OneAndOneIs2

Yesterday I finally stopped being just an observer and did my first bit of actual teaching.

Went surprisingly well. My first call for silence went largely unheard, which was a bit of a panic-inducer. But my voice-training classes came back to me, and it's actually kind of like driving a car: When you need more power, you drop a gear and floor it. When it comes to your voice, you drop an octave or two. And then in a thunderously deep voice you yell "Quiet please!"

Well, it was loud in comparison, anyway ;)

Following that, they were remarkably well-behaved for the rest of the lesson. Almost scarily so...

And being alone is the best way to be
when I'm by myself it's the best way to be
When I'm all alone it's the best way to be
When I'm by myself, nobody else can say goodbye

-- Circle, by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians.

Last week was half term. It wasn't a good time for keeping things in my possession. Firstly, there was my USB hard drive. This is a vitally important piece of hardware - Of its 40GB capacity, barely one gig remains free. That space is made up of portable apps like Firefox; education resources from various places, my entire MP3/Ogg collection, and quite a few ripped movies & things.

When I arrived in school on the Friday, I was fairly sure it was in my bag. But in the afternoon, it was nowhere to be found. Not in my bag, not on the table, nowhere.

Damn, must have left it at home I thought optimistically. Then I left for the day, and indeed for the week, and looked around at home. No sign of a hard drive.

Argh!

Not only is it bad from the point of view of hard-to-replace files living on it, it's also pretty appalling from a privacy point of view - all my passwords and my whole browsing history lives on that hard disk. That's why I'm usually really careful with it.

Must have left it in the science department after all. Damn, that's a week without far too many resources. *sigh*

So then I go up to London to visit the Science Museum. And the Underground was against me from the start: Every time I got to a platform, the train was pulling out and I had to wait for the next one. EVERY TIME!

Finally, one train was still there as I arrived, but it was beeping, signifying that the doors were about to close. Hence I broke into a run and leaped through the train doors just before they could close.

As I leaped, I saw something drop down and, in obedience to the laws of momentum, it described a beautiful curved trajectory as it continued forwards and accelerated downwards.

To put it another way, my keyring with all my keys detached itself from my belt loop and fell beneath the train doors. Which promptly shut. And the train left the station.

NNNnnngg...

So that was the keys to my flat and the key to the science rooms at school gone. I backtracked to the station and looked, but there was no sign of my keys on the ground by the rails - either somebody had already picked them up, or they were in fact hanging under the train. Either way they were gone forever.

Luckily, my flatmate was home when I got there so I was able to get in, and she got a copy of hers so it only cost me a fiver on that score.

Then I came back to school today, and my USB drive is nowhere to be seen. Nowhere.

It isn't at home, this I know. It isn't in my bags, I emptied them repeatedly in a futile search. It MUST be here. But isn't. Surely it couldn't have been stolen..?

Sherlock Holmes: Eliminate the impossible...

It definitely wasn't at home. I swear I remember bringing it into school in my bags, but it's nowhere to be seen in the school. Ergo it must be in my bags. QED.

Except I searched the bags several times already.

One more search?

Why not...

And naturally, after a whole week feeling the loss of my hard drive like a phantom limb, I finally notice there's a pocket in the top of my laptop bag. And inside this previously-unnoticed compartment?

My USB hard drive. Where it's been all week, readily available.

Bloody typical.

The soft-spoken comedienne Rita Rudner allegedly said that Men are self-confident because they grow up identifying with super- heroes. Women have bad self-images because they grow up identifying with Barbie. - possibly the most profound thing I've yet heard a comedienne say.

It was certainly true in my case: Amongst the collections of old, old photographs that my mother hoards are a few showing me with a coat hanging down my back, cape-like, and wearing wellies - the closest my somewhat-younger self could come to a Superman costume in those days... I loved the Superman films. (Tho I drew the line at wearing my underpants on the outside - there are limits!)

