school – Dan Q

How an RM Nimbus Taught Me a Hacker Mentality

What can I make it do?

It’s been said that when faced with a new piece of technology, a normal person asks “what does it do?”, but a hacker asks “what can I make it do?”.

This kind of curiosity is integral to a hacker mindset.

I can trace my hacker roots back further than my first experience of using an RM Nimbus M-Series in circa 1992². But there was something particular about my experience of this popular piece of British edutech kit which provided me with a seminal experience that shaped my “hacker identity”. And it’s that experience about which I’d like to tell you:

Shortly after I started secondary school, they managed to upgrade their computer lab from a handful of Nimbus PC-186s to a fancy new network of M-Series PC-386s. The school were clearly very proud of this cutting-edge new acquisition, and we watched the teachers lay out the manuals and worksheets which smelled fresh and new and didn’t yet have their corners frayed nor their covers daubed in graffiti.

Program Manager

The new ones ran Windows 3 (how fancy!). Well… kind-of. They’d been patched with a carefully-modified copy of Program Manager that imposed a variety of limitations. For example, they had removed the File > Run… menu item, along with an icon for File Manager, in order to restrict access to only the applications approved by the network administrator.

A special program was made available to copy files between floppy disks and the user’s network home directory. This allowed a student to take their work home with them if they wanted. The copying application – whose interface was vastly inferior to File Manager‘s – was limited to only copying files with extensions in its allowlist. This meant that (given that no tool was available that could rename files) the network was protected from anybody introducing any illicit file types.

Bring a .doc on a floppy? You can copy it to your home directory. Bring a .exe? You can’t even see it.

To young-teen-Dan, this felt like a challenge. What I had in front of me was a general-purpose computer with a limited selection of software but a floppy drive through which media could be introduced. What could I make it do?

This isn’t my school’s computer lab circa mid-1990s (it’s this school) but it has absolutely the same energy. Except that I think Solitaire was one of the applications that had been carefully removed from Program Manager.

Spoiler: eventually I ended up being able to execute pretty much anything I wanted, but we’ll get to that. The journey is the important part of the story. I didn’t start by asking “can I trick this locked-down computer lab into letting my friends and I play Doom deathmatches on it?” I started by asking “what can I make it do?”; everything else built up over time.

I started by playing with macros. Windows used to come with a tool called Recorder,³ which you could use to “record” your mouse clicks and keypresses and play them back.

Recorder + Paintbrush made for an interesting way to use these basic and limited tools to produce animations. Like this one, except at school I’d have put more effort in⁴.

Microsoft Word

Then I noticed that Microsoft Word also had a macro recorder, but this one was scriptable using a programming language called WordBasic (a predecessor to Visual Basic for Applications). So I pulled up the help and started exploring what it could do.

And as soon as I discovered the Shell function, I realised that the limitations that were being enforced on the network could be completely sidestepped.

Screenshot showing Microsoft Word's 'Macro Editor' on Windows 3.1. The subroutine being defined contains the code 'Shell("WINFILE.EXE")'; the 'Shell' command is described in the WordBasic Help file, which is also visible. — A Windows 3 computer that runs Word… can run any other executable it has access to. Thanks, macro editor.

Now that I could run any program I liked, I started poking the edges of what was possible.

Could I get a MS-DOS prompt/command shell? Yes, absolutely⁵.
Could I write to the hard disk drive? Yes, but any changes got wiped when the computer performed its network boot.
Could I store arbitrary files in my personal network storage? Yes, anything I could bring in on floppy disks⁶ could be persisted on the network server.

I didn’t have a proper LAN at home⁷ So I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore, unfettered, what I could get up to with Windows’ network stack.

Screenshot from Windows 3.11; a Microsoft Paint window is partially-concealed behind a WinChat conversation with 'RMNET013'. The other participant is warning the user to look busy and stop drawing dicks in Paint because the teacher is coming. The user is responding with confusion. — The “WinNuke” NetBIOS remote-crash vulnerability was a briefly-entertaining way to troll classmates, but unlocking WinPopup/Windows Chat capability was ultimately more-rewarding.

File Manager

I started to explore the resources on the network. Each pupil had their own networked storage space, but couldn’t access one another’s. But among the directories shared between all students, I found a directory to which I had read-write access.

I created myself a subdirectory and set the hidden bit on it, and started dumping into it things that I wanted to keep on the network⁸.

By now my classmates were interested in what I was achieving, and I wanted in the benefits of my success. So I went back to Word and made a document template that looked superficially like a piece of coursework, but which contained macro code that would connect to the shared network drive and allow the user to select from a series of programs that they’d like to run.

