Disappointment with high school

Last summer I mentioned the Scottish Baccalaureate, a scheme I first discovered by reading Perth High School's handbook. It had seemed a good choice for Benjamin as he is already nearly fulfilling the requirements for the Scottish Baccalaureate in Science and it would afford valuable insurance as an alternative means of satisfying course entry requirements for higher education. The missing component is the Interdisciplinary Project for which he could do something interesting from home.

Benjamin's school would still need to put some time in because some approved center must assess his work. ( He started asking months ago but was just shuffled from one teacher to another. )

By now it is indeed likely that we are out of time: by Spring Term Benjamin will be shifting any spare effort over into revision. I regret that he had to keep trying to find and ask teachers over so many weeks, ultimately fruitlessly. There was a clear lack of anybody taking responsibility for his school's side of allowing a student to gain a qualification that their own handbook mentions. Aside from the school not being able to find time to assess the work he could have done, the question should have been discussed by some group of teachers and decided promptly: then we may have had time to arrange registration through an alternative center.

Update: I should now note that the school have at least telephoned to apologize.

Continuing exercise

My exercise is still going fine: today's was easily my best Saturday morning workout of the year. For my after-work exercising I have developed a trick. I used to come home tired from work, it would be cold and wet outside, and I would collapse onto the sofa and not exactly enjoy feeling that now I have to put my shorts on and head out to the garage, even if abstractly I know that a few minutes' time on the cross-trainer will warm me back up. Now I turn the heating up in the car on the way home so I am warmed through. When I get home I decide that I need not work out but I keep open the option that I might. Then it turns out to be easier after several minutes' rest to decide to do it after all.

Problem with backup volumes

I started seeing bad blocks from the external Seagate SSDs that I was using for backups so I bought Western Digital spinning-disk drives instead and new cables and moved to using those. They too worked fine for a while but now I am starting to see unreadable disk sectors again.

I guess that I can't rule out some issue with the OpenBSD Intel Wildcat xHCI driver; the relevant computer will soon be shifting to NetBSD. Though, I think that I managed to reproduce the bad sectors from the Seagate drives on my Linux laptop. I am trying one of the suspect Western Digital drives on a NetBSD computer next.

I want removable drives because transport by car remains a great way to arrange off-site backups. I am wondering what my next move should be but I should not procrastinate as unreliable backup volumes are intolerable.