But Superman's biggest problem is, we all know he's invulnerable. How can you build suspense if your hero is guaranteed to survive? (Even when he DID die, it was only temporary, after all...)

That's why the most common themes in Supes' stories involved Lois Lane being in danger he might not be able to save her from, or kryptonite, or a sudden loss of his superpowers - things that made him suddenly vulnerable again.

Hence the reason, I think, why I was so fond of the TV series, the Greatest American Hero. Here we had a super-hero who, somewhat reminiscent of Green Lantern, was a normal guy who was given his powers by benevolent aliens. Rather than a power ring, tho, the G.A.H. powers derived from his suit, rather Iron Man-style.

The suit made him bullet-proof. It let him fly, and levitate objects. It made him super-fast, and could even turn him invisible.

So far, so humdrum: Sounds just like Superman, only without the alien origin and shiny green rock allergy, right?

There was a stroke of genius in the series, however: The suit was handed over with a book of instructions on how to use it. That book was lost in the desert before it was ever read. Thus the hero had all these powers, but no idea what they were or how to make them work. He crashed every time he flew. He got stuck in invisible mode. He levitated the wrong objects. And though the suit made him bullet-proof, he always worried about guns because the suit didn't cover his face so he wasn't sure if a shot to the head would hurt him or not.

Having no instruction book was what made the hero. It made his ineptness believable on a continuing basis, episode after episode. And I know this, because my brother bought me the complete set on DVD for Christmas last year and I'm working my way through them.

It also meant that many of the kids watching it decided that when they grew up, they would in fact read the manual rather than just trying to blunder through on their own.

Which is all well and good, if you HAVE the requisite instruction book.

I bought a laptop some time ago - an HP NC4000, second hand. It's an underpowered beast, but I like it because it's small and runs the latest Ubuntu perfectly - even the 3D desktop.

Because it was second hand, there was no manual. And it was a long time before I stopped having problems with the touchpad.

Sometimes it would act like I was holding the button down, even though I wasn't. Sometimes it would scroll down the page for no reason. Sometimes it would click on something I didn't want to click. It aggravated me no end.

Eventually, through trial and error (and Google) I discovered that a tap on the pad was considered a mouse-click. A double-tap-with-dragging-movement was interpreted as click-and-drag. And a vertical stroke on the very right of the pad was a scroll-wheel equivalent.

Once this was established, I got very fond of the touchpad and how cleverly it emulated all the functions of a real mouse. If only I'd had an instruction book to start with, I'd have been happy with it right from the start.

Why do I mention it now? Because I'm using a Windows laptop at the moment, and in theory it works the exact same way. In theory.

But the scroll-wheel functionality doesn't work. Well, it does in one or two applications, but mostly it doesn't. And that means no wheel in Firefox.

So that means no scrolling on long pages - a huge annoyance - and no mouse-gestures based history menu - another huge annoyance. I'm hoping there's a way to stop it trying to be clever, because having gotten used to a decent touchpad at last, I'm going nuts trying to use a laptop that doesn't have one.

If only the laptop had come with an instruction book, I might have sorted it out already...

Something else that doesn't come with an instruction book, regrettably, is humanity. Over the years, we've tried to work out our own. There's a huge body of literature on the subject - from the popular & well-known "Men are from Mars" type, to the more heavy-going treatises on psychology and the like.

Since psychology and related topics play an important part in getting kids to behave, I picked up a library book a while ago on one of the latest trends: Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP.

Essentially, this is a way to alter the way you or somebody else thinks/reacts through awareness of thinking patterns and body language. (Big oversimplification there)

It's got a few interesting points in it. For instance, if somebody is trying to remember what happened, their eyes will generally go left, whilst if they're making something up, they'll look to their right. Hence if a teacher asks a pupil "Explain what happened before I got here" after an incident, if the pupil looks to the teacher's left, it's likely that a work of fiction is about to issue forth.

So that's handy. And another point of interest was a way of stopping negative reactions to a scenario - such as always feeling unhappy when you go to work, for example.

