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.

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.

Now I’m a larval maths teacher, I have to set homework, and that means I have choices:

Oh.

Exercise 4 of chromatic’s Write Your Life tells me to:

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.

This is exercise 2 in chromatic’s excellent Write your life exercise.

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.

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.

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. Still, best to keep the door shut.

Spurred on by the forthcoming adaptation on ITV, I’ve finally got round to reading Christopher Brookmyre’s first novel, Quite Ugly One Morning

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.