The first week back at work.

Happenings

  • So yeah, I started up back at work for the new school year. All the usual stuff to deal with. Updates to government policies to read. Leadership imploring all staff to do better. Chronic pain flares up with the stress. Still, I’m in a different classroom this year and it’s better than expected. My previous classroom had years (like, 10 years) of junk built up in old filing cabinets I never did get around to sorting out, so it was nice to come in to a relatively fresh room to organise how I like. It also feels bigger, and has a better location — closer to the staff room (toilets, coffee, photocopier), further from behaviour hot spots.
  • So far my classes this year have been nice, but I’ve not met them all yet. Biggest challenge this year is looking like my year 11s, who seem to lack any urgency about their upcoming exams.
  • I tried modding my RGB30 handheld with some felt to damp the noise of some of the buttons, some TMR joysticks, and a sticker on the dpad sensor to reduce input errors. It wasn’t altogether successful. The joysticks wouldn’t do any right inputs at all (up, left, and down seemed to work though), and I don’t currently have any means to calibrate them. The felt was too thick to fit into the gaps I needed to, and also one of the plastic tabs that locks the shell together snapped while I was opening the thing (thankfully, it still stays pretty tightly shut).
  • I got everything ready for my first “group theory for kids” session tomorrow. We’re going to do 2x2 matrices for a couple of weeks first, and then cover a bunch more elementary examples (dihedral groups, modular arithmetic) over the next term before we go anywhere near the actual definition of a group.

Links

Reading

Book 5 of Nicomachean Ethics. This time it’s about justice, and it’s quite a tricky and strange book. Still processing my thoughts on this one.

Playing

I’ve been playing more Terranigma, and it’s still really cool. I just beat the Bloody Mary boss. She was a real pain, terrible design to be honest. I just followed what all the guides say to do — don’t try to beat her with skill, just buy loads of really powerful spells and nuke her.

I’ve also been trying to get RetroArch working on my Pocket Reform. The trouble is that everything has crackly and stuttering audio, even extremely old systems like NES. I do not seem to have this problem on standalone emulators, only in RetroArch. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.