Gradually, compressed over a series of floppy disks, I brought in a handful of games: Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Wing Commander, Civilization, Wolfenstein 3D, even Dune II. I got increasingly proficient at modding games to strip out unnecessary content, e.g. the sound and music files⁹, minimising the number of floppy disks I needed to ZIP (or ARJ!) content to before smuggling it in via my shirt pocket, always sure not to be carrying so many floppies that it’d look suspicious.

Screenshot of Windows 3.11 File Manager connected to a network with shares rmnet, shared, and students. Shared contains a hidden directory called 'dan'. — The goldmine moment – for my friends, at least – was the point at which I found a way to persistently store files in a secret shared location, allowing me to help them run whatever they liked *without passing floppy disks around the classroom* (which had been my previous approach).

In a particularly bold move, I implemented a simulated login screen which wrote the entered credentials into the shared space before crashing the computer. I left it running, unattended, on computers that I thought most-likely to be used by school staff, and eventually bagged myself the network administrator’s password. I only used it twice: the first time, to validate my hypothesis about the access levels it granted; the second, right before I finished school, to confirm my suspicion that it wouldn’t have been changed during my entire time there¹⁰.

Are you sure you want to quit?

My single biggest mistake was sharing my new-found power with my classmates. When I made that Word template that let others run the software I’d introduced to the network, the game changed.

When it was just me, asking the question what can I make it do?, everything was fun and exciting.

But now half a dozen other teens were nagging me and asking “can you make it do X?”

This wasn’t exploration. This wasn’t innovation. This wasn’t using my curiosity to push at the edges of a system and its restrictions! I didn’t want to find the exploitable boundaries of computer systems so I could help make it easier for other people to do so… no: I wanted the challenge of finding more (and weirder) exploits!

I wanted out. But I didn’t want to say to my friends that I didn’t want to do something “for” them any more¹¹.

I figured: I needed to get “caught”.

16-bit Windows screenshot with a background image from WarGames. A dialog box asks 'Are you sure you want to quit? If you quit, you will lose the ability to: (a) use network chat tools, (b) play videogames awhen you should be doing coursework, (c) impress your friends and raise your otherwise-pathetic social status'; the cursor hovers over a 'Yes, I'm out' button. — I considered just using graphics software to make these screenshots… but it turned out to be faster to spin up a network of virtual machines running Windows 3.11 and some basic tools. I *actually made* the stupid imaginary dialog box you’re seeing.¹²

I chose… to get sloppy.

I took a copy of some of the software that I’d put onto the shared network drive and put it in my own home directory, this time un-hidden. Clearly our teacher was already suspicious and investigating, because within a few days, this was all that was needed for me to get caught and disciplined¹³.

I was disappointed not to be asked how I did it, because I was sufficiently proud of my approach that I’d hoped to be able to brag about it to somebody who’d understand… but I guess our teacher just wanted to brush it under the carpet and move on.

Aftermath

The school’s IT admin certainly never worked-out the true scope of my work. My “hidden” files remained undiscovered, and my friends were able to continue to use my special Word template to play games that I’d introduced to the network¹⁴. I checked, and the hidden files were still there when I graduated.

The warning worked: I kept my nose clean in computing classes for the remainder of secondary school. But I would’ve been happy to, anyway: I already felt like I’d “solved” the challenge of turning the school computer network to my interests and by now I’d moved on to other things… learning how to reverse-engineer phone networks… and credit card processors… and copy-protection systems. Oh, the stories I could tell¹⁵.

Old photograph of Dan, then a teenager, with other teenagers. Dan is labelled 'young hacker, a.k.a. bellend', while another young man is captioned 'classmate who just wanted to play lemmings'. — I “get” it that some of my classmates – including some of those pictured – were mostly interested in the *results* of my hacking efforts. But for me it always was – and still is – about the *journey of discovery*.

But I’ll tell you what: 13-ish year-old me ought to be grateful to the RM Nimbus network at my school for providing an interesting system about which my developing “hacker brain” could ask: what can I make it do?

Which remains one of the most useful questions with which to foster a hacker mentality.

Footnotes

¹ I first played Game of Life on an Amstrad CPC464, or possibly a PC1512.

² What is the earliest experience to which I can credit my “hacker mindset”? Tron and WarGames might have played a part, as might have the “hacking” sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And there was the videogame Hacker and its sequel (it’s funny to see their influence in modern games). Teaching myself to program so that I could make text-based adventures was another. Dissecting countless obfuscated systems to see how they worked… that’s yet another one: something I did perhaps initially to cheat at games by poking their memory addresses or hexediting their save games… before I moved onto reverse-engineering copy protection systems and working out how they could be circumvented… and then later still when I began building hardware that made it possible for me to run interesting experiments on telephone networks.

