Chris Malton and co's blogs

The ZyXEL P660-HW router has a nice feature that allows you to turn on NAT loopback. I want this to always be on! The default is off on a reboot.

Enter "sys edit" a primitive editor living under Menu 24, submenu 8 of the telnet admin interface.

Log in, drop to a command shell and type

sys edit autoexec.net

Keep hitting N(ext) until you see "EOF" appear. You've found the line to insert after.

Q(uit) and then type "sys edit autoexec.net" again. This time hit N until you see the line before EOF appear. On mine this is something to with adsl dmt2. Then type I(nsert), followed by "ip nat loopback on", then X(it) edit.

To remove, just hit D(elete) when the "ip nat loopback on" line appears, then hit X(it).

Techy, yes, geeky, yes, irritating to find, yes, useful feature, yes.

Take that you ZyXEL P660-HW!

Three weeks in, and it's time to scribble a few more thoughts. I've just got back into my room in halls from doing everyone's washing up, while they've all gone away for the weekend. Just Dan, one of my flatmates, and myself this weekend - everyone else has cleared off to various places. Home, London, or even Majorca.

The course is slowly but steadly progressing, and it's beginning to teach me a few things. Yes, sure, I've taught myself a lot of it already, but for many, this course is the first time they've had to program. And the labs reflect the range of abilties. There's a basic task for everyone to do, and then there's the extensions for the whizz-kids, or as we prefer to call them, space cadets. There's then the extra space cadets challenges which are designed to stretch people even further. It's really quite good.

At the start of the course, I did not like Java. To me it was what happened when VB met C - there was a big bang and Java came out of the other side. However, the course has managed to ease me into Java a bit more gently than I perhaps tried to have a go at it before. I wanted fancy apps with UIs before I'd got a command line version of "Hello World" working.

As to the clubs I listed I'd joined, there's only 4 that really feature now. SUBB (The Southampton University Brass Band) are still part of the schedule on a Sunday night. Tuesdays see StageSoc's training sessions, spectacularly clashing with the Concert Band. StageSoc have won that fight. Wednesday is Student Robotics, which is all about a competition for sixth form colleges. I'm now Treasurer of said society, and it's going to be a bit of fun managing the finances there. Then there's the ad-hoc meetings of the SUPC. SUPC being the Southampton University Paintball Club. I usually see at least one of the committee in the pub on a Thursday night at Karaoke.

Speaking of paintball, last weekend I was away at Campaign Paintball in Surrey for another "Big Game", this time based around the theme of Dr Who and the Whoniverse. It was awesome, and there's plenty of photos around. Specifically, Team Pups have a load up on Flickr, and so you can find me in those.

Enough of the chatter. It's safe to say that I'm really enjoying my time here at Southampton. Hopefully another blog entry will appear in a few weeks assuming I get some time to myself.

Here's the second part of my first week at Soton.

Wacky Wednesday

Wednesday was what is named "the Bunfight". Nobody is quite sure why it has that name, but it involves nearly every club in the uni getting under one (or two) roof(s) to try and recruit members. So let's just say I've got a fair list I've joined:

SUSU.TV - Student Union TV Station
SURGE - Student Union Radio
SUPC - Southampton University Paintball Club
Student Robotics
ECSS - Electronics and Computer Science Society
GameSoc - Board games (except Chess) and most trading card games
SUBB - Southampton University Brass Band
SUCB - Southampton University Concert Band
StageSoc - Backstage society

I think that's it..... maybe more!

Anyway, that'll keep me busy most nights each week, leaving me with my weekends free so far.

Tricky Thursday

Thursday was taken up with us trying to complete our storyboards from Monday's City Challenge, without the other groups seeing. So naturally we picked the most prominent position in the lab to sit..... There were a few photos that needed editing, so I did that, and the result was that on every restart of the GIMP it would multiply in numbers, and produce a rather yucky error. I called Toby from Helpdesk over, and he went "Yeah, there's probably a few things that broke. The build script terminated unexpectedly. Delete your prefs folder, and it should be fine." Reluctantly I trashed my .gimp-2.2 folder and started again.

