Archive for September, 2006:

As I am now a 50/50 IT Technician/Tutor, I have to do tutory (is there such a word?) things. Such as planning my courses and lessons - and marking.

When I switched from a student to a full-time worker, I vowed that I would never bring my work home, meaning that I worked from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday and not a minute longer. For the past year, I have pretty much managed to stick to this vow, until now. The last few days I’ve left work later and later setting up a new centre, which was opened today.

And now marking comes into it - today I had to mark a dozen portfolios from my students, as they are all being moderated on Monday. Unfortunately, I broke my vow yet again, as I ran out of time and have had to bring 3 portfolios home to mark.

I feel like one of my old teachers from school. I understand why they put off marking until the last minute - as I could have marked these over 3 months ago, but I avoided it.

One good thing though, is that some of my colleagues pointed out that marking is a lot easier once you’ve had a bit of alcohol. I’m currently drinking some Stellas - but you’ll also notice I’m writing a pointless blog post to avoid marking even more…

Hot off the press, well not quite - is some news from yours truly. However, I shall not divulge the news until I know definately if the news is going to occur.

I’ll just leave you all guessing, maybe for a few days - a week - a month - or longer! Either way, it’s bo!

I mentioned whilst writing the Project Nineteen logs, that I would be back with a third project involving my server…

Well, after a few weeks of on/off ‘modding’ Project Yeong Yang is finally finished. However, whereas with my other two projects, I wrote a log alongside my work - for this, I’ve left the logging until now. So expect a full write-up over the next week or so, as I gather together all the pictures that I’ve taken throughout.

It’s not as spectacular as Red Nineteen, or as bold as Pink PC - more practical than cosmetics.

For a start, it took me over 24 hours to format all of the drives within it. It has taken me weeks to plan the exact software setup. It has taken me hours to allocate drive letters, partition it all and decide what is going where. And that’s only the Hard Discs. Off the top of my head, it has 14 fans of various sizes within it, keeping it nice and cool for 24/7 use. Tomorrow I’ve got to connect it up to the network finally and sort out users/permissions. Then it’s just a case of putting it up into the loft, where it will remain for good.

Oh, then I’ve got to write several batch files and test them, prior to backing everything up. But if everything goes to plan, we’ll have over 1.4TB of storage space to play with. Within the last few hours one of the 120GB drives crapped out on me, so it was quickly replaced with a spare 160GB I had lying around…

A few years back, I watched the Formula 1 Grand Prix religously - every race event was viewed by yours truly. Then Formula 1 lost its appeal and I opted to see a few races here and there instead, freeing up my Sundays.

Today, however, I was flipping through the channels and spotted the Italian Grand Prix on ITV. So, whilst finishing off my server, I sat through the many laps and advert breaks, realising that the spark was still there.

For those of you that missed the race and indeed any news today, you wont have heard that Michael Schumacher won the Italian Grand Prix (his 90th win!) - putting him just 2 points behind Alonso in the Driver’s championship. The real kicker though, is that Schumacher’s leaving at the end of this season - retiring from Formula 1 for good. Though it sounds as though he’ll still be involved with Ferrari and/or Fiat.

I thought it was odd, that the only race I decide to sit through this season, is the race where he announces his retirement. Though most knew it was coming.

It seems that the PS3 has been delayed yet again.

More information here.

It looks like I’ll forget about purchasing one and concentrate on my PC instead. Afterall, the games are more expensive and it seems like I wont be able to purchase one until I’m retired.

Will you holding out even longer for the PS3? Or are you looking forward to the Wii?