Any of all of these datapoints, which took place over a decade, could be interpreted as “the moment” that I became a hacker! But they’re not the ones I’m talking about today. Today… is the story of the RM Nimbus.

³ Whatever happened to Recorder? After it disappeared in Windows 95 I occasionally had occasion to think to myself “hey, this would be easier if I could just have the computer watch me and copy what I do a few times.” But it was not to be: Microsoft decided that this level of easy automation wasn’t for everyday folks. Strangely, it wasn’t long after Microsoft dropped macro recording as a standard OS feature that Apple decided that MacOS did need a feature like this. Clearly it’s still got value as a concept!

⁴ Just to clarify: I put more effort in to making animations, which were not part of my schoolwork back when I was a kid. I certainly didn’t put more effort into my education.

⁵ The computers had been configured to make DOS access challenging: a boot menu let you select between DOS and Windows, but both were effectively nerfed. Booting into DOS loaded an RM-provided menu that couldn’t be killed; the MS-DOS prompt icon was absent from Program Manager and quitting Windows triggered an immediate shutdown.

⁶ My secondary school didn’t get Internet access during the time I was enrolled there. I was recently trying to explain to one of my kids the difference between “being on a network” and “having Internet access”, and how often I found myself on a network that wasn’t internetworked, back in the day. I fear they didn’t get it.

⁷ I was in the habit of occasionally hooking up PCs together with null modem cables, but only much later on would I end up acquiring sufficient “thinnet” 10BASE2 kit that I could throw together a network for a LAN party.

⁸ Initially I was looking to sidestep the space limitation enforcement on my “home” directory, and also to put the illicit software I was bringing in somewhere that could not be trivially-easily traced back to me! But later on this “shared” directory became the repository from which I’d distribute software to my friends, too.

⁹ The school computer didn’t have soundcards and nobody would have wanted PC speakers beeping away in the classroom while they were trying to play a clandestine videogame anyway.

¹⁰ The admin password was concepts. For at least four years.

¹¹ Please remember that at this point I was a young teenager and so was pretty well over-fixated on what my peers thought of me! A big part of the persona I presented was of somebody who didn’t care what others thought of him, I’m sure, but a mask that doesn’t look like a mask… is still a mask. But yeah: I had a shortage of self-confidence and didn’t feel able to say no.

¹² Art is weird when your medium is software.

¹³ I was briefly alarmed when there was talk of banning me from the computer lab for the remainder of my time at secondary school, which scared me because I was by now half-way through my boring childhood “life plan” to become a computer programmer by what seemed to be the appropriate route, and I feared that not being able to do a GCSE in a CS-adjacent subject could jeopardise that (it wouldn’t have).

¹⁴ That is, at least, my friends who were brave enough to carry on doing so after the teacher publicly (but inaccurately) described my alleged offences, seemingly as a warning to others.

¹⁵ Oh, the stories I probably shouldn’t tell! But here’s a teaser: when I built my first “beige box” (analogue phone tap hardware) I experimented with tapping into the phone line at my dad’s house from the outside. I carefully shaved off some of the outer insulation of the phone line that snaked down the wall from the telegraph pole and into the house through the wall to expose the wires inside, identified each, and then croc-clipped my box onto it and was delighted to discovered that I could make and receive calls “for” the house. And then, just out of curiosity to see what kinds of protections were in place to prevent short-circuiting, I experimented with introducing one to the ringer line… and took out all the phones on the street. Presumably I threw a circuit breaker in the roadside utility cabinet. Anyway, I patched-up my damage and – fearing that my dad would be furious on his return at the non-functioning telecomms – walked to the nearest functioning payphone to call the operator and claim that the phone had stopped working and I had no idea why. It was fixed within three hours. Phew!

How I Learned the Pythagorean Theorem

The younger child and I were talking about maths on the school run this morning, and today’s topic was geometry. I was pleased to discover that he’s already got a reasonable comprehension of the Pythagorean Theorem¹: I was telling him that I was about his age when I first came across it, but in my case I first had a practical, rather than theoretical, impetus to learn it.

It was the 1980s, and I was teaching myself Dr. Logo, Digital Research‘s implementation of the Logo programming language (possibly from this book). One day, I was writing a program to draw an indoor scene, including a window through which a mountain would be visible. My aim was to produce something like this:

All of these graphics were made using my own 2019 implementation of Logo, TRRTL.COM: click on any graphic to continue drawing!

My window was 300 “steps”² tall by 200 steps wide and bisected in both directions when I came to make my first attempt at the mountain.

