If I wanted to restart the computer I bloody well would. Is it possible you could stop popping up every couple of bloody minutes while I’m writing? Because sometimes I go a few minutes without actually looking at the screen (touch typer I am not) and it’s rather annoying to find that all I’ve been doing is futilely clicking on your dumb windows message.
The Onion does a glorious bit on Sony (via Pete)
Twitter is suddenly everywhere. I can always tell when something has made it overground because the teachers start talking about it. And this week I’ve had two of them asking about this Twitter thing. But they’re not the only ones it seems. I can barely turn on the TV or the radio without some mention of it. There was the recent Jonathan Ross / Stephen Fry chat on his show. Russell Brand’s on now. So, I hear, is Chris Moyles. And today 5 live was awash with it. Mayo and Kermode’s (Wittertainment) film reviews were all over it. And once the BBC attaches to it, everyone does. But what seems like Twitter’s very own jump the shark moment came when Phillip Schofield joined in.
It’s all that Stephen Fry’s fault of course! If he wasn’t so wonderfully nice and beloved by everyone, we maybe wouldn’t have had this explosion of celeb twittering. But it’s too late to go back now!
Oh, and if you’re interested: Twitter me.
A while ago we had the great nightmare of a Maths Tracking software that was written by educators. It took so bloody long to get it working that I was ready to personally visit the company to put forth my case against their product.
And now one of the teachers had the bright idea of ordering some science assessment software. I know exactly what happened. Rep came in, showed off the software working perfectly on their rep laptop and wowed teacher with it. What teacher didn’t see was the complete mess of the program beneath the shiny surface. Doesn’t like loading on a network, doesn’t like being on a secure network drive, demands full admin access for all users, has to be individually configured to see the central database on every workstation and to top it all off doesn’t recognise the imported SIMs data the way it’s meant to.
I had to create a csv file from SIMs, break it down to individual year groups, format the data properly and then import it. And even then, the stupid bloody program doesn’t accept it. The date of birth field was the best: Must be in the format dd/mm/yy. Which is what I imported. Stupid Science software then registers all of our Year 1 test pupils as being born in 1902 and 1903. Stupid, stuid software. In the end I had to go into each pupil entry and delete the date of birth year 02 or 03 and replace them with 02 and 03. Press update and all is okay. But Richard, you say, surely you actually haven’t made any changes at all? And that is true. But stupid, stupid software then recognises dates as 2002 and 2003.
Tomorrow I have to go through the whole farce with years 2-6. Looking forward to it greatly.
Just doesn’t go together does it? I have spent a lot of the day, inbetween the aforementioned depression and visits to the loft with towels, messing around with Windows Movie Maker and Audacity. The thing I need to do is put together the audio and video for the bit that we’re doing in the staff show this year. Last year was full drag, this year it’s just ABBA.
So one of the TAs got us a 4 minute mix of ABBA songs and I said I’d quickly knock together something to go with it. The theory being that the more things we have going on at once, the better it will be. (Or at least the kids will have more to look at and enjoy).
Plan 1: Put together some intro music – clapping, cheering, shouting, general stuff like that. Using Audacity and my music collection that was no problem. Probably more time consuming than it really needed to be but all beautifully simple and easy to use.
Plan 2: Get the ABBA videos of the songs from the mix and edit them together as a backdrop. Oh bloody hell. I’d always heard people talk about how video editing should onlhy ever be tried, especially by a novice, on a mac. I believe it now. Wrong formats, wrong codecs, wrong this, wrong that. I tried getting freeware to do the trick, but even that let me down. In the end, after much trial and error, I settled on Windows Movie Maker and a very simple plan. But windows still insisted on fucking it up several times and crashed repeatedly. Bless it.
So after far too much extra work on this thing I now know Audacity and at least some rudimentary movie maker program well enough to use it in lessons with the children. A great result. And yet another thing off the to-do list.
One small benefit to the whole ABBA thing is that, as I’m playing Benny, I can quite legitimately go unshaven all week in an attempt to grow my Benny beard. Sort of makes up for the enormous embaressment of getting up and doing the thing I guess.
As seen today on Twitter.
Have spent a lot of today tinkering (or is it just avoiding doing stuff?). Louise and Molly headed into York this morning to get a bit of Christmas shopping done. I wasn’t allowed on the trip – think they were buying me my present perhaps – Molly is ever so sweet when it comes to keeping secrets like this. She tries to keep them, she really does. But I just know at some point between now and Christmas Eve she’ll blurt it out. Bless her.