We soon found out that a few other things were also broken. Toby spent a while explaining what the issue was. For those with any linux knowledge, consider this. A package such as Mathmatica doesn't really install with yum/rpm/apt under Linux. It has its own magic installer, which won't divulge a list of files. The solution: find / > before.txt && install-mathmatica.sh && find / > after.txt && diff before.txt after.txt

Formalities Friday

Although Friday was officially the day of the Freshers' Fayre, I stood in the queue for a good hour before deciding I'd never get in before half twelve. Therefore I made a nuisance of myself in the undergrad lab for an hour or so and then headed off to the formal introduction to my course. Several more hours of lectures followed before I headed off to meet my tutor, Ed Zaluska. His office (along with many others) are located on the fourth floor of the wonderfully named Vista building. Why Vista? Well, I heard somebody say, "It's called the vista building, because it's glass, cost a lot, and doesn't do a hell of a lot." I'm not sure how true that is, especially since it's home to seemingly about 1/3 of ECS! A finger-buffet in the marquee followed, along with the jumpstart prizegiving. Although our group won absolutely no prizes for our storyboard, it was all about us managing to complete a vaguely coherent storyboard.... And we ought to have won just for the ingenious reference to the sea via some fish and chips.

And so week 0 comes to a close and I'm left staring down the barrel of week 1. I've had an awesome time this week, and it's definately been worth it. That said, a few lessons to learn for any future ECSers reading this:

• Don't upset helpdesk. No. Really. Don't!
• Learn your way around before your first set of lectures...

SOUTHAMPTON FRESHERS 2009!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, now I've yelled myself silly, let's begin with Freshers 2009.

Shift-it Saturday (Move-in day, aka meet the mates)

My flat-mates are, quite frankly, awesome. Dan, Al, Jo, Jess, and Annys. Apart from a few things that need sorting out (Dan....), it's all going well.

Moving in took ages, but that evening, the flat next door invited us all round for drinks in their kitchen. See the picture.

Silent Sunday

Sunday was a reasonably quiet day..... until the foam party. Which didn't happen! Well it did, but our flat got as far as the "bus" (think procession of taxis) where I found out there were long queues the other end as well waiting to get into Sobar, and hence, given that I needed to be up the next morning... I decided not to stay out too late and went back to go to bed.

Manic Monday

Monday. This is where it all kicked off. JumpStart is the ECS induction programme. Starting at 11:30AM. But before all that, I needed to head down onto campus to collect my freshers week box office tickets. I got there waaay ahead of schedule, but I was first in the queue. I also saw Cassie who was on Box Office (which I know Alan would like...).

Then it was quickly back to halls, grab some stuff and get ready to go to the ECS JumpStart programme. After an hour and 30 of talks, some of which were quite interesting (although not anything in particular I didn't know already), we had some lunch, and headed off on our City Challenge.

This year's City Challenge involved groups of us wandering around Southampton taking photos of each other to make a storyboard. I shan't reveal any details of ours, but let's just say it involved a baguette, a murder and a few random extras - including a very helpful policeman and an old lady. Big thanks to them!

Back to the flat, grabbing some food from Highfield en-route and then off to the Freshers Welcome Party. Queue for not too long, (maybe 10 minutes) and I was in. Clubbing isn't really my thing, so I stayed for a bit. Met up with some of my tutor group, who are some of the coolest guys around (and possibly stupid after James' antics on the common yesterday!). Then back here and back to bed.

Techy Tuesday

Tuesday was all about getting registered for ECS Labs. Meeting in Zepler at 11:15 AM is not everyone's cup of tea, especially after last night and the Freshers Welcome Party for most people, but I was ready for it. You see, I didn't come here to rock and roll all night and party every day. Well I didn't think that was part of the course description...... My course is (as is everyone's) preceeded by Freshers week - not really my kind of thing, but anyway. So yeah, I was glad to see something related to my studies appearing.

So after registering in Zepler, I logged onto the shiny ECS workstations (well, shiny unless you're pouring yoghurt over them - Toby might get the joke!), to find a rather broken Firefox. It would appear that Toby's wonderful Linux building system hadn't quite done what it should have done. He explained to me what had happened.

Before anyone wonders, Toby is part of the ECS helpdesk. He also does the Linux PC builds. Great, until something like Mathmatica goes and breaks your build script!

Anyway, off to the ECSS Freshers Welcome party now.

Part 2 coming soon!

First of all, apologies to the few of you that took my last blog post to be a giant massive advert. It wasn't intended that way, but re-reading it, it could be considered as such. Apologies for that.

As I sit here, counting down the remaining 17 hours before I head for Southampton, with a bare desk, and not a lot else in sight, save for the few bits of IT and other stuff I'm leaving at home, I'm reflecting on the past years and how I got to this stage in the first place.