And so, naively, starting from the lower-left, I thought I’d need some code like this:

RIGHT 45
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100

But what I ended up with was this:

Hypotenuse? More like need-another-try-potenuse.

I instantly realised my mistake: of course the sides of the mountain would need to be longer so that the peak would reach the mid-point of the window and the far side would hit its far corner. But how much longer ought it to be.

I intuited that the number I’d be looking for must be greater than 100 but less than 250: these were, logically, the bounds I was working within. 100 would be correct if my line were horizontal (a “flat” mountain?), and 250 was long enough to go the “long way” to the centrepoint of the window (100 along, and 150 up). So I took a guess at 150 and… it was pretty close… but still wrong:

I remember being confused and frustrated that the result was so close but still wrong. The reason, of course, is that the relationship between the lengths of the sides of a triangle don’t scale in a 1:1 way, but this was the first time I found myself having to think about why.

So I found my mother and asked her what I was doing wrong. I’m sure it must have delighted her to dust-off some rarely-accessed knowledge from her own school years and teach me about Pythagoras’!

The correct answer, of course, is given by:

\sqrt{100^{2} + 100^{2}}

I so rarely get to use MathML that I had to look up the syntax.

The answer, therefore, is… 141.421 (to three decimal places). So I rounded to 141 and my diagram worked!³

What made this maths lesson from my mother so memorable was that it fed a tangible goal. I had something I wanted to achieve, and I learned the maths that I needed to get there. And now it’s impermeably etched onto my brain.

I learned the quadratic equation formula and how to perform algebraic integration by rote, and I guarantee that it’s less well-established in my long-term memory than, say, the sine and cosine rules or how to solve a simultaneous equation because I’ve more-often needed to do those things outside of the classroom!

So I guess the lesson is that I should be trying to keep an eye out for practical applications of maths that I can share with my kids. Real problems that are interesting to solve, to help build the memorable grounding that latter supports the more-challenging and intangible abstract maths that they may wish to pursue later.

Both kids are sharp young mathematicians, and the younger one seems especially to enjoy it, so feeding that passion feels well-worthwhile. Perhaps I should show them TRRTL.COM so they can try their hand at Logo!

Footnotes

¹ You know the one: the square of the triangle’s hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You could conceivably know it by some other mnemonic, but the essence is that if you know the lengths of two sides of any right-angled triangle, you can derive the length of the third with some moderately-simple arithmetic.

² Just one way that Logo is/was a cute programming language was its use of “steps” – as in, turtle-steps – to measure distances. You might approximate them as pixels, but a “step” has meaning even for lines that don’t map linearly to pixels because they’re at wonky angles, for example.

³ I’d later become unstuck by rounding, while trying to make a more-complex diagram with a zig-zag pattern running along a ribbon: a small rounding error became compounded over a long time and lead to me being a couple of pixels off where I intended. But that’s another story.

Note #27182

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

It’s the Third of Bleptember, and this routine-loving pupper is still confused by the fact that the elder child doesn’t come on the school-run morning walk any more, instead leaving early to catch the bus to her new school. Look at those big anxious eyes, poor thing!

Note #27169

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

The Second of Bleptember brought back the morning school run into this doggo’s routine. And while she was glad of the extra walk, she also seemed glad of the opportunity to lie down in a quiet, child-free hallway upon our return home.

Note #27145

Looking forward to the school run starting again next week… so I get a bonus excuses for walks around our beautiful village!

The Local Historian

Back in 2021, as part of a course I was doing at work, I made a video talking about The Devil’s Quoits, a henge and stone circle near where I live.

Video screengrab of Dan standing in front of some standing stones. — It started with a fascination after discovering a little-known stone circle near my new house. It grew into an obsession with the history of the place.

Two years later, our eldest was at school and her class was studying the stone age. Each of three groups were tasked with researching a particular neolithic monument, and our eldest was surprised when she heard my voice coming from a laptop elsewhere in the class. One of her classmates had, in their research into the Quoits, come across my video.

And so when their teacher arranged for a school trip to the Devil’s Quoits, she asked if I could go along as a “local expert”. And so I did.

On a sunny day, Dan sits with his back to a stone, more of the circle visible in the background. — It turns out “local expert” just means “I read the only book ever written about the archaeology of the stones, and a handful of ancillary things.”

And so this year, when another class – this time featuring our youngest – went on a similar school trip, the school asked me to go along again.

I’d tweaked my intro a bit – to pivot from talking about the archaeology to talking about the human stories in the history of the place – and it went down well: the children raised excellent observations and intelligent questions¹, and clearly took a lot away from their visit. As a bonus, our visit falling shortly after the summer solstice meant that local neopagans had left a variety of curious offerings – mostly pebbles painted with runes – that the kids enjoyed finding (though of course I asked them to put each back where they were found afterwards).

