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!
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 Alps (who ironical
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 to press further.
"Oh right, she isn't here right now. What is the call ab
My Saturday was spent attending the Eurogamer Expo at Earl's Court, London. This trade show was a chance for members of the public and video games industry to show off their future releases and next-gen technology. And it is brimming with technology.
One of the most popular stands was the OnLive service. Recently launched in the UK, the service jumps aboard the cloud bandwagon and tries to offer gamers the chance to stream titles online using a PC or a micro-console. This small box was availa
After acquiring a new HTC Wildfire S and trying to sign up (still unsuccesfully) to the My Orange site, I was greeted with this Captcha:
Not even Google knows what a tooder is, why they are massive or why there are more then one so I guess you will need to use your own imagination.
A program called Breaking In is being launched in America and it is the IT world's equivalent of CSI. the show follows a fictional IT team breaking into museums, nicking cars and doing other things that real security researchers likely don't do as part of their day to day affairs. The producers even created a Flash game for people to play around in and supposedly "hack" by guessing a password.
Unfortunately for the show's marketing team, one user responded to the Naked Security blog post abou
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 can I get something decent for only
Soon! I'll be heading off tomorrow, time to get packing I guess. Should get my gadgets charged just in-case, and find the charger for my netbook. Those universal ones are useless.
Hmmm, DSi with Advance Wars will keep me occupied on the train. If my next blog post is from Wales you will know I missed my stop because of it.
Geeky T-Shirt, got plenty. Which one to pick!
Have I forgotten something? Oh yes, a pen and notepad so I actually remember what was said! See you guys there!
A little game for you. Exceptionally geeky folks may get this immediately (or even know already what this post will be about). What is wrong with this picture?
I'll let you look at that for a minute. See anything?
OK? Done.
Note the command itself:
dir "windows/logs"
I had no idea until today that, if you include the full path in double quotes, Windows will happily accept the / symbol in place of the normal \ symbol for separating folder names. Go try it now, but wildcards wo
Some may remember my previous post about what bored kids do with their time afterschool. Recently, the cousin to the confectionary based caterpillar turned up. I present to you, the Tiny Paper Snail.
Only school kids can take something so simple and make you go awww.
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 biscuits. Even more surprisingly, someone d
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 of camcorders. There
Year 13 chose today as their "muck-up day" as the pupils call it. Hence the current sights of Post-It notes declaring how we are going to miss them (amongst other messages) scattered accross the whole school. I'm not kidding either, every wall in every corridor and room accessible to the pupils are scattered with Post-It notes. It's like a tornado of sticky bits of paper whisked through the school over Period 1 and as fast as they come down, the walls are covered again.
It's pretty hilarious
One of my jobs each week is to assemble the school's display that is shown above reception. This typically involves a slideshow of images, which this week was provided by staff who were on a ski trip.
While looking at one image something stood out. That familiar stall where something isn't right or unusual on the screen and prevents me from moving on until I twig what it is. Students, check. Restaurant, OK that's normal so check. Appears to be at the top of the slopes, nice view in the backgr
...you stick pins in marshmellow caterpillars. Wait I don't think I got the little Internet meme correct there.
Some may recall my previous blog entry of why the education secotor is so enjoyable. The discovery of this little chap when cleaning up after the afterschool crowd further reinforces this. How random but cute!
Sometimes I look at why I work for lower money then my corporate counterparts in IT. Then I realise in corporate IT, you don't get strange and random situations every day due to the unpredictability of the students at the school.
As an example, I currently have some of the older kids singing a joint rendition of the song below in one of the corridors outside my office. You won't see that in corporate IT.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4]YouTube- Potter Puppet Pals in "The My
And in celebration of this an order was given from the top to not use any heating in the school for some reason. Everyone was freezing cold but we dilgently followed the order as obeyed. No heating on in our department!
We used the air-con instead. Bliss!
There is no better way to end a day at work then spending a bit of afterwork (unpaid) time getting a printer to demand more cheese to print.
PJLTalk is your cheesy friend for this.
Note that this doesn't affect the printer's operation or stop it printing.
