tsky

Wow, I was listening to Kreaftwerk last night while rebuilding systems at home... Currently listening to lots of early Black Sabbath... rather loud before I head into a meeting with SMT again. Daren't listen to anything heavier or I might actually whip out a baseball bat ....

I work with J17Sparky, we did a rough audit before just putting in PCounter... total site figures were around this per month: Mono Photocopying - 158,835 Mono Printing - 13,333 Colour Copying - 666 Colour Printing - 4167 Hopefully reducing this now that they see on screen they have very little money left in their electronic pot.

give them a selection of bulbs and a screwdriver and see how long it keeps them entertained

I love how us IT geeks are l00t whores for stuff... Every year I went to InfoSec I was like a child in a candy store named "Everything is free if you can stuff it in your pockets". Many a stand I'd glaze over and shriek "blah blah, whatever, stuff everything you have into this backpack and I'll look at your information later" Hurrah for freebies. Lamentably, I'm not able to make BETT this year... perhaps we need some kind of regional l00t whorage festival in which we can all line our pockets with.. er.. I mean find out useful information from companies and partake in their services.... yes.. that's what I meant.

I just wasted five minutes of my life reading all this ... cheers, I'm never getting that back.. you owe me cake on top of the pizza you owe me for all that hardware I gave you (glad you got it sorted bud!)

Has no one considered the irony of this though.... Quoth the geek from classic RATM... "***K you I won't do what you tell me"

"there no way my food tray will make it intact past that mouth...." ???

I'd like to know too... and also if they'd like to employ me to do the job at £36-40K a year from my house

direct in/out - literally has the gateway as our router. sits with direct (every port) access connected to the Internet - though it is through the NGfL, and we all know what that means... Not sure if it's a recent service pack knocking the damn thing out - going to try a complete base install of XP with no service packs...

keep getting the same error messages on our servers technical support ticket still open - onto engineer number 3 get the usual: "are you SURE that the shares are writable?", "yes - everyone has access to do EVERYTHING" "are you SURE it can access the Internet ok?" "yes, it's on the OTHER SIDE of our firewall and the server is being belted by everything the web throws at it with NO FIREWALL TURNED ON" going to try AGAIN putting it on an XP machine and then throwing that on the other side of the firewall to see if we can get it to work that way.

No, you're missing the point - we have to SACK teachers and SLT so that we CAN buy gold plated Alienware PC's for the Support staff....

All I wear is black short sleeves... Matalan do a range of shirts cheap tho for the chic geek. Reporter: "Mr Cash, why do you always wear black" Johnny Cash: "Because that's the way I feel"

Firstly... well done on putting the video together - you've obviously spent a lot of time on it. You have a nice environment to work in too... Secondly... uuuurgh so many aspects of this building scream "I'm an architect and I don't have the first clue about education!" Same sex toilets - are they shared by staff too? That's a common one in architects minds - yes what a good idea, let's have the little darlings all mixing with each other while they go to the can, that won't unsettle the poor Y7 girls when the Y11 boys are all taking a leak... One of the worst ones I've seen is the notion of staff and kids in the same toilets... yeah because THAT's not going to cause issues for teachers the kids hate... Floor to ceiling doors in the toilets too.. hmmm... drug-taking/glue sniffing/smokers dream that one.. not to mention the fact they'll all be sh4gg1ng their tiny braincell out....CONSTANTLY Swivel chairs... ARRRGH! no no no no no! It works with 6th formers and university students but not with hormonal little numpties that decide to see how many RPM they can manage out of them during your lesson (and don't pull the "well manage them better in class" b0ll0x because I'd love to see you do that with some of the kids I used to teach that were all statemented, on various types of legal and non-legal narcotics and have a history of mental illness!) Big atriums... look great, wonderfully impressive for the corporate market - but really, no no - REALLY, think about it... that's probably around 30-50 classrooms you're wasting as empty space you have to heat. Much more cost effective to have a bleedin rectangular block as a building... s0d the "wow" factor and go for functional and useful every time. Are there computer labs in large open spaces only? Maaaan that's going to be a nightmare to teach in.. I had a room that was the size of two rooms (one side designed as computer area, the other as written area) and invariably my HoD would dump his class on me so I'd have 60 of the little darlings to look after over a massive space... uuuurgh. So glad I'm back in the IT Support role. Colours, colours everywhere and most of them associated with driving mental illness... (check colours not to use online if you don't believe me - yellow is bad). Yes it looks lovely, yes I'm having a personal rant about what I think is idiocy - but I've been in FE and in Secondary and in the real world and I've seen who drives these kind of building projects - greasy little architects and councillors who like to be patted on the back and palms greased with tax payers money. £32 Million eh? I don't think there's much value for money in there ....