I won't bore you with the details, since for many of you it's probably not necessary. I will say, however, that Uni is going to be a lot of fun. At least, I aim to make it fun! And that'll be despite the one hundred and twenty three of you who'll come asking me to set up their PC, and the four thousand, five hundred and sixty seven of you I'll probably collide with at the bunfight, and the god-knows-how-many of you who'll just be great mates most of the time.

So now, it's time to wave farewell to the Essex countryside, and move into my new home in the Highfield area of Southampton.

OK, So I've got 3 weeks to go until I move into my room at the University of Southampton. And I need to do this jigsaw puzzle that is working out what to take, and how to get it down there!

For me this involves a large quantity of IT equipment. Well, more than most people anyway!

OK, so I'm only taking a desktop and a laptop.... An underpowered 2.0Ghz single-core desktop with a 19" screen at that. So how am I going to do those tasks needing the power of my main desktop which is going to be sitting at home?

The answer lies in the new version of LogMeIn Free and LogMeIn Hamachi.

Introduction to LogMeIn

For those of you who haven't heard of LogMeIn, here's what they provide. LogMeIn are essentially a company who make remote access systems for PCs. You install a bit of software on your PC, and you can log into it via various methods from the LogMeIn website.

What do I use LogMeIn Free for?

LogMeIn (LMI) Free is 100% free. It doesn't do remote sound, or file transfers, or printers, but it does give you remote access to the desktop. For me this is enough to provide remote IT support to my family, and a few friends. Plus with the new Wake-On-LAN feature, my server hosting this website can stay on, with my desktop off. When I need my desktop for some power computing, I just load up my LMI account on the web, and click "Turn on this PC" and wait a couple of minutes, my desktop wakes up and logs in to the LMI servers. I can then remote control it. I then can shut it down at the end of my work time, and off we go again.

What do I use LMI Hamachi for?

LMI Hamachi is effectively VPN without the configuration.

Every machine I use has an Hamachi VPN IP address. All 3 machines are in the same LMI "network", and hence, to combat the problem of not being able to access shared printers and files over the LMI Free web user interface, I can just map the LMI Hamachi IP address. On my desktop that's off to uni, the drives from my server Q:\, S:\ and U:\ are mapped as \\w.x.y.z\netapp$ and so on. And since I prefer to use RDP to access the server, I can do that just by being on the "VPN", and all I do is double click a shortcut on my desktop, and off I go.

The quirks and catches

There's a couple of things that will catch you out unless you're careful with the new LogMeIn.

1. If your PC doesn't support Wake-On-LAN, installing LogMeIn won't make it work! Your must support Wake-On-LAN first!
2. For whatever reason on Windows 7, in some cases, so I'm told, you have to type PC-NAME\USERNAME as the username, rather than just a username.

I'm not aware of anything else though.
I'm very impressed.

Well, it was results day on Thursday, and thankfully I got into my first choice university. That being Southampton I can go and annoy a few students that thought that they had got rid of me!

I'm really looking forward to going down to the land of geeks and gizmos, and also wacky signs.

Geeks because I'm off to do computer science.
Gizmos because I'm in with the electronics lot as well.
Wacky signs because of my favourite sign on campus - sadly I don't have a picture, but I assure you it exists - which says

School of Nursing
and Midwifery

Entrance ->
Deliveries round the
back

Please tell me you get the joke. It's the laughing stock of campus for some people.

Anyway, I've discovered that the Soton Uni Athletics Union have a Paintball "team", so that pleases me.

All you fellow Sotonites, you've got 5 weeks before I turn up. Things won't necessarily be the same after that!

This blog post is regarding Shoreline Paintball's Return to the Thunderdome event at Mayhem, Abridge, near Romford. It's quite long!

5:30 AM

YAWN! Having already been awake for an hour or so before this, and with thoughts racing through my mind, sleep wasn't exactly on my mind. A quick breakfast, then load everything into the car (all 3 boxes and a bag of stuff) and hit the road. The journey was easy, until I picked my navigator up.....

From there on, we missed the turning for the A128 in Brentwood, and then proceeded to go down some tiny little country lanes, before finally arriving at the A113, about 15 minutes later than planned. I thought this was quite good going, and although we were a little bit later than expected, it wasn't a huge problem.

Just one of the many bit of ex-military equipment strewn around the site.

