A blog by James: Gamer, Father, Geek.

So, that was the summer holidays then. I actually really enjoyed them. I know in previous years I’ve got bored, but not really this time. We didn’t go out much, Me and Kat went to London for 2 nights. Saw Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, which inspired me to get a move on with the books. I managed to read books 2-7, averaging out to one book a week. Read the 7th in about 3 days and it was brilliant. We took a trip to Skegness, the first time we have all been together. Hannah liked the beach!

Hannah  is continuing to develop well. She has two bottom teeth and a third on the way. She can’t walk, but she can walk if she’s holding onto something, so for all intents and purposes she can get anywhere she wants now. This past week she’s started to form new sounds, ‘ma’ and ‘na’ have crept in and it looks like she’s starting to use her tounge to go for a ‘th’ sound too. She’s slipped a bit with sleeping in that she tends to wake up once a night on average for a feed, but she’s very good and it only takes a few minutes of feeding and she goes back to her cot without a fuss. Actually getting to sleep is much better now. She cries for only about a minute most days once we put her in and she’s away, some days she doesn’t cry at all. This means 99% of the time we know we have Hannah-free time from 7pm onwards.

Games wise I’ve pretty much just been playing WoW. Despite my previous post, Kat didn’t get round to trying WoW. A shame, but never mind. Rob has got back into it and we’re enjoying playing together. My Druid is much more effective when all the damage is going to his Paladin.  We’re both poor this month so I have just cancelled my pre-order for Batman: Arkham Asylum. I played the demo and it was brilliant. I’ll still be getting it, but will have to wait for pay day.

Comics wise I’ve just been reading the usual. I’ve got the 8th Preacher installment to read. My comics subscriptions have pretty much run out and I’m not too keep on renewing. The cost is the main issue. I get paid less than when I first subscribed and due to the exchange rate it’s not as much of a bargain. Added to that is the fact that trades are cheaper in the long run. It’s difficult. Overall quality of the comics is actually just average. I haven’t really enjoyed Captain America in a while. I like Bucky Barnes, but the constant need to have him relive his WW2 days is a bit of a bore fest. It looks like they’re bringing back Steve Rogers which although I am excited about, it is a massive copout for him to be alive. All the claims of him being properly dead, it’s stupid. I don’t believe the whole ‘we planned it all along!’ crap either. They shoe-horned the ‘forshadowing’ in. Astonishing X-Men has been a big dissapointment since Warren Ellis took the reins. I loved the Whedon run, but the writing and the art work for the series now is utterly, utterly terrible. New Avengers has been it’s usual self, just constantly average. I love the idea of the Avengers more than the actual series I suppose. Dark Avengers has been ok but still, the problem I think is having Brian Michael Bendis seemingly write all of the major Marvel titles and he’s spreading himself to thin. He can be good but he’s just spreading himself too thin right now.  I’m tempted to catch up on Iron Man, I got the first trade of the new series recently and the second is out in hardback. I’ll see how much it’d cost to get the individual issues on eBay and then perhaps subscribe from Page45 in Nottingham. Funds are tight lately though so maybe not.

This month we also did a cooking challenge, spawned from my ponderings for many months about how much we spend and waste on food. So we adapted the idea (initially it was just about cost) so we each bought food and cooked for everyone for a week. Points went for lowest cost, least waste, best quality, healthiness and best 3 course meal. Overall I won, but only just. Although it was tiring towards the end to be doing all the cooking, I did enjoy it because it forced me to try new dishes. My asian chicken noodle broth, crunchy garlic chicken and chocolate brownie cake all went down very well. All thanks to Jamie Oliver’s book ‘Ministry of Food’. If you can’t cook, get this book. It’s all very simple stuff.

I won’t talk about work here for obvious reasons, let’s just say certain things are worse than they were before the holidays.

Oh well. Overall life is still good. Can’t believe Hannah is 1 in just 3 months! I’ve got my next OU course starting in a couple of weeks. Workload this year should be slightly less as I’m doing a 20 point course first then starting a 30 point in Feb. But the work should be harder so I don’t know what’s worse. I shall try to keep on top of it though. I had brilliant assignment scores in my last 2 courses ruined by average exam marks. I think the system is very unfair given the subject matter (there is NO programming done in the test, you write code on paper…yeah, that’s a really good reflection of how things work practically in the real world!)

Ok so my GeekParents idea has died. Mostly my fault in that my excitement and effort lasted a whopping week. You can’t magic up a community, it takes time and effort, the latter of which I just don’t have. I’m really enjoying relaxing this summer, reading the Harry Potter books and loving them, enjoying time with Hannah and playing plenty of TF2 and WoW. The amount of work I have to do over the next 5 years to get qualified to teach is considerable so I want to spend my free time enjoying it as much as possible! I do feel a mix of guilt and embarrassment and it is tempting to delete it all but I’ll leave it there, I may yet change my mind or other people may be interested.