Supanames.com - used them a few times, or 123-reg.co.uk - they're good and cheap too..

Same here, we use it in every classroom so we can start the live reporting to parents over the next year. You just need education of users, teach them the shortcuts and reap the benefits!

I think I could have coped with just the extra work that was dumped on our lap the first week of the holidays, and the fact I lost a member of staff as he moved to a better paid job - the thing that killed it for us was the need for our ISP (sleazynet) and LEA to communicate together and make the connection changes we needed at a specific time, then not doing them for 5 weeks which had a knock-on effect on all our schedules. How difficult do you reckon it would be to make some router changes? Well, it's taken five months of constant badgering! The amount of work was already huge due to increased computing requirements and deployment of whole new virtualised infrastructure, a big job for two people - but a lot of it hung off what IP ranges we were supposed to have, what routing kit was being changed, what hardware we were expecting in on "promised" deadlines. I worked out that around 75% of my orders this year from my vendors (who were previously ok) have been wrong, delayed or cancelled because they "didn't actually have that stock to sell" (which strangely only ever gets mentioned the week that payment is due). I think it's a harsh lesson learned this year, lots on - not enough workforce - bad delivery times by external contractors. Next year we'll be doing less over the summer and more over the year I reckon, spacing out the bigger work.

Just pulled the latest copy of the software and attempted to put it on a new server.. seemed to go on fine until you try and log in at the web console on the server. comes back with the error: An error has occurred in ESMServer. Contact Pearson VUE Customer Support for further instructions. when you try and log in. If you give it the wrong details, it gives the "wrong username/password" message as you would expect, but when given the correct details is fails... Gives the following error in the log file: 12:52:10 08/27/2009: [ESMServer] Request from 127.0.0.1 with no cookie. 12:52:10 08/27/2009: [ESMServer] Session {FE5B7E6C-67EB-4DC3-8218-680BFAEFC09E} created for 127.0.0.1 (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)). 12:52:10 08/27/2009: [ESMServer] Forced login for session {FE5B7E6C-67EB-4DC3-8218-680BFAEFC09E}. 12:52:41 08/27/2009: [ESMDataServer] Mutex abandoned. 12:52:41 08/27/2009: [ESMDataServer] 12:52:41 08/27/2009: [ESMAuthentication] Error 80004005 at line 224 of C:\CAT Software 8.0 Builds\ENTERPRISESITEMANAGER\ESMAuthentication\Authentication.cpp. 12:52:41 08/27/2009: [ESMAuthentication] 12:52:41 08/27/2009: [ESMServer] Error 80004005 at line 241 of C:\CAT Software 8.0 Builds\ENTERPRISESITEMANAGER\ESMServer\CIWAuthentication.cpp. 12:52:41 08/27/2009: [PCLErrorBulletinDispatcher] ESMAuthentication: 12:54:08 08/27/2009: [ESMServer] Idle session deleted after 32 minutes for {D6A57733-5235-4FB0-865F-071BF8C6CED6} (127.0.0.1). 12:54:08 08/27/2009: [ESMServer] Idle session deleted after 33 minutes for {26C0DEF6-830F-4E9C-A4C0-B47BBA5378A1} (127.0.0.1). 12:54:08 08/27/2009: [ESMServer] Idle session deleted after 33 minutes for {F5786727-06B8-4B58-93D4-B0A3268B8F85} (127.0.0.1). anyone got any clues? never installed this before - technical support from the examboard and company that designed it is less than helpful. Have to get it installed today on new server as previous server detonated on booting.. Really don't want to have to reverse engineer this piece of junk .. have been looking through system for past hour and a half already checking it's installed ok....

