100 Grades Per Minute

It has taken time for me to post this because I wanted to make sure everything was bedded down, calm and not influenced by the various emotional rollercoasters I have been on over the past week.

Currently I am a data assistant. At the end of the month I will be a data manager in a new school with a £5k pay rise, a scale going even higher and plenty of responsibility. And my own office. I don't care how small it is, I have my own office.

Of course, it comes at a cost! ...

They can create some interesting results out of the blue.

There has been some awful news coverage today of the privacy policy updates being carried out by Google. Many people are being misled by the reduction of the 70 seperate policies currently being agreed to down to 1 policy for 1 unified platform. It makes business sense and whilst there are always some concerns when changes are made to any organisation's policy, the storm in a teacup is being made worse by the media again.

This morning on BBC News, the story broke about Google's changes ...

Recycling bins filling up, spam folders overflowing. Yes it's that time of year again when you come into work with a bag full of leaflets and find half of them make their way into the bin. BETT 2012 is finished and the dust is settling in the Olympia Exhibition Hall for the last time with BETT 2013 scheduled for the ExCeL Centre instead.

Click here for pciturs on Google+.

This year saw the return of the Edugeek stand to provide tech staff with an amusing diversion in ...

I will be at BETT 2012 and can't wait for it to come. Partly for "professional development," partly to see you Edugeekers again and partly to restock my desk with a bagful of freebie office supplies.

My freebie-fu was weak last year. With any luck it has since improved!

When you output dates in SIMS with the Reporting tool, the results will come out as text and cannot be converted into a proper date with the number format window. This is a fix used in the SIMS Standard Portrait template to prevent Excel from throwing a fit and entering the data incorrectly. You can modify the template and remove the fix but that is best left to advanced users, there is a simpler option.

Let's take a date in the format "1 March 2012" in cell C2. You can ...

Also a shameless plug for my Google+ account.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/11068277...ts/a5VE8XZRqeB

Those are my two cats on the cake.

This has to be the most obnoxious printer I have used lately (with the exception of our new Ricoh at work but that's a photocopier and sits top of the evil hardware food chain automatically).

I can't think of any printer that will jam it's print jobs, make you so frustrated that you turn it off....then print what you wanted to when you turn it back on a week later. And it still refuses to print what you want to print even if you power cycle it.

This printer isn't just failing, ...

For the past few years we have had some terrible snowfalls. For the most part it is further north this year with the south being mostly unaffected. Forecasts show a brief minor risk of snow flanked either side with rain and rather mild temperatures nearer Christmas.

So where is this snow? Seems to be plenty of gimmicks being punted by the advertisers.

I know people who have gone out buying snow shoe grips, snow chains, all sorts of stuff that you should use abroad in ...

The home phone rings right before a nice cup of coffee and interrupting a typical British chat about the weather.

"Hello, I'm calling from Scottish power. Is Mrs X in?"

"Uhh..no this is a relative, she isn't here. Is this a sales call?"

"No, a sales call would be if I was offering the beast deal for your electricity or gas."

What a weird thing to say. Maybe this is a genuine call for said relative. I decide ...