But the most heartwarming moment came when I later received an amazing handmade card, to which several members of the class had contributed:

A hand-coloured card, saying 'Thank you so much', with a child's drawing of somebody talking about Bell Beaker people and a photo of Dan showing pictures of pots to a class of schoolchildren. — I particularly enjoy the pencil drawing of me talking about the breadth of Bell Beaker culture, with a child interrupting to say “cool!”.

I don’t know if I’ll be free to help out again in another two years, if they do it again²: perhaps I should record a longer video, with a classroom focus, that shares everything I know about The Devil’s Quoits.

But I’ll certainly keep a fond memory of this (and the previous) time I got to go on such a fun school trip, and to be an (alleged) expert about a place whose history I find so interesting!

Footnotes

¹ Not every question the children asked was the smartest, but every one was gold. One asked “is it possible aliens did it?” Another asked, “how old are you?”, which I can only assume was an effort to check if I remembered when this 5,000-year-old hengiform monument was being constructed…

² By lucky coincidence, this year’s trip fell during a period that I was between jobs, and so I was very available, but that might not be the case in future!

Sponge Throwing

Pretty sure there isn’t a prize for Throwing Wet Sponges At Children during the graduating year’s “fun run” at the school sports day… but just like the kids are asked to, I’m going to try my best. 😁

Typeseccing

I don’t want to withdraw any of our children from sec [sic] education lessons.

However they’re spelled, they’re a great idea, and I’m grateful to live in a part of the world where their existence isn’t the target of religious politics.

But if I can withdraw consent to receiving emails about sex education in Comic Sans then that’d be great, thanks. 😅

For anybody who could use a break

Third day of being ill with what’s probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school… and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip… I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Willd-Built.

The opening page reads: “For anybody who could use a break.”

Yes. Yes, please.

God’s Adviser

Duration 7:28

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Of all the discussions I’ve ever been involved with on the subject of religion, the one I’m proudest of was perhaps also one of the earliest.

Let me tell you about a time that, as an infant, I got sent out of my classroom because I wouldn’t stop questioning the theological ramifications of our school nativity play.

I’m aware that I’ve got readers from around the world, and Christmas traditions vary, so let’s start with a primer. Here in the UK, it’s common¹ at the end of the school term before Christmas for primary schools to put on a “nativity play”. A group of infant pupils act out an interpretation of the biblical story of the birth of Jesus: a handful of 5/6-year-olds playing the key parts of, for example, Mary, Joseph, an innkeeper, some angels, maybe a donkey, some wise men, some shepherds, and what-have-you.

A group of children dressed as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, kings, angels, and a variety of barn animals crowd a stage. — Maybe they’re just higher-budget nowadays, or maybe I grew up in a more-deprived area, but I’m pretty sure than when I was a child a costume consisted mostly of a bedsheet if you were an angel, a tea-towel secured with an elastic band if you were a shepherd, a cardboard crown if you were a king, and so on. Photo courtesy Ian Turk.

As with all theatre performed by young children, a nativity play straddles the line between adorable and unbearable. Somehow, the innkeeper – who only has one line – forgets to say “there is no room at the inn” and so it looks like Mary and Joseph just elect to stay in the barn, one of the angels wets herself in the middle of a chorus, and Mary, bored of sitting in the background having run out of things to do, idly swings the saviour of mankind round and around, holding him by his toe. It’s beautiful².

I was definitely in a couple of different nativity plays as a young child, but one in particular stands out in my memory.

Dan, as a young child, superimposed against a background with a star, with a speech bubble reading 'Hark! A star! In the East!' — “Let us go now to Bethlehem. The son of God is born today.”

In order to put a different spin on the story of the first Christmas³, one year my school decided to tell a different, adjacent story. Here’s a summary of the key beats of the plot, as I remember it:

God is going to send His only son to Earth and wants to advertise His coming.
“What kind of marker can he put in the sky to lead people to the holy infant’s birthplace?”, He wonders.
So He auditions a series of different natural phenomena:
- The first candidate is a cloud, but its pitch is rejected because… I don’t remember: it’ll blow away or something.
- Another candidate was a rainbow, but it was clearly derivative of an earlier story, perhaps.
- After a few options, eventually God settles on a star. Hurrah!
Some angels go put the star in the right place, shepherds and wise men go visit Mary and her family, and all that jazz.

So far, totally on-brand for a primary school nativity play but with 50% more imagination than the average. Nice.

Edited watercolour of magi crossing a desert on camels, with a large meteor inserted into the sky. — What the Meteor Strike of Bethlehem lacked in longevity, it made up for in earth-shattering destruction.