Call it Jaypeg then get another and call it Empeg.

Is he a friend or does he deserve some stick? "well, finally, it appears his flat-pack bride from Russia has turned up... we might actually get some bandwidth back for classrooms from his excessive brides.ru surfing"

Glad you got it sorted ok!

The poor sods who are going to work here get a 2m x 4m box to work in. And I thought our office was bad enough at the moment! (Reprographics gets 40m2 in comparison for 2 large photocopiers)

Don't get me wrong, it's not the concept I disagree with, it's the idiocy of the systems and procedures in place.. The idea of building a school that is relevant and usable and forward-thinking is fantastic. I REALLY want things to work here - our school is in desperate need of an update and investment in a lot of areas being a co-funded aided school... my concern is that BSF has become yet another "one size fits all" approach where nothing is about education and improving standards and everything (just like they did with the CLC's) becomes about money money money and the appearance of doing something good rather than actually DOING it. ho hum. It's Friday... I need another black coffee laced with prozac.

...and this comes back to the fact that modern life has no accountability. Politicians and their pay, kids with their behaviour, parents with their parental responsibilty, schools and their BSF project... I have to get millions of quotes for any devolved capital budgets for scrutiny by the SMT and governors and say why I spend X amount on Y product... I'm responsible and accountable for my budgets. Yet with the BSF projects, it seems that you have little accountability from the contractors side - unless it implicitly says in the contract they're accountable, they can take the cash and run and shrug off the blame on their slopey slopey shoulders of responsibility. Just WHO is in charge, just WHO cares about these things ? Ask anyone and they'll all point fingers at each other so noone gets the blame.

Nail on the head right there. People who are paid extortionate amounts and they have no ability to project manage.

For all they rattle on about how we're going to "create new learning opportunities and enhance technology in education" all they really mean is "we like to have some computers that do word processing and web browsing". They've even put LESS labs on the new build plan than we have at the moment. We're going from having (counting in CLC use) 5 labs down to 2. Go figure. All they care about it seems is getting a nice new classroom that's painted the colours the teachers want. The infrastructure seems to be at the back of their minds. I was told "oh yes, we want wireless, yeah everything wireless" to which I replied "you can have wireless zones but your computers will be WIRED so get that out of your head right now. Just because it 'works at home' doesn't mean you can hang labs of desktop PC's that do video editing with remote storage (based on your plans) off it. GAAAAAHHHHH [Large panning shot of tsky screaming at the sky, zooming out google-maps stylee] They employ you to "make a difference" and "point us in the right direction because you have real-world experience" and what they REALLY mean is "can you keep us in stock with toner and make sure I can download all my pr0n ok please, I don't like change" *sobs into his very strong Java coffee* Knowing what the architects and builders are like in this place, even if we put in temporary links between sites they'll put a digger through it like they did with one of the other school blocks... [Crazy Admin Rant Warning!] It's absolutely crazy that every time I try and talk to the BSF consultants/architects/planners/buttmunchers all they say is "oh well, yes you have a vested intereste don't you - potentially losing your job!" "I DON'T GIVE A S4!7 ABOUT MY JOB ... I CARE ABOUT THE 1100 KIDS THAT CAN'T LEARN AND THE 100 STAFF THAT CAN'T TEACH YOU MORON!" When will these people start acting like the professionals they're supposed to be and talk about education as a WHOLE service instead of segregating each chunk of the rebuild. IT infrastructure is necessary to underpin everything.. from lowly registers to learning platforms, email, network storage, phone systems and computer labs. Aaaaaand what are they all winging about... what colour their walls are.. the fact they don't have an office for every member of staff... that they're not going to have a printer on their desk...