I've ended up writing two daft books about being a school IT manager

[LeonardTwitty]

Moving a classroom board around because apparently being the last to know is the standard in my school!

[smurfomatic]

Went to a BBQ on Friday night with a group of colleagues from the school I worked at. Great to see them, but was reminded of one of the older staff member's technical prowess when she was taling about using "the Google thingy" to find her way there...

Edited August 23 by smurfomatic

[LeonardTwitty]

46 minutes ago, smurfomatic said:

Went to a BBQ on Friday night with a group of colleagues from the school I worked at. Great to see them, but was reminded of one of the older staff member's technical prowess when she was taling about using "the Google thingy" to find her way there...

Haha we have a PE teacher just like that. He insists on having the same password for everything. It's a war I gave up on long ago.

[smurfomatic]

33 minutes ago, LeonardTwitty said:

Haha we have a PE teacher just like that. He insists on having the same password for everything. It's a war I gave up on long ago.

 

Funny that, the person I was talking about was a PE teacher too...

[LeonardTwitty]

7 minutes ago, smurfomatic said:

 

Funny that, the person I was talking about was a PE teacher yeah its weird really because they are very set in their ways

 

[MartinT]

PE staff are the worst for technology and for writing prowess.  I used to help out with report reading and the PE ones were shockers.

[LeonardTwitty]

1 hour ago, MartinT said:

PE staff are the worst for technology and for writing prowess.  I used to help out with report reading and the PE ones were shockers.

Haha we have 2 of them, one is past retirement age but is proper old school, and the other tries to act tough but it doesn't work lol.

[LeonardTwitty]

So after going back and forth with Amazon, they will allow me to publish new black and white versions of the books which will then be linked to the series and then I can remove the colour ones.  Apparently its something you have to ask for.......its like working in a school haha getting blood from a stone.  Or more appropriately creating miracles with no budget!!

[Rob_D]

8 minutes ago, LeonardTwitty said:

So after going back and forth with Amazon, they will allow me to publish new black and white versions of the books which will then be linked to the series and then I can remove the colour ones.

I'd have thought you could just publish the BW versions as a revision to the paperback.

[LeonardTwitty]

Just now, Rob_D said:

I'd have thought you could just publish the BW versions as a revision to the paperback.

No because once you pick the paper and style, it gets locked to the books ISBN.  They won't allow it to be changed.

[LeonardTwitty]

So after some lovely help from amazon kdp at 6am this morning the black and white versions are now linked in and the colour versions are out, reviews and sales data is transferred too, also sat working on book 3 this morning so hopefully once the draft is finished and approved by my most critical of fans (my wife) I can have it out by Xmas.  Now working on promotion and expanding the reach of the books.  All work and no play lol.  Thanks again for all the support guys and girls. It means more that you know!  The more people my books reach the more it drives me to keep going!  Also news from work, we are moving to HWB soon......a forced move by the local authority yay a fun new term to look forward too.

Edited August 26 by LeonardTwitty

[LeonardTwitty]

Right. I've spent a fortnight clogging up my own thread with Amazon admin — royalties, ISBNs, whether the paperbacks ought to be colour. Nobody comes to General Chat for that. Back to the point of it.

Here's the bit of book one that gets quoted back at me more than anything else.

[Derek exchange — "We don't talk about Derek" through "Many things about Derek are not technically possible."]

Not one person has ever told me Derek is a good character. What they say is "we've got one of those."

Which was rather the point.

So — what's yours? Every school I've set foot in has a box that everyone has quietly agreed not to touch, where nobody can tell you what it does any more, only what happened the last time somebody tried to find out.

And an actual offer, rather than me pointing at Amazon again. Book three is being written now. Same school, same nonsense. Put your Derek in this thread and I'll use the good ones — anonymized, obviously, the school's invented and every name gets changed, same as the first two. Anyone whose machine makes it in gets their EduGeek name in the acknowledgements if they want it there, or left out entirely if they'd rather.

Seems only fair.

[BKGarry]

The closest I have to a Derek is a machine I am not responsible, it is the Building Management System, that only recently got moved to Windows 10 (thats right to Windows 10), that controls everything to do with the building and airflow etc. Luckily not the schools actual responsibility for another 8 years yet

[LeonardTwitty]

3 hours ago, BKGarry said:

The closest I have to a Derek is a machine I am not responsible, it is the Building Management System, that only recently got moved to Windows 10 (thats right to Windows 10), that controls everything to do with the building and airflow etc. Luckily not the schools actual responsibility for another 8 years yet

Haha we have a Biomass system on windows 10 also not our responsibility. However my predecessor did dismantle it for scrap.  Luckily they noticed and were able to set it back up......