What you do is, you create a link in your brain (hence the "neuro" bit) between a positive reaction and a certain stimulus. e.g. you think about something that makes you happy, and once that is clear in your mind and actually inducing a feeling of happiness, you do something like touching a knuckle - any gesture you're unlikely to make without intending to - and so link the gesture to the emotion.

You do this a few times, until the gesture itself induces a feeling of happiness. Then you do the same thing, only using a different gesture and linking it to the emotion you don't want - like the "I hate going to work" feeling.

Then (the clever bit) you perform both gestures at the same time, linking the positive and negative reactions together and "short-circuiting" them so that, in theory, your brain can't evoke the "hating work" feeling without also invoking the "happy" feeling, and so canceling out your automatic reaction to disliking going to work.

Great idea in theory, but as I'm a student on half-term, I can't test it out. Hey, did I mention I'm going to the Science Museum on Friday?

Those who can't become managers :)

While I'm not being terribly productive on the writing front, I thought I'd go through my archives and tag posts with a category I've been meaning to add for year: The Helpful category.

It's a category for the howto's, the guides, the explanations, and various other posts I've made over the years that I consider "worth reading" rather than just "something I wrote"

There's 17 so far, not a bad average compared to many bloggers ;)

But in a fit of boredom, I started following links to other blogs from comments on some of the blogs I read, and an uncanny number of them have a latest post saying it's their blog-birthday. (A strangely-high proportion of the others has a latest post on the subject of which way round toilet rolls should go. Don't ask me why)

One of them was the Iceland Weather Report, which I've encountered a few other times. In her first point, Alda mentions that she gets very few comments. As bad as two per three hundred visits, sometimes!

Well, yesterday I had 1378 hits. And three comments.

Some people don't know when they're well-off!

It's an "apples and oranges" comparison, of course - I don't really write to be entertaining or to tell people about my life, so I don't get the same level of comments as people who do. Mind you, when I stop and think about it, I'm not really sure how to categorize what I *do* write about - beyond the simple definition of "whatever the Hell I want to, really" that is.

I do sometimes wonder, tho, just how many regular readers I have. Posts like the defrag one are all very gratifying with their hundreds of comments, but they make it hard to tell how many readers I have because many (most?) of my hits are from people coming to one specific post, not readers of the blog.

I did have a point when I started this post, but I'm no longer sure what it was.

I made a start one one of my (many, many) assignments for university today - I managed one paragraph and two references before I'd had enough. But it's a start, so I feel mildly virtuous about that.

And I finished unpacking, so I have found some of the important parts of paperwork I was looking for, as well as my hair conditioner. I also found my laptop's WiFi PCMCIA card, which is good, but it doesn't seem to work on my new home's wifi router, I have no idea why. So I'm having to use my borrowed Windows laptop or trail a cable across the flat to get online.

...

If you're wondering why I'm not writing so many blog posts at the moment, I'm hoping you'll now understand the reason for it

I could think of more, easily enough, but a seemingly-popular site named ITWire has come up with a list of ten.

I only know this because my access stats have been going crazy filling up with referrals from them, because that damned defrag article has been linked from their reason eight...

So I was again giving a fellow teacher a lift home because her car's not fixed yet. For various reasons, I had the album "things of beauty" playing at the time.

She's half mexican or spanish or something, so I don't think it was quite her kind of music... so the conversation went along the lines of:

"What language is this?"

"Something Scandinavian - Finnish, I think."

"Okay.."

"It's a long story. Do you know what a meme is?"

You try explaining the "leek girl" thing to somebody who doesn't even know what a meme is!

Ah well. I gave AN explanation - whether it was understood or not is up for debate. Maybe I should have just lied and just pretended I actually like unintelligible folk music..

I'm typing this on my desktop PC. It's online. Yay.

I'm online only temporarily, because I'm using an extremely long ethernet cable to plug in to the router. Not a long-term solution. No yay.

