Yesterday's charity shop bargain...

...was one of these for 20 quid.

So far it works well, and it has the manual etc. so I'm figuring out most of it fairly easily. What I'm not mad keen on is that the alarm starts off very quiet, which with me is pretty futile - I generally need the audio equivalent of dynamite to get me out of bed. Anyone know a way to make it start at the volume setting I prefer?

An odd choking feeling...

Although I'm a lab technician, not a teacher, I'm occasionally asked to talk about snakes for school classes etc.

I did one of these lessons a couple of weeks ago, for a class of kids with learning difficulties, the teacher has just put the pictures she took onto the server. Unfortunately only a couple show me without the kids - for legal reasons I can't put their pictures on line - and only one of them was reasonably sharply in focus.

So this is me in full flow talking about (I think) the way that snakes move their bodies, while Sam does his best to strangle me...

( Snakes on a technician )

It's the first picture of Sam I've put on line in a few years - he's now about 17 years old but still going strong, about 5ft long and weighing a couple of kilos. He's never bitten anyone, which makes him perfect for this sort of thing.