As far as I am aware, nobody I know ‘in real life’ reads this. They quite easily could. My Facebook page links to my Twitter page, my Twitter profile links here. I have links on various forums to here and only one of those has one person I know ‘in real life’ as a member.

Not that I mind if they do read this. But this is a semi-secret place. A place to say slightly crazier stuff without worrying too much.

So my crazy thing to say now is “If it was possible to have sex with music, my headphones would be getting lucky right now.”. One of the things I miss most about my pre-(happily!)-married days is the amount of time I spent listening to music. I’ve always loved music but never started buying it until I was about 16. In my student days I would spend most waking hours with some kind of music playing, be it on the radio when I woke up, my PC or my walkman/mp3 player/iPod. I would always be up to date with what was new. Then a lot of waking hours get taken up with work and family, so you have to be a little pickier with how you spend your ‘Me’ time, and more often than not I choose to play games in that time.

Today is one of those days where I remember how much I love just plugging in some headphones, tuning out the world and enjoying some great new music. There’s been an advert on Living the past couple of weeks and I liked the sound of the song. So I Googled it and saw it was La Roux, “In for the kill”. So I listen to it on YouTube and love it. Then I remember seeing their other song “Bulletproof” at number 2 in the iTunes chart so I listen to that and love it even more. So I got the album today and am currently half way through it and think it’s bloody fucking brilliant.

Another artists I decided to look into was Little Boots. I managed to develop a mini-crush within the hour, her YouTube videos of cover versions are brilliant, she’s obviously very talented and I like the new direct-to-audience style actors, artists and general famous people are using. The ease of user created content and communication the likes of Twitter, YouTube and Flickr give us means they can cut out the PR crap, which I like. Makes them seem more genuine.

iTunes is being very slow downloading that album so haven’t listened to it yet, but will do before bed.

I read a couple of articles on the BBC website’s Education News that rather annoyed me, all linked to what teachers can and can’t do.

The first that annoyed me is this culture of non-contact with students. Anytime I touch a student I get shouted at “You can’t touch me!”, to which I reply that yes I can. I took a course and have a certificate to say that I am trained to use reasonable force on students, a right all members of staff have. That is one situation where contact is necessary. Also, to me, general day to day stuff. I’ll put my hand on a shoulder or elbow to move people along or out of my way. I’ll tap them to get their attention, again nothing that could ever cause harm and often it’s done in a joking way. The tough situation is one of comforting an upset child. Now yes I would never hug a student, and I think at secondary school age certainly this must not be done. I just hated that what this article quoted from a Headteacher that if a female member of staff comforted an upset student she would be seen as a motherly type, where as if a man does it it is seen as wrong. He might be a child predator! Grr.

Anyway that was nothing compared to reading that in Scotland, teachers are not allowed to have their own blogs! How ridiculous. Yes those in positions of care should not be discussing the lives of our charges. But anytime I talk about work I always make sure I never mention names or where I work. Yes anyone that already knows information about me such as my full name, the names of my wife, daughter and dog would be able to work out who I am. The only thing that ties this blog to me really is the WHOIS information, which I find infuriating and would like to at some point look into a way of changing that information. I think there are services out there that will let you do this but I think that takes control over your website away from you to an extent. I could of course move this to somewhere like Blogspot or Wordpress’s own hosting and then I would be more protected.

Anyway it all boils down to this idea that teachers should be this beacon of perfection. Not only are they expected to educate students but they are social workers and surrogate parents. To sweeten the deal now we are having aspects of our non-working lives subject to new rules. I’m sure it won’t be long before this rule applies to the whole UK. They can stuff themselves, of course. I will blog till I die. The whole thing just isn’t enforceable. If they gave me a warning, I could within 10 minutes set up this place on Wordpress, change the name that I use and if I wanted to be very paranoid, make sure all posts are published with a time delay. There will be no team of expert internet detectives trying to catch me out.

I hate that it leaves me yet again thinking if I should make more of an effort to be anonymous. I won’t for now, as of course this ‘rule’ is only in Scotland. I will still use common sense and not name names or give any other information that could lead people to discover who I’m talking about.

Moan over. I have a relatively easy day ahead of me so I can’t complain too much.

Just a quick question, does anyone read this? I doubt it, but I think I link to it on a couple of forums so it is possible.

I do love how teenagers feel the need to talk about their sex lives during lessons. They could at least have the decency to keep it quiet. They may think that they are oh so grown up talking about it, where as everyone else is thinking “What a slag/twat/liar” (delete as appropriate).

Just 24 minutes until they leave and I can pour acid into my ear canals so I won’t have to listen to them tomorrow.