I was cast as Adviser #1, and that’s where things started to go wrong.

The part of God was played by my friend Daniel, but clearly our teacher figured that he wouldn’t be able to remember all of his lines⁴ and expanded his role into three: God, Adviser #1, and Adviser #2. After each natural phenomenon explained why it would be the best, Adviser #1 and Adviser #2 would each say a few words about the candidate’s pros and cons, providing God with the information He needed to make a decision.

To my young brain, this seemed theologically absurd. Why would God need an adviser?⁵

“If He’s supposed to be omniscient, why does God need an adviser, let alone two?” I asked my teacher⁶.

The answer was, of course, that while God might be capable of anything… if the kid playing Him managed to remember all of his lines then that’d really be a miracle. But I’d interrupted rehearsals for my question and my teacher Mrs. Doyle clearly didn’t want to explain that in front of the class.

But I wouldn’t let it go:

“But Miss, are we saying that God could make mistakes?”
“Couldn’t God try out the cloud and the rainbow and just go back in time when He knows which one works?”
“Why does God send an angel to tell the shepherds where to go but won’t do that for the kings?”
“Miss, don’t the stars move across the sky each night? Wouldn’t everybody be asking questions about the bright one that doesn’t?”
“Hang on, what’s supposed to have happened to the Star of Bethlehem after God was done with it? Did it have planets? Did those planets… have life?”

In the end I had to be thrown out of class. I spent the rest of that rehearsal standing in the corridor.

And it was totally worth it for this anecdote.

Footnotes

¹ I looked around to see if the primary school nativity play was still common, or if the continuing practice at my kids’ school shows that I’m living in a bubble, but the only source I could find was a 2007 news story that claims that nativity plays are “under threat”… by The Telegraph, who I’d expect to write such a story after, I don’t know, the editor’s kids decided to put on a slightly-more-secular play one year. Let’s just continue to say that the school nativity play is common in the UK, because I can’t find any reliable evidence to the contrary.

² I’ve worked onstage and backstage on a variety of productions, and I have nothing but respect for any teacher who, on top of their regular workload and despite being unjustifiably underpaid, volunteers to put on a nativity play. I genuinely believe that the kids get a huge amount out of it, but man it looks like a monumental amount of work.

³ And, presumably, spare the poor parents who by now had potentially seen children’s amateur dramatics interpretations of the same story several times already.

⁴ Our teacher was probably correct.

⁵ In hindsight, my objection to this scripting decision might actually have been masking an objection to the casting decision. I wanted to play God!

⁶ I might not have used the word “omniscient”, because I probably didn’t know the word yet. But I knew the concept, and I certainly knew that my teacher was on spiritually-shaky ground to claim both that God knew everything and God needed an advisor.

The Dog and The Snowman

On the way to school this morning, the 10-year-old lagged behind to build a small snowman.

On the way back, the dog saw the snowman, which wasn’t there when she’d passed earlier. She wanted to make it clear that she Did. Not. Trust. it. She stood back and growled at it for a while, and then, eventually, was persuaded to come closer.

Leaning as far as her little legs could manage, she stretched to carefully sniff it while keeping her distance. She still wasn’t entirely happy and ran most of the way to the end of the path to get away from the mysterious cold heap.

(This same dog earlier this year spent quarter of an hour barking at our wheelbarrow when, unusually, it was left in the middle of the lawn, rather than beside the shed. She doesn’t like change!)

Dominated

Kids’ ability to pick up new words from context is amazing.

Kids’ confidence even when they’ve misunderstood how a word is used is hilarious. 😊

This evening, our 7-year-old was boasting about how well-behaved his class was while their regular teacher had to attend an all-day meeting, vs how much it impressed the temporary teacher they had.

His words: “Today we had a supply teacher and we totally DOMINATED her!”

Permanent Record

To:

****@fulwoodacademy.co.uk

From:

“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>

Subject:

Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997

Date:

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:18:07 +0100

To Whom It May Concern,

Please supply the personal data you hold about me, per data protection law. Specifically, I’m looking for: a list of all offences for which I was assigned detention at school.

Please find attached a variety of documentation which I feel proves my identity and the legitimacy of this request. If there’s anything else you need or you have further questions, please feel free to email me.

Thanks in advance;

Dan Q

To:

“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>

From:

“Jodie Clayton” <*.*******@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>

Subject:

Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997

Date:

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:48:33 +0100

Dear Dan Q,

We do not retain records of detentions of former pupils, and we certainly have no academic records of pupils going back thirty years ago.

