💾 Archived View for rochelimit.uk › gemlog.gmi captured on 2023-04-27 at 07:40:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-07-16)
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As we move towards the summer break my school is still, even after four months, operating as if we will be visited by the schools' inspectorate any time. That would be fine if everyone thought we will breeze through it as we did several years ago. This year, the bar has been raised and similar schools are being failed and their management criticised. Of course, this has meant that senior managers are spending their entire time inventing make-work tasks for the rest of us to do, which is stopping us from doing our real jobs of planning and delivering a quality education to the students. This itself may cause problems during the inspections but then, naturally, the blame will be laid on the shoulders of the teachers, not the managers. Thanks, guys.
The price of diesel has reached £1.90 per litre (about $9 per US gallon), food prices are way up, the economy seems to be heading for a period of stagflation, the UK government is destroying the constitutional checks and balances on its actions, Russia is making gains in eastern Ukraine. And little England is putting up the bunting to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of an elderly monarch who inherited her position and wealth and seemingly has no influence on the governance of the nation. What is an anti-monarchist to do?
So, a surprising result has occurred through my efforts to cut hours at work. I have been using a phone app to track my time, with categories for all the main tasks I undertake, to collect evidence of my long hours. And it seems that when I have to select 'break', I take more care to have shorter breaks and avoid those accidental breaks that can happen when colleagues come by for a chat. I hadn't realise the time I can waste in this way. I still need to find some more time savers, but this is a promising start.
Simple Time Tracker for Android (links to Play Store)
I'm on Easter Break. I was hanging on last term and getting grouchy, browsing for alternative jobs in my breaks and arguing with managers about workload, so I needed the rest. I've been looking into ways to cut five hours a week from work to have more family time - I'm back in the classroom Tuesday, so I'll see how well that goes. Karl Von Clausewitz said no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, but you have to have a plan.
Does anyone really believe the message you hear when holding to talk 'to the next available advisor', that these two stated facts are both true? 1. Your call is important to them. 2. They are experiencing 'more than the usual number of calls'. Again.
I've been reading a lot about the Tinylog standard, from @drewdevault and @bacardi55. It seems like a nice idea, but I don't intend to use a separate tool to aggregate Tinylog posts. I thought about changing this log into that format, but decided to stay with a simple gemlog system, but looking more like Tinylog. Is that enough, or should I go the full Monty?
I'm travelling to a location with no mobile phone coverage, but I have to be contactable, so I installed Linphone so I can pick up calls to my SIP home phone number using WiFi. I spent a while fiddling with the config settings before I discovered that the VOIP connection doesn't like running over my Wireguard VPN. If anyone knows why this is an issue, please let me know.
I've finished watching The Expanse and now The Witcher. Looking for a third series of Mandalorian I found The Book of Boba Fett. It is less a space western than Mando, so I'm looking forward to episode two.
Setting up WireGuard on my work laptop, to tunnel through to my home network - easy config, or would have been without a mistyped IP address in one file. If I understood the protocol better I might have not faffed about with barely understood settings for ages.
Still no short thoughts. Back to work in two days after a festive break, brain all fuzzy from gin.