7:15 AM

Arriving at Return to the Thunderdome was, how shall I put it, a bit interesting. I didn't know what to expect. Registration was obviously going to be key, and sure enough that was the first thing. That said, having never been to an event where I've used my own kit before, I wasn't sure about how much paperwork would need doing. Very little, thankfully, was the answer. All it took was a bottle inspection to check the date on them, and that was that. So why, especially when the game didn't start til 10AM, were we arriving so early? The answer was the air safety training which was going to be mandatory for being able to fill your bottle. Unfortunately, due to a lack of paperwork turning up, the training was cancelled. Result: No training needed to fill bottles.

We went and found an end of a table, and just perched there. There was already a buzz in the air in the large-ish briefing room - this was obviously going to be special. Anyway, one other guy was already setting up his kit on the other end of our table. A lucky coincidence meant he happened to be from the Kent Rangers. One of the Kent Rangers was supposed to be lending James, who came with me, a battle pack, but of course, he made the mistake of coming via tube.... Need any more be said?

Gradually the room began to fill up, and large swathes of people began to arrive. At this stage, I recognised none of them, hardly surprising. The rest of the Kent Rangers also turned up, and we introduced ourselves, and they introduced themselves. Some of them, I recognised from the forum that is UKScenario, such as Woody. Others I had to ask what they post as. The main thing was, that they were all prepared to help the new guys like us, get stuck into the world of scenario paintball.

8:30AM

Running a little later than planned, I headed out to the chronograph station. These wonderful devices (chronographs), aren't quite what their name makes out to be. They actually measure the velocity of a paintball fired from a marker, and as far as I can tell, have very little to do timing anything. (Woody has promptly corrected me here - they time between two points and get the speed that way. Naturally there was a case of velocity too high, then waaay too low, before managing to get it just right at about 270 feet per second.

9:20AM

Finally the player briefing got underway. It was a short and to-the-point event, and didn't cover the main paintball rules, only those specific to the event. "Fair enough", I thought, since most players have probably heard more safety briefings than necessary in their years playing. The mission was, of course, simple. Get the "fuel" (coloured liquid) from the containers out on the field, back to your base in the scoring window. Each team had a designated scoring window, and playing on the Settlers team, ours was at half past every hour.

9:50AM

Time to head out. Still no sign of the guy supposed to be lending James a pack, so he'd bought one (with a small loan...). As we all headed out onto the field it became clear that this was never going to be anything like what I'd played before. I wasn't far wrong. Our home base was at the North end of the site, next to an old bus. It was rather quickly renamed "the battle bus" - and who wouldn't.

10:00AM

"GAME ON!" And deadly silence filled the air. I have to say that shocked me, but then it shouldn't have done so, since the red team were perhaps over 100m away. Hardly any point wasting paint.

Woody gets stuck into the action.

Earlier, I'd been assigned to Lawrence (phoenix1GBR) or Steve. At this stage I've forgotten who, but it wasn't long before radio channel 7 became a little over-active. Unfortunately, as my radio only supports the base 8 channels, and not the sub-channels feature, When I tune for channel 7, I get the whole of channel 7, including all subchannels. Net result = lot of radio noise.

Within minutes I found myself down in the "Radar station" zone. A tree-covered area, with plenty of open space at ground level. Paint was coming from pretty much all sides, but nonetheless, we all fought hard to push the Bikers (red team) back beyond the fuel station, so that we could get in and collect the fuel from there for our rapidly approaching scoring window. Eventually, we made it, although both sides sustained heavy losses. Thankfully, with a respawn point not far away, it was only a 5 minute turnaround to get people back in the game. Finding said respawn point was a stroke of genius on my part, and saved many Settlers during the day. The Bikers, meanwhile, had a respawn point that was perhaps a 30 second stroll away from the action. This meant that they were able to turn around faster. This didn't bother us, and we extracted plenty "fuel", and returned it within the scoring window.

That said, I was then shot at, and hit several times over from somewhere in the distance. Returning to the respawn point, there was noise over the radio, "Need backup now in the bottom woods". This was where I'd just come from. Being cautious, I headed back that way, and sure enough we were in trouble. The Bikers had wiped us out nearly completely. With just 3 men left holding off the Bikers, the retreat order was called. Retreat all the way back to the "battle bus". Many did so. Unfortunately due to the nature of the radios, I was able to receive, but transmit only to people with the same radios as myself and James, which was nobody.

