Work

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! ...

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.

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

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 ...

It happens to everyone sooner or later. You get to work with the nagging feeling that you are missing something. Something important, all the way until you pull in to the car park at work.

And realise you have forgotten your wallet.

I have a supply of coffee at my desk, no problem. But lunch may be a problem unless...

15 minutes later after heading off on my break, I have a pound coin in my hand scavenged from my car ashtray. Will it be enough? Where ...

And I made a biggy!

This year we decided to set up SIMS Learning Gateway to comply with the 2010 Online Reporting requirements. These required us to provide a means of serving school reports to parents online for which Learning Gateway does perfectly. But as we roll into the close of the written reports cycle, there are lessons to learn.

First off I overestimated how much Assessment Manager can cope with. Figuring staff were used to it for single grades, it is terrible ...

To my local newsagent, please correctly label your sandwiches. When I buy a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich I expect tuna and sweetcorn as a filling, not for half the tuna to be replaced with shredded cabbage. If the sandwich was labelled "Tuna and Cabbage with Occasional Flecks of Sweetcorn" I would have left it on the shelf.

And thus, a rants category is born on the blog.

A while ago, I recall Angry Technician discussing how he had a chronic case of "The Ear," an ability to walk past any machine, stop and instinctively know something is wrong and require fixing.

I had such an episode today dealing with tick grids for the end of year process in SIMS. I believe they call it curriculum assignment but after a while, hours of ticking boxes against a list causes the brain to melt slightly and simplify the entire system down to "Tick Grids." ...

Nothing makes your mouth water quite like two large boxes of biscuits appearing on your desk. We are talking nearly 100 per box of various delicacies from jammy dodgers to shortbread. Tasty!

But wait, these biscuits, I recognise that box. We had those for supervised study...a couple of...years...back...

Librarian: "Oh those are for the bin. I found them in the store cupboard and they went off September 2008."

Surprisingly, they still look like ...

Sometimes strange kit get's pulled up from the depths of the school and sent off to the school's technical team as "potentially useful." It's a common occurance and every technician with a blog has probably posted recollections of their old kit found in the dark corner of a classroom or server room.

Today is no exception when I was handed some old kit that the PE Department had cleared out of their gym. Amongst them was a still camera with a likely usable lens and couple ...

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