Jodie Clayton | Office Manager with Cover and Admissions
Black Bull Lane, Fulwood, Preston, PR2 9YR
+44 (0) 1772 719060

To:

“Jodie Clayton” <*********@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>

From:

“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>

Subject:

Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997

Date:

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:00:49 +0100

But, but… I was always told that this would go on my permanent record. Are you telling me that teachers lied to me? What else is fake!?

Maybe I will always have a calculator with me and I won’t actually need to know how to derive a square root using a pen and paper. Maybe nobody will ever care what my GCSE results are for every job I apply for. Maybe my tongue isn’t divided into different taste areas capable of picking out sweet, salty, bitter etc. flavours. Maybe practicing my handwriting won’t be an essential skill I use every day.

And maybe I will amount to something despite never turning in any History homework, Mr. Needham!

Dan Q

Don’t Ask, Don’t Teach

Politics and pundits

The UK’s Conservative government, having realised that their mandate is worthless, seems to be in a panicked rush to try to get the voters to ignore any of the real issues. Instead, they say, we should be focussed on things like ludicrously-expensive and ineffective ways to handle asylum seekers and making life as hard as possible for their second-favourite scapegoat: trans and queer people.

The latest move in that second category seems likely to be a plan to, among other things, discourage teachers from talking about gender identity in schools, with children of any age. From the article I linked:

The BBC has not seen the new guidelines but a government source said they included plans to ban any children being taught about gender identity.

If asked, teachers will have to be clear gender ideology is contested.

Needless to say, such guidance is not likely to be well-received by teachers:

Pepe Di’Iasio, headteacher at a school in Rotherham, told Today that he believes pupils are being used “as a political football”.

Teachers “want well informed and evidence-based decisions”, he said, and not “politicised” guidance.

Cringey political poster reading "Is this Labour's idea of a comprehensive education? Take the politics out of education, vote Conservative", alongside three books: Young gay & proud, Police: Out of School!, and The playbook for kids about sex. — I can only assume that the Tories still have a stack of this genuine 1987 billboard poster (ugh) in stock, and are hoping to save money by reusing them.

People and pupils

This shit isn’t harmless. Regardless of how strongly these kinds of regulations are enforced, they can have a devastating chilling effect in schools.

I speak from experience.

A group of teenagers stand around awkwardly. — I don’t know if this is the “most-90s” photo I own of myself, but it’s gotta be close. Taken at the afterparty from a school production of *South Pacific*, so probably at least a *little* disproportionately-queer gathering.

Most of my school years were under the shadow of Section 28. Like I predict for the new Conservative proposals, Section 28 superficially didn’t appear to have a major impact: nobody was ever successfully prosecuted under it, for example. But examining its effects in that way completely overlooks the effect it had on how teachers felt they had to work.

For example…

In around 1994, I witnessed a teacher turn a blind eye to homophobic bullying of a pupil by their peer, during a sex education class. Simultaneously, the teacher coolly dismissed the slurs of the bully, saying that we weren’t “talking about that in this class” and that the boy should “save his chatter for the playground”. I didn’t know about the regulations at the time: only in hindsight could I see that this might have been a result of Section 28. All I got to see at the time was a child who felt that his homophobic harassment of his classmate had the tacit endorsement of the teachers, so long as it didn’t take place in the classroom.

A gay friend, who will have been present but not involved in the above event, struggled with self-identity and relationships throughout his teenage years, only “coming out” as an adult. I’m confident that he could have found a happier, healthier life had he felt supported – or at the very least not-unwelcome – at school. I firmly believe that the long-running third-degree side-effects of Section 28 effectively robbed him of a decade of self-actualisation about his identity.

The long tail of those 1980s rules were felt long-after they were repealed. And for a while, it felt like things were getting better. But increasingly it feels like we’re moving backwards.

A pride rainbow painted down the back of a white person's first, held in the air. — As a country and as a society, we can do better than this.

With general elections coming up later this year, it’ll soon be time to start quizzing your candidates on the issues that matter to you. Even (perhaps especially) if your favourite isn’t the one who wins, it can be easiest to get a politicians’ ear when they and their teams are canvassing for your vote; so be sure to ask pointed questions about the things you care about.

I hope that you’ll agree that not telling teachers to conceal from teenagers the diversity of human identity and experience is something worth caring about.

Update: Only a couple of hours after I posted this, the awesome folks (whom I’ve mentioned before) at the Vagina Museum tooted a thread about the long tail of Section 28. It’s well-worth a read.

[Bloganuary] Alumnus

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What colleges have you attended?

I feel like this question might be a little US-centric? Or at least, not UK-friendly! The question doesn’t translate well because of transatlantic differences in our higher education systems (even after I skimmed a guide to higher education across the pond).

