As we left him on Wednesday, Chris told us to “Tell everyone I’m not dead yet!” The cancer caught up with him at five this morning. Our thoughts are with Gwyneth and Olly and with everyone else who knew Chris. He is already missed.

What a week. Christmas was fab, as usual. We spent it at the Mill with mum, dad, Dougal, Liz and the kids. A smaller group than usual, but we all had a good time. Then it all started to go a little bit wobbly. We don’t appear to have lost any friends to the tsunami, but I can’t say that makes the news reports any less shocking. Our disasters have all been on a smaller scale.

It’s been a while I know, mostly because I’ve been staggered by the workload associated with the teacher training course. Such a staggering workload in fact that I’ve decided to drop out for the time being and get some more experience in the classroom as a teaching assistant before hopefully reapplying for a more local PGCE course next year. Why? Frankly I was completely unprepared for the course. I had problems with time management (I’m not quite sure how, but I’ve managed to get through life so far without worrying over much about time management beyond knowing that my wife keeps the authoritative version of our diary), paperwork (everything’s on my wiki, why do I need to print it out?

Now I’m a larval maths teacher, I have to set homework, and that means I have choices: I can use the homework associated with the textbooks we use I can cut and paste past exam papers and things together I can write my own homework assignments which I can either Write out longhand and use a photocopier Generate in electronic form and print out The first two options aren’t exactly bad, and I’ve used both of ’em before now, but the resulting homework sheets can look scruffy and, well, inconsistent.

Oh. Bugger.

Photos I took at the weekend of my brand new nephew Stan Frank Dougal Cawley, and some other photos taken in the flat of my grandson Isaac. Click the photo to see the full set.

Exercise 4 of chromatic’s Write Your Life tells me to: Create a new invention, change your life circumstances, or somehow write away a difficult or time-consuming task. First define the problem, show how it affects you, and then invent it away. But I’m not going to do that, exactly, because I already did it.

I stopped buying Wired ages ago. I pretty much stopped reading it before that. All that said, you should read The Long Tail; a well thought out and argued analysis of what happens when stuff stops being scarce.

Exercise 3 in the Write Your Life project. On a typical morning, I wake up before the alarm goes at 0630, stumble through into the bathroom, then back into the sitting room where I get suited and booted for the day. (Gill, being a sensible type, gets to sleep in some more, so banging around the bedroom in the dark isn’t a particularly good idea). If I’m running to time, I nip into the office, check my mail and skim through my RSS feeds.

This is exercise 2 in chromatic’s excellent Write your life exercise. Home. Four letters. Easy to understand. Hard to pin down. If we take home as being “The place where one sleeps”, then home is a two bedroomed first floor Tyneside flat. If you are fortunate enough to know Tyneside well, then I’ve just told you a great deal about where I live; you can probably sketch the floorplan, especially if I tell you that there’s the usual extension at the back with a kitchen and bathroom in it.

This is the first exercise in chromatic’s Write Your Life essay writing project. Follow the link for more information.

So, I’m catching up with NTK and notice my name in one of the links, which is weird. So, being curious I follow the link and it’s the video that got made at EuroFoo this year, for which I was interviewed. Now, I know it’s a truism that a camera adds to ones weight, so I was prepared for looking like an incredibly rare beached bearded whale, but I didn’t realise I was quite so hyper.

So, today’s the first day of YAPC::Belfast, my birthday and the third day of my teacher training course. I’d really like to be in Belfast, but I wouldn’t have missed what I actually did for the world. I’d tell you all about it, but I’m still not sure what the rules are about confidentiality of pupils and stuff so, until I’ve found that out I won’t be writing about that stuff.

The weather recently has been remarkably muggy, so I’ve been keeping my office window open while I’m working. Which is all very well, but we’re trying to keep the cats in, so I have to keep the office door closed. Of course, it shouldn’t be too much of a worry, we’re on the first floor (2nd floor if you’re American) and surely the cats wouldn’t be so stupid as to go leaping out of the window.

Spurred on by the forthcoming adaptation on ITV, I’ve finally got round to reading Christopher Brookmyre’s first novel, Quite Ugly One Morning Wow. If you can make it past the (quite disgusting) first chapter, then you’ll be in it for the long haul. Great characters, spiky dialogue, twisty plot, worrying prescience and some fabulously gruesome set pieces and comeuppances. So, in summary. Buy this book. Then do what I did and buy the other Parlabane books too; they’re worth it for the titles alone.

Once upon a time, when the world was young, I sat my O levels. I passed 10 of the blighters. That was 20 years ago and, as these things are wont to do, my examination certificates have been mislaid. For strange reasons I have a bit of paper to prove that achieved grade 3 at the flute, and another to prove that I could swim 100 metres at the age of 9, but if I have to prove that I got an A grade at O level maths, no joy.

Originally uploaded by pdcawley. In the garden of my parents’ house is a big old willow tree. Attached to a branch some 30 or 40 feet up is this swing, which swings out over a tiny stream. Because the swing is actually attached to a block and tackle, it’s possible, once you have the knack to keep it swinging (and indeed increase the swing’s amplitude) by judiciously shortening and releasing the rope.

Oopsie! I managed to misconfigure the name of the comment script. Which is one way of stopping comment spam I suppose, but not my preferred method. Comments should be working now.

Here’s one of my photos from Eurofoo. I appear to have caught DJ Adams at a particularly gormless looking moment.

After a certain amount of swearing (mostly caused by my own utter foolishness) we’re now running under MT 3. Time to go hunt handy plugins…