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I saw Kraftwerk live a few months ago and I recognised one of the riffs from another song. It’s taken me many months to find it:

Dom & Roland -- Get up

Kraftwerk -- Die Mensch-Machin

Uncanny!

Having seen a few people post theirs, I’m spurred on to post my favourite albums of 2009. In only managed to get an MP3 player capable of holding more than 50 songs in November so my list this year is fairly short.

I’m very tempted to post my top 10 of the 2000s but I fear that would end up in me spending several days listening to albums and making no decisions.

In no particular order but alphabetical:

Calories – Adventuring

I saw this band supporting Johnny Foreigner in Manchester and they totally blew me away. Their songs are pure indie-pop, but not the diluted type that seems to have been so popular. Their songs barely make 3 minutes but have melodies and riffs that last.

Frank Turner – Poetry of the Deed

Being a big Million Dead fan, I’ve followed Frank closely since going it alone. Probably one of my favourite live performers, he released his third album this year. The album is definitely more musically mature and polished but not in a way that loses any of his folksy charm, or punk-rock anger for that matter. A strong and logical progression of his music.

Memory Tapes – Seek Magic

This album seems like perfect come-down music, combining catchy beats, laid-back guitar and almost haunting vocals. Confusing, but still very good.

Passion Pit – Manners

I somehow managed to avoid Passion Pit for ages despite them being plastered all over the blogs everywhere you looked earlier this year, now I wish I hadn’t. This is sort of album I wanted Hot Chip to make; a genuinely good mix of rock and electro. Any band that can get the indie kids dancing this much has to be on to a winner.

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

I still have no idea to describe or classify this album. Nor do I care – along with Manners – this album never fails to put a massive grin on my face wherever I am.

So I’ve had the G1 for a good few months now and it’s pretty awesome except for the well-publicised battery issues. Now, I’ve recently started commuting which involves a fair period on the train and tube. Since I started, it seemed to be even worse battery life but I thought I was just imaging it; the battery didn’t seem to last until I got home however, this definitely seemed shorter.

It turns out that for whatever reason, the G1 really sucks when it doesn’t have a signal; it seems to rape the battery when it loses a signal while it frantically polls to find a reception. I installed Locale (a must-have app anyway) and an airplane mode plug-in for it and turned on airplane mode for the times I was travelling. The results are amazing, it literally lasts about twice as long.

Now, it goes without saying that this shouldn’t be necessary, the iPhone doesn’t need dirty hacks to last the day, but the battery issues were well publicised before I bought it. I hope this helps someone with their battery woes.

If you (like me, and apparently scores of others) are having problem with o2 Broadband and it dropping connections, it’s down to its crappy DNS. I recommend changing the router’s DNS to something like OpenDNS or Google DNS (which the Howto uses) for the time being.

How to change o2 router’s DNS

Below is a post that I posted to the VLE of the school I am currently at. I don’t make any revolutionary claims here, I would imagine that all of the tools have at least been discussed, if not used, in schools already; this was just what I thought might be useful for this school.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t be afraid to wait for silence or attention. As a new teacher you might feel self-conscious about standing and not talking but it’s effective and the students won’t think it’s odd; most of their Teachers will do it.

This post is attempting the slightly infeasible task of a summary of about 10 weeks of life in the PGCE student.

Starting at the beginning, it’s a very different atmosphere to an undergraduate degree. I’m not sure whether its the perception, atmosphere or both, but its more focused and intense as you’d expect.

That said, it was a fairly gently introduction to postgraduate life. Its inevitable with anything new that it takes a week or two of admin-type stuff before you get into it.

That was fairly quickly replaced a sense of realisation when we were told that we would be in schools in mere weeks. Despite everyone signing up for the course to spend their whole lives in a school, there really is a feeling of, “what, now?!” about the swiftness of approach. The workload up until this point is fairly minimal, enjoy this!

Going into school is a strange experience, especially if like me, you haven’t much school experience prior to the course. I’m going to avoid going into too much detail as most of it escapes me and I will post more about it seperately. What I will say though, is that if you’re in a school that usually takes on student teachers, you’ll might be suprised by how ambivalent the students will be to your arrival. You might get the odd student asking but on the whole, it’s an order of logic less of an issue that it is for you.

I’m about 6 weeks into my placement now and things are finally “settled”. What I mean by that is, lesson plans aren’t taking longer than the length of the lesson and you spend the lesson itself worrying about the students rather than yourself. It’s a nice feeling to have that mental shift; it allows you to enjoy your experience all the more.

I had originally hoped to keep this really up to date with the goings-on of my PGCE for not only myself, but anyone else thinking of doing a PGCE to see what the year is actually like. One of the first things that happened on the course is we were advised to be really careful about our Internet presence as teachers; this seemed to be at odds with the site so I had to have a good think about whether it would be wise to continue.

After deliberating I’ve decided to re-continue posting, I have no intentions of posting anything relating to my particular University or School, and all I want(ed) to do is to let other students know what the PGCE is like. With that decided, I’m going to try and post a summary post from September-now which will be hideously brief and incomplete compared to the reality but never mind.

I’ve been trying to get a Microsoft live@edu email account set up on Android’s work email application which uses Activesync. This has only been tested with specifically live@edu accounts but any Windows Live-based email might work. The information needed to do it is out there but it’s really not very easy to find. Here is what worked for me.

My email was in the form username@live.uni.ac.uk.

Email address: username@live.uni.ac.uk.
Server address: m.exchangelabs.com
Username: username@live.uni.ac.uk.
SSL: On

If you’re stupid enough like me to manage to SIM lock your G1/Dream, you might wonder how to unlock it with a PUK code seeing as there’s apparently nowhere to enter it on a G1/Dream. The process is to click ‘Emergency call’ and enter:

**05*$puk_code*$new_pin*$new_pin#

and press call. A nice sign of the times is that you can also obtain your PUK code online, with T-Mobile at least.