The next hour or so seems a complete blur of action, and very soon I began to feel hungry. Returning to the main building complex for lunch, I felt satisfied with the morning's performance, but it needed more work. Not everyone had broken for lunch though. The game was still going, and the battle still raging. I sat down and started to have lunch. The rest of the Kent Rangers had also chosen this moment to come in for lunch, and it was fairly obvious why. They were all covered in paint one way or another.

After lunch, which was going to be 10 minutes, but turned into 1 hour, the Rangers and James and I set out to drive the Bikers back. We got back onto the field and respawned by the "battle bus". There was movement in the trees and one guy walked out from behind the plastic crates wiped himself down and said "There's reds all the way down the left flank, they've got to the "fuel depot". Fuel Depot was one of the arenas, and it was going to be hard to drive them back. We spread out through the treeline. A few shots were fired. A marshal moved in the distance, went behind an obstacle and appeared again. "Aha, so they're behind there." I thought and everyone else must have thought the same. A hailstorm of paint was unleashed, and to my surprise, a few found their targets. Three reds, with hands in the air, wandered out from behind the barricade, and headed back to respawn.

Where's gommie?

The next memorable moment was when I was behind the tank convoy. We'd managed to push the reds back as far as the top of the tank convoy field, and they were on the run. One bottle of "nitrous oxide" (yellow water) was sitting on the far side of the APC to my left, another on the top of some ammo crates. A fellow player appeared behind me. Without thinking I told him about the bottles. "Hold this" he said handing over his marker. It was an Etek or something similar. He yelled to the other players "Give me covering fire" and dashed around the front of the APC, grabbed the bottle and returned, completely unharmed. A hailstorm of paint came flying in. "You missed one" I said. "I'm not going out there again", and with that somebody else ran out grabbed the bottle off the ammo crates and chucked it to me. "Get that in the trolly, and tell the Rangers you've done it." I did so, now was not the time to argue.

We pushed the bikers a significant distance up the field, only to have our efforts undone in the last 30 minutes after the scoring window. The reds pushed back, and it appeared many blues gave up. The end result was so close that anything could have changed the outcome.

Biker Warriors - something like 19300
Settlers - something like 17800

I remember the 1500 point difference.

15:00 - So what now?

Well, some foolish (or was that stupid, or was that insane) players decided to play the last game. James and I chose not to, and spent the time cleaning up our kit and packing it into boxes. The last game was all-out-war, and simply put, I have no idea who won. It didn't count for any points so I wasn't fussed.

I have probably had the most fun to date on a paintball site playing Return to the Thunderdome, and I will be back to play more games with the Kent Rangers. Knowing these guys is worth its weight in gold.

Also, I should probably note the lack of pictures in this blog post. I forgot to take any pictures, but don't fear, there were semi-professional photographers on site, and there will be a load of photos posted up. As soon as I can get some for you, I will.

I will be back for more... even if it is just to repay Lee for almost soaking me in coloured water (thanks mate).

Hopefully, I'll see all of you, my readers, on the battlefield as well - If you need more info on anything, just go to UKScenario and click on the relevant forum and then topic. Next year's calendar is up already thanks to Woody, and so you can already start saving for those.

And so finally, the big thanks.

And the thanks I have to give are to:

• Shoreline Paintball - Thanks for putting on such an awesome game, and keeping it running smoothly. You guys are a credit to the sport.
• Mayhem Paintball - Fantastic marshalling, well thought out site, really helpful all round. Would love to come and play the site again.
• Bra-Newbs photography - Thanks for the photos which you took - Looking forward to a DVD-full of them.
• Kent Rangers - especially Johnny, Woody, Steve and Lawrence - Really good game and thanks for having me on-side. I like the style of your team, and a great atmosphere having you around.

Explaining the title of this post isn't exactly difficult. I was recabling a data point in my room to be 1 data, 1 phone. Great, until you realise there's three cable where there should be two.

Me being me, I just cut them, hoping I'd not need to reconnect them, and all would be fine. I then went off to work. Got a call from mum about 20 minutes later. "The alarm's just gone off - it's reporting a line fault." I groaned, loudly. It explained the extra cable. Quite why that cable happens to come from that point, I'll never know. All I can say, though, is that I now vaguely understand the cabling in our house. It's a bit quirky, but that sounds about right for our electrician.....

Anyway, alarming issues aside, I recabled to my sister's room in a few simple steps and even better it worked first time. Now I'm no professional cabler, but something tells me I'm lucky.

Now I've got a few things to clear up surrounding my last blog post.

The TV shows were indeed, Crystal Maze and X-Fire.

