Last weekend I went to the Lake District with my dad. We stayed at the rather nice Langdale Youth Hostel where I discovered my camera’s batteries hadn’t charged; I managed to get about three pictures before they died. The Post Office just down the road sold non-rechargeables and I’m going to get my money’s worth out of them.

On Saturday we went up The Band and along Crinkle Crags. The last time I did this we got to see a helicopter rescue, but this time the only things in the sky were flies and gliders circling in the thermals. It was very warm and the walk up The Band wasn’t so pleasant, neither was the walk back down from Red Tarn. The scrambling over Crinkle Crags was fun though but I can’t work out why I find it so tiring to walk up and down a hill, but scrambling and climbing about on bits of rock isn’t a problem.

I did my maths test again today. And I passed

Yes folks, I am operating at GCSE level maths again

I dunno, I can write correctly normalised databases straight out of my head, I can code hideously complex software. I even once managed to write a fractal generator. But none of that is hard compared to “You are organising a school trip. There are 32 students, 8 of which have paid £2.50. What is the proportion of students who have not paid? Express this in its lowest common denominator… you have 18 seconds and cannot use a calculator”.

These questions were obviously not written by real teachers. Real teachers have no need to quickly calculate anything in their heads. When asked a maths question the response is “work it out yourself and I’ll come back in five minutes”

Some of the questions were pretty easy, some I went “Err wtf?” and just waited for it to time me out. Some were actually quite ambiguous and took me a few minutes to understand!

I had spare time to review my answers at the end and in the final 30 seconds remembered how to complete a question I’d missed out. Cue lots of frantic scribbling and thinking as the timer ticked down. I had a James Bond moment and just managed to get the answer in before the timer expired

It’s one less thing I have to do again in my life. I like that. It’s also one more of my sacred Teaching Standards that I have completed. They are a little like XBLA achievements, but instead of gaining them by kicking people in the head or doing a forward flip they are achieved by “taking into account the students’ social, moral and ethnic backgrounds” and other teachery stuff.

OK, in order to become a qualified teacher you have to pass three tests. One on numeracy (maths), one on literacy (English) and one on ICT. Every trainee teacher has to do these tests, even if they are in your subject area. It doesn’t matter that I have a degree in Software Engineering, an A-Level in Computing and half a GCSE in IT. Nor does it matter that I use computers daily and have done since… ever.

No, I still have to take a daft ICT exam. It took me fifteen minutes, most of which was double checking my answers to ensure I wasn’t doing stupid things. The test was quite well created really, with a fake desktop and applications to play with and I suppose for a non IT person it might be slightly challenging (and no doubt the maths people are saying the same about the maths test I failed).

Obviously I passed it. If I hadn’t you’d be reading about me in the news after being found swinging from my washing line.

I’m now off to the Lake District until Saturday with school

Well… shit. I failed the bloody thing by three marks. I need to work on my mental arithmetic and statistical analysis.
It’s silly. The questions it asks I’d never need to do in my head within 18 seconds – I’m an IT teacher, we don’t pay thousands to Microsoft just so we can do maths in our heads
Booked it again for next Tuesday.

Ooer, I’m off to do a maths test. There are a number of mental arithmetic questions, some statistical stuff and then “general mathematics”.
Joyful…
Damn QTS tests, I’ll be glad when they’re over.

I’ve started a new game. This one is a rewrite of a game I made for the GBA a few years ago. I’m not going to clutter this place up with the status information and general chatter, instead there is a new blog running on my main site.

Visit the main site, click “Code & Projects” and then choose an option

hijack-hacked-linksys-wireless-router

Read on for an amusing tale of what happens when people fail to change the default settings in their hardware. I’ve got a wireless network, my neighbour seems to as well. Fortunately for him he has WPA, fortunately for me I have MAC address filtering.

Unfortunately for me I have a Belkin router that doesn’t work properly

Firefox is a great browser, but for some reason it has moments where it seems someone has poured treacle into my PC or the code has been written in BASIC. Quite a bit of this is probably my PC, the randomness of the Internet and other things I can’t control but being a “power user” there must be something I can fiddle with…

Open a new tab and type “about:config” into the addressbar. Look at all those cryptic options! It’s like browsing through /etc or poking the Windows registry with regedit. Fancy a fiddle with the settings? I found two sites that tell you to change things and type in new configuration options – all with the promise your browsing experience will be “faster”. They don’t quantify what this “faster” means, but hey! ignore that and have a fiddle, it seems to have made things load quicker.

Now if only there was a way to make Flash not clog the browser up, or Java bring the whole thing tumbling down.

Firefox Can be Faster

13 Tweaks 

The English language is a tricky beast. Being a mixture of various other languages, mixed with some grunts and the importance of context it’s no wonder people get it wrong. In fact I’m sure there’s grammatical errors creeping into this post as I type.

Most people won’t notice the odd missing comma, the time you used a semi-colon rather than a full-stop, or missed off the period from the end of “etc”, etc. What stand’s out a mile though is that damn apostrophe. Their like a giant flashing beacon that say’s “Err… I have no clue where it goes so it goe’s in everything”. Same with “their”, “they’re” and “there”.

I’m quite glad I have English as my native language; learning this loosely structured mass must be quite hard. So, in the true blogging style, rather than write about ways to improve our typing I thought I’d simply link to someone else.

Five Common Mistakes That Make You Look Dumb

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