Work, and why life sucks.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. With me working and obsessively playing videogames I haven’t had change to do anything like draw, write, or update the site. It’s a lot of hard work to make a site your own, even when you use a place like Blogger and takes a lot of commitment.

Twinseeds is another example of a well intentioned site that I ended up abandoning due to the amount of work involved. I absolutely loved doing it but it was too much for one man alone.

This site is a lot easier to update I just need to find time. With the way things are going I maybe getting more time than I want.

You see I’m losing the “Job” I’ve been doing brilliantly for the last two years in September. Sad fact is the organisation needs to downsize and the be “open and fair” everyone had to be interviewed.

I’ve used quotations for those words as it’s not really a “Job” it’s a contract. I do the work on a temporary contract and they just don’t extend the contract when they need to get rid of me. Means no Redundancy pay, which sucks. “Open and Fair” means your hard work counts for nothing and maintaining you job comes down to an on the day interview. I joined as an agency worker, which meant no interview, As initially they needed a lot of staff. But to get a proper job with this organisation you need to have been in competition with the general public for it (Hence Open) with everyone having an equal change (Fair).

To me this is ridiculous, the best who were here should have been kept on. There must be some Jinx over me with interviews as I haven’t had a successful one yet. The first this year (to Keep this job) was strange. You see I gave good examples but I missed out because I took longer to answer their questions. Didn’t help that I knew more than they did about the job and was asked irrelevant questions.

But I digress, what is done is done. I didn’t intend to stay there long and it was only really a Job to me not a career. I’m 25, still live with my parents, single and basically heading nowhere. For a while now I have been pursuing a career in Maths Teaching. I looked at what I’d be good at, I have strong maths skills (that need practice I admit, not done anything serious in ages) and I genuinely like helping people.

Seriously I think there’s something wrong we me that I like helping others so much.

So to me that seems like good enough reasons to pursue maths teaching.

Now this is going to sound really stupid but despite the shortages getting into teaching is very, very. very, very, unbelievably difficult to get started in. The website is no help as it is all gobble-de-gook. After getting some advice from connexions I went for the GTTR route, slightly annoyed that it meant going back into full time education. I found that the bursaries however made this more appealing.

So I applied to my local university and here’s where I got knocked backwards. Getting in took a massive amount of work and was incredibly hard. Ok the University of Cumbria is quite well respected for teaching but it’s hardly Cambridge. Considering the shortages I thought this would be a breeze. WRONG! It’s no wonder there’s a shortage of maths teachers they aren’t exactly bending over backwards to recruit them. Financially maybe but that’s all.

So I underestimated them. And once again the Jinx of interviews keeps my perfect strikeout record continuing. Fair enough I didn’t do so well and know of some areas that I could definitely work on.

However I recently got hit sideways by the feedback (Yes one of the very few times I actually got something back). They said I need to think about my reasons for wanting to become a teacher! Great, now I’m questioning why I want to be a teacher and I feel lost and scared that I’m heading nowhere and back to square one.

I’m going to see about career’s advice, but it just seems like I’m still getting nowhere.

What this means however is I may have more time to make updates to everything. So I guess there’s a small silver lining.

So enough depressing talk. My Job may be nearing it’s completion but there are times where you have nothing to do (hence the ability to create this post). Normally in this time I play about with Excel to advance my knowledge.

Here are a couple of things I’ve done is Excel.

If you got the Heroes season 1 boxset you may be familiar with this Mind Reader. Some people who have tried this occasionally get hashes instead of letters in the grid. Try increasing your resolution though it may be down to your version of Excel. If anyone can confirm why it would do this I would be grateful.

Try and work out how it works. Try the maths on paper if you think I’m using formulae. If you can’t work it out it’s explained Here. This shows how it works, not only as an excel spreadsheet but in general (so it shows how the Heroes one works too)

And here is a little game I made up using random numbers and conditional formatting. I could probably do better if I used macros (at the moment the “mines” move about with every move)

I also made my own spreadsheet for recording my games collection, but it’s half finished.

All of these were made in resolution 1152 x 900, one up from the standard 1024 x 768. You made need to change the resolution to get the best results.