The song, for those of you who bothered, was The Delays - Long time coming.

Of course, if the cabling job had been a faf, I'd have a new song title for you to work out. Suggestions as to what I might have been thinking on a postcard. I assume I'll have a regular entry from a Mrs Trellis of North Wales, probably addressed to the wrong department, no doubt.

OK, I'll admit it. It's been far too long since I last wrote here. I haven't died, or even come close to it, or maybe I have, but it doesn't matter. I'm back here now!

You're probably wondering where I've been all this time. The answer, is nowhere. Well I say nowhere, I mean I've been working, but never had to travel too far.

Working? Yup, I didn't tell you, but there's been too much going on to actually write this blog post!

Now I've finally got about twenty or so minutes to myself, I'll actually finish this.

It all goes back to 12th June, when, while sitting at my desk revising the maths module C4, my mobile began to ring. "Unknown number". I never know what to expect on the end of an unknown mobile number. For all I knew, it could have been a friend asking a query about maths or something. I picked up, only to find it wasn't a friend, but Delta Force paintball.

For those who don't know the background, I was sort-of forced to find a job for this summer. I figured I'd probably got a weekday job at school, sorting out PC upgrades. A weekend job would be good, as it'd free me up during the week to do this work at school. I applied pretty much everywhere, and nowhere was interested. Being a bit of a paintball fanatic, I did apply to all the local sites to marshal there, and had heard nothing. That was, until the phone rang that Friday afternoon.

Back to the phone call. It was an odd phone call, inviting me to a trial morning working at Delta Force paintball. With little hesitation, despite the exams the following week, I accepted it, and that was it. The rest, as they say, is history. OK, it's not quite.

I survived being shot at - even quite enjoying it at one stage. I blame that on Ian for telling his team it was fun to shoot at me and not the other team. I got him back the next time I worked, mind you. After we've managed to lose the last of the customers (there's always a few who don't want to go), we have to clean all the markers up. We were all supposed to do about 50 each. Well I sorted it out, and counted for each person, and managed to give myself a respectable 45, and Ian a rather pleasant 65. He wasn't happy!

It's not regular and seems to be rather varied in terms of number of weeks I work each month. It doesn't pay fantastically, but I never wanted it to, it's just a job, and hey, it's something I enjoy doing.

So that's that.

Now onto school, and the IT there. What do you do when you spent last summer upgrading the school network to a Windows domain? I know, replace the computers one year later.

I'm not going to reveal just how much work has gone into the upgrade, but let's put it this way, it's been a lot of hard graft so far, and I'm already sick of the sight of another patch cable, or "reborn" card, or patch panel. To illustrate the point, here's just how much work goes into fitting a single PC:

1. Unscrew and remove right side panel
2. Unscrew and remove PCI card locking device
3. Remove blanking plate from PC and don't throw away
4. Remove "reborn" card from packaging - this takes at least half a minute, as the cards are in bags only just big enough for them.
5. Fit "reborn" card to PCI-E x1 slot
6. Replace and re-affix all covers removed in steps 1 and 2
7. Unlock the security system to allow PCs to be placed in it.
8. Feed monitor, keyboard and mouse cables through hole barely big enough to take a monitor plug.
9. Plug all the cables in.
10. Lock the PC in its security slot.
11. Put the cable hole plug back in.

This whole process is quite involved, and easily takes a day to do 30 computers. Plus you end up with sore fingers from the not exactly smooth edges of the holes in the aluminium panels. That said, I'm not trying to knock the benching system. I love it, it's really clever, and it's almost indestructible. It even stands up to the punishment the students give it, something that's pretty hard to come by.

Even so, it's hard work, but I know the students will be pleased when everything is finally done.

While I'm here, I should probably mention "Return to the Thunderdome". "What!?" you might say. Return to the Thunderdome is, in fact, the title of a Shoreline Outdoors event. It's what happens when a few hundred paintballers converge on Romford in Essex. More on that to follow.

For now though, you've had your fair share of news, and I need some sleep.
So I'll leave you with a conundrum to solve:
Perhaps it's "To the [Thunder]dome!" or is it a case of "Until next time the world's in peril, that was [something], this is mission control, signing out."

The first isn't strictly quoted, but anyway, can you name the TV shows?

I'll be awarding points for correct answers, and what do points mean? That's right, nothing except a bit of respect from your mates.

Bonus 10 points if you know which artist and track is responsible for the title of this post.

Until next time.
-- CJ