Anyway, whilst they were away the plan was to get lots done. Except that disappeared when the computer decided it wasn’t going to play nice. You see, over the past couple of days I’ve been doing the tweaking Windows on the Asus Eee PC to try and reduce the footprint. And seeing as it worked so well, I figured it was worth a shot on the main computer as well. Ooops.
Suddenly it can’t see various programs and I have to spend the afternoon reinstalling programs and finding obscure dll files. Joy.
Everything seems to be running okay again now, but that did mean that all the time I had spare to be doing things today vanished. So after Molly went to bed I tried to catch up. Which meant I was trying too hard to get it all done, which means I got bogged down in just how much stuff I really need to get done before Christmas, which means I accomplished almost nothing except stressing myself out some more.
Great day. Bloody computers. (Yeah, like it’s the computers fault that I started messing around.)
On the plus side the Asus Eee PC is looking good. After various bits of tweaking it’s running fast and clean. After the Libretto it’s taken a little bit of getting used to. The keyboard is bigger which is good, but the bloody touchpad just gets in the way of my style of typing. I tend to leave my thumbs hanging below the space bar and I end up scrolling all over the place. Of course, the fact I can sit anywhere in the house and get online more than makes up for this and I’m sure I’ll be used to the keyboard and trackpad in no time.
Today I got my first Christmas and birthday present. After lusting after one for a long , long time, I’ve finally got my hands onto a lovely Asus eeepc. A little under a year since I first mentioned the damn thing, today I finally got one, spent a long time loading everything up and finally put the Libretto into the filing cabinet.
Poor, poor, lovely little Libretto. It served me incredibly well. Back when I picked it up, I needed it to be a small computer I could throw into a bag to make notes on. And it was wonderful. But that was two years ago nearly and things have moved spectacularly on by now. Which is why I’m typing this out on my brand new Eeepc and am just about to upload the post straight away when I’m finished.
New toys are very, very good indeed. And this is a cracking new toy.
Today was Learning Platform training day 2.
Oh it was such fun. Or maybe not. We at least got to have a play this time and discovered what we had thought all along. It may be functionally quite easy to use, but the sheer scale of administering the Learning Platform and all of the users on it is massive. Cue headache.
Not made any better by being in a room almost guaranteed to make me ill. Small, cramped, full of noisy computers. Too hot with the windows closed. Freezing with fans on and windows open. Hot, cold, tired, bored, hot, cold, bored, tired, headache, headache, headache, headache……
The only good thing about it was realising I don’t actually have to even think about it until January again now. Have lots and lots and lots of other things to be getting on with. The funniest thing is that I know I haven’t got a hope in hell of getting it sorted properly given the amount of time I would need to spend on it. But I also know that I’m much better off for available time than any of the teachers who were there at the meeting today.
The Learning Platform. It may or may not be a good idea. But it’s most certainly not been thought out properly. We get told that it’s at least 3-4 hours administration work a week and they wonder why we’re all slightly reluctant to play along. Oh, wait. Hold on. I’ve just realised, I actually loaf off at work for 3 hours each week. I just pretend to be busy. Of course I’ll have the time spare to do the LP admin.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Headache, headache, headache…..
Today, after a bit of a nightmare with the server locking up and having to be restarted, we had our Learning Platform installation. Done remotely by a nice man from RM called Richard. So once he was online and off I just got on with other stuff.
Other stuff involved website work and, in the background, trying to rid one of the staff’s machines of all the horrible bugs, viruses, trojans and spycrap they’ve picked up. My ongoing advice to the staff in circumstances like this: If you have older boys and they go online; buy them their own laptop. That way when they inevitably screw it up you have your own , clean one and can make them pay to get theirs cleaned. The crap they’ve picked up is just great. I keep throwing programs at it, they keep finding new and interesting nasties to delete. But I’m winning, slowly but steadily. Of course, I have the impression that the last few are going to be the ones that make me give in completely.
Anyway, the Learning Platform has been installed.
Possibly. He finished at 4pm I was told. Whether he actually finished or just gave up I have no idea yet. Hopefully the network is intact and working still in the morning.
Of course, even if the Learning Platform is working I have no intention and definitely no time spare to even think about it for a while. But seeing as the closest deadline for it is next year, I think a few months off to get the new website sorted would be fine.
One interesting aside, it’s all very well choosing something that you think is incredibly funny / cute / sexy as a user name or email address or screen name; but you should really think about when it will be used and what context it’s used in. Such was the problem today. The nice gentlemen remote logged on to the server and started doing the install. User name? Welsh Wizard. Not as silly as the email address I was once given by someone at a school conference once. Is sexgodpete@hotmail really the right email address to give out in these circumstances?
fictions 