[MartinT]

Oh, BMS, I do remember having one of those.  We had to give Facilities remote capability to that server as they seemingly needed to tweak it at all hours of the day and night.

 

Our own Derek was at a previous school.  A box running Linux and goodness knows what (some kind of POP and SMTP for mail) that needed to be kept running or else e-mail into a single secretary would stop working.  I finally got rid of it by moving to an Exchange Server a couple of years later.

[smurfomatic]

Our "Derek"s were two PCs owned by the Learning Support department. Still running Windows XP long after it went out of support, so they were taken off network. Purely because it ran one piece of software they used all the time - which was no longer available and certainly wouldn't run on a newer system (it barely ran on XP!) but they couldn't find an alternative system. Still going, somehow, when I left in 2021...

Edited August 27 by smurfomatic

[LeonardTwitty]

21 minutes ago, MartinT said:

Oh, BMS, I do remember having one of those.  We had to give Facilities remote capability to that server as they seemingly needed to tweak it at all hours of the day and night.

 

Our own Derek was at a previous school.  A box running Linux and goodness knows what (some kind of POP and SMTP for mail) that needed to be kept running or else e-mail into a single secretary would stop working.  I finally got rid of it by moving to an Exchange Server a couple of years later.

Haha that's a good one the secretarial email life line.

[LeonardTwitty]

8 minutes ago, smurfomatic said:

Our "Derek"s were two PCs owned by the Learning Support department. Still running Windows XP long after it went out of support, so they were taken off network. Purely because it ran one piece of software they used all the time - which was no longer available and certainly wouldn't run on a newer system (it barely ran on XP!) but they couldn't find an alternative system. Still going, somehow, when I left in 2021...

Haha yeah been there, our additional learning team use outdated software all the time, not for the kids but because the teachers are useless with new technology!

[LeonardTwitty]

Just now, LeonardTwitty said:

Haha yeah been there, our additional learning team use outdated software all the time, not for the kids but because the teachers are useless with new technology!

Their computers are all off network, and the LA had to give them their own isolated VLAN.  They were not happy!

[LeonardTwitty]

Ok so we have heard off two people so far about their own "Dereks"  lets have some more stories about the difficult systems in your own workplace  there must be something that when you hear its name you come out in a cold sweat but also have a weird respect for!!

[LeonardTwitty]

Nobody's biting, so here's a better question than the one I asked.

 

What's the oldest thing still in active production on your network?

 

I'll start the bidding. We have a Windows XP machine that runs one piece of software for one department, that has been reformatted twice and came back both times, and that the previous IT manager left a note about rather than an explanation.

 

It's called Derek. Not by me, I should say. It named itself, after a login screen corruption in about 2015, and nobody has had the nerve to correct it since.

 

Go on then. Year and model. I fully expect to be beaten.

[southhamster]

Ok. My "Derek" was a hidden espresso box... For those of a tender disposition, espresso was a sort of local web cache to serve frequently accessed pages in the days when internet bandwidth was laughably inadequate, think ISDN 128K. I started work as a network manager and engaged new broom mode by clearing out the server cupboard. What's that PC at the back there hidden behind all the random stuff? An old espresso box. Huh, they won't need that, they're on a really fast 2mb line; I'll rip it out. Some time later, "the internet's broken" Ooops... Frantic race to change the proxy settings to redirect to the ISP, not the espresso and a lesson learnt. Until the next time when I disconnected a redundant and not recommended overhead cat5 cable only to find there was no fibre link between buildings..  

[LeonardTwitty]

3 hours ago, southhamster said:

Ok. My "Derek" was a hidden espresso box... For those of a tender disposition, espresso was a sort of local web cache to serve frequently accessed pages in the days when internet bandwidth was laughably inadequate, think ISDN 128K. I started work as a network manager and engaged new broom mode by clearing out the server cupboard. What's that PC at the back there hidden behind all the random stuff? An old espresso box. Huh, they won't need that, they're on a really fast 2mb line; I'll rip it out. Some time later, "the internet's broken" Ooops... Frantic race to change the proxy settings to redirect to the ISP, not the espresso and a lesson learnt. Until the next time when I disconnected a redundant and not recommended overhead cat5 cable only to find there was no fibre link between buildings..  

Haha i love it