The router has Wifi. Yay. My desktop has no WiFi card, and the router keeps dropping WiFi connections anyway. No yay.

I can download my email via thunderbird. Yay. The ISP this flat is subscribed to doesn't allow you to use any SMTP servers other than their own. No yay.

I know how to use SSH to tunnel network traffic to another server and bypass such petty restrictions. Yay. The only remote SSH account I have doesn't allow such tunneling. No yay.

All in all, I don't feel like using the Net here is going to be the hassle-free experience I'm used to...

On Sunday, I moved out of the flat I shared with Lou for the last four and a half years, to one ten miles or so down the road. From a second storey flat with no lift, to a second storey flat with no lift.

One hell of a day - thankfully I had help, or I'd have been truly stumped.

Stuff was strewn all over the place, and even today isn't fully packed away - tho it's mostly done, and I know where most things are. I've even gotten myself online, courtesy of a network cable and my laptop - I can't find the laptop WiFi card, and my desktop's always used ethernet. Geek or not, I mostly like to use "tried and tested" stuff..

My new flatmate seems nice enough - spends most of her life in her room watching TV, or has done since I've arrived anyway. Maybe she just can't face all my boxes of stuff... Ah well, should be packed away by tomorrow (he said hopefully)

The flat I'm now in is bigger and better-appointed than the previous one. Nicer carpets, bigger shower, etc. I have to admit, tho, I don't much like it. The old flat was small and packed to overflowing with stuff, but it felt like home. This feels like what it is: A rented place to store my stuff and sleep at night. Maybe it'll grow on me.

It was a huge pain getting to school this morning - I came into town on the new route at totally the wrong place, so it took me way too long to get across the town as I had to look for a landmark and THEN head for my destination. Getting home was easier - one of my fellow staff members had suffered a breakdown in the morning (or rather, her car had) so I gave her a lift to her mother's, and she played navigator. I hate not knowing where I'm going in the mornings..

More than anything, tho, I miss being able to talk about all this uproar with my best friend. But then, if I could do that, I wouldn't have had to move in the first place..

That's twice recently I've logged on to my online banking this week to check my balance, only to see that they're showing tomorrow's payments like it was today.

Last time it was showing me that I was about to have a student loan paid in. Which was fine. Today, it's telling me that the standing order due to be paid out TOMORROW, which I wanted to cancel and thought, naively, that I could therefore stop today, has already gone through and the money is gone. So I'm £600 down right now. Just what you need when you've just moved home, eh?

Oh well, I daresay I'll get it back within a week or so - banks being so good at moving money around these days...

Bastards.

(No, I'm not in a very good mood right now. Why do you ask?)

Remember when you had to turn around in your seat to parallel park? asks a Slashdot submitter as he opens an explanation of a new innovation by Nissan that makes it easier to park by having cameras mounted all around the car.

No. I don't, actually. I haven't turned around to park since before I ditched the L-plates.

What, just what, do people think those shiny things attached to their doors are there for? Aerodynamics??

Here's a hint: Wing mirrors are there so that you can see behind you.

Unbelievable, I know.

That means that when you put your car into reverse to park, you should be looking at your mirrors. Because they give you the perspective from the side of your car, they show you EXACTLY what you need to see in order to park: How near to the other car you are, how well lined-up on the kerb/painted lines you are. Everything.

Amazing, eh? And all with no gadgetry, wizardry, or possibility of a breakdown.

Computer-generated birds-eye Around View Monitor system... oh, FFS!!!

People who've been reading this blog for longer than's good for them might remember that a few months ago, I was contacted, through this blog, by somebody who wanted me to write a white paper about Linux for Microsoft.

This evening, I log on and glance at Thunderbird, only to see a letter from a google.com address: I came across your website ... wanted to reach out to you and check if you might be interested in exploring career with Google

I confess to a certain amount of surprise...

I am still alive. Just got a lot going on.

I'm not sure whether to be pleased or not that my hits don't seem to have dropped during my long silence...

Life. Sucks.

That is all.