the top of this page. I think I’ll re-do my file downloads section next.

I’m going to buy an Asus Geforce2 MX dualhead graphics card and a second monitor. I want two screens! (we have a PC with two at work and it’s just so easier when you can have two full-screen programs running).

Just finished hacking around with our group project again. It’s almost finished, just a few bits to tidy up. It’s midnight and I’m sleepy.

Phoned Planet Talk to have a whinge at them. Was kind of deflated by the poor connection I had. I could hear myself about 1 second after I spoke, and it was louder than the person on the other end of the phone. She said there was no direct debit set up on my account. I said “Yes there is”, she said “oh… oh yes, there it is”. Yesterday the nice collection agency sent me another letter! This time asking for money I’d already paid to PT! PT told me to ignore the letter, so I shall. If the collection agency phone, I’ll tell them the same thing.

I suspect I’ll be phoning them this time next month when it all starts again.

Our kitchen is finished! The floor looks nice. If I had a camera, there’d be a link to a picture of it. That reminds me, my cousin has my webcam and maybe it’s time I reminded him it was mine

Time to enable power-saving and sleep(25200), with an alarm set for 7am. I don’t own a real alarm (well I do, but It’s not plugged in), instead my PC assaults me with music at a pre-set time using XMMS and the Alarm plugin for it. It’s great, I avoid the shite local radio stations and get to listen to something I like.