Let’s try instead enumerating the education establishments I’ve attended post-school. There’ve been a few!

Preston College

A young Dan, plus seven other casually-dressed young men, pose in a classroom. — I’m the leftmost of the unwashed nerdy louts in this collection of unwashed nerdy louts: Preston College’s Computing A-Level graduates of the 1997-1999 class.

Nowadays young adults are required to be enrolled in education or training until the age of 18, but that wasn’t the case when I finished secondary school at 16. Because my school didn’t yet offer a “sixth form” (education for 16-18 year olds), I registered with Preston College to study A-Levels in Computing, Maths, Psychology, and General Studies.

The first of these choices reflected my intention to go on to study Computer Science at University¹. Psychology was chosen out of personal interest, and General Studies was a filler to round-out my programme.

A group of young adults mill around in a rainy car park between campus buildings. — This photo first appeared in one of my oldest (surviving) contemporary blog posts, way back in 1999.

Aberystwyth University

Then known as the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, this became my next academic destination as I pursued an undergraduate degree in Computer Science with Software Engineering.

Originally intending to spend five years doing a masters degree, I later dialled-back my plans and left with only a bachelors degree (although I still somehow spent five years getting it). This was not-least because I was much more-interested in implementing Three Rings than in studying, although I at least eventually managed to get away with writing and handing in a dissertation based on my work on the project³ and was awarded a degree and got to wear a silly hat and everything.

Dan and Aberystwyth friends at Ruth and JTA's wedding. — Of course, the real adventure at Aberystwyth was the friends I made along the way. Including this lot!

Since then, I’ve used my Software Engineering degree for… almost nothing. I started working at SmartData before I’d even completed it; the Bodleian required that I had one but didn’t care what the subject was, and I’m not certain that Automattic even asked. But I still appreciate some of the theoretical grounding it gave me, which helps me when I learn new concepts to this day⁴.

Aylesbury College

Almost a decade later, the academic bug bit me again and I decided to study towards a foundation degree in Counselling & Psychotherapy! I figured that it I were going to have one degree that I never use, I might as well have two of them, right?

The academic parts⁵ of the work could be done remotely, but I needed to zip back and forth to Aylesbury on Monday evenings for several years for the practical parts.

The Open University

Almost another decade passed then I decided it was time to break into academia a further time. This time, I decided to build on my existing knowledge from my first degree plus the subsequent experience and qualifications I’d gained in ethical hacking and penetration testing, and decided to go for a masters degree in Information Security and Forensics! I even managed to do some original research for my dissertation, although it’s terribly uninteresting because all it possibly managed to prove was the null hypothesis.

Dan with his Masters Degree certificate (Master of Science in Computing: Information Security and Forensics) — Smug mode activated as I prepare to add another degree certificate to the wall.

Something I’d discovered having been a student in my teens, in my 20s, in my 30s, and in my 40s… is that it gets harder! Whereas in my 20s I could put in an overnight cram session and ace an exam, in my 40s I absolutely needed to spend the time studying and revising over many weeks before information would become concrete in my mind!⁶ It almost feels like it’s a physical effort to shunt things into my brain, where once it was near-effortlessly easy.

People have occasionally suggested that I might push my field(s) even further and do a doctorate someday. I don’t think that’s for me. A masters in a subdiscipline was plenty narrow-enough a field for my interests: I’d far rather study something new.

Maybe there’s another degree in my sometime, someday, but it’s probably a bachelors!

Footnotes

¹ I figured that an A-Level in Maths would be essential for admission to a Computer Science degree, but it very definitely wasn’t, though it helped out in other ways.

² The ubiquity of digital photography nowadays makes it easy to forget that snapping a picture to share with friends used to be really hard work.

³ Little did I know that 20 years later Three Rings would still be going strong, now supporting ~60,000 volunteers in half a dozen countries!

⁴ While I love and am defensive of self-taught programmers, and feel that bootcamp-plus-experience is absolutely sufficient for many individuals to excel in my industry, there are certain topics – like compiler theory, data structures and algorithms, growth rates of function complexity, etc. – that are just better to learn in an academic setting, and which in turn can help bootstrap you every time you need to learn a new programming language or paradigm. Not to mention the benefit of “learning how to learn”, for which university can be great. It’s a bloody expensive way to get those skills, especially nowadays, though!

⁵ I was surprised to find that the academic bits of my course in counselling and psychotherapy were more-interesting than the practical bits. See for example my blog post about enjoying a deep dive into the background of The Gloria Films. I learned a lot from the practical bits too, mind.

⁶ I probably didn’t do myself any favours by beginning Automattic’s intensive and challenging recruitment process while wrapping up my masters degree though.