beeswax

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouser_press

http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/council/jobs/now.html#itech

something to add from the meeting, "how come someone doing this job in a primary school is on the same grade as those in a secondary?" "It's not about how much work you do, it's about job skills." "So how come the head of our 1250 pupil secondary school gets 4 times as much as the head of the 240 pupil primary down the road?" I'd like some answers to that conundrum.

Support staff had a meeting with the person from the council responsible for our job evaluations this afternoon, and it was admitted that they didn't really know what our jobs entailed, so we're going to have new evaluations sent out. Our council did what they call a question trace with selected people from various schools in different support jobs. The "trace" means that all the following questions in a section depend on how you answered the first one. Sadly they wouldn't tell us the name of the individual who did this on "behalf" of the IT Technicians, as this post may then have been advertising a vacancy (or two). They (the council rep) all but admitted that those questioned for the most part worked in the primary sector (no offence intended), and the upshot is that almost everyone is going to have a new job evaluation done, and maybe I'll get a chance to do the question trace. I'll give you a flavour of the questions, and the answers submitted, "Is the jobholder required to develop any plans for actions, activities or events which are to happen some time in the future?" and, "Is the jobholder ever subject to unavoidable interruptions which make it difficult to complete the job duties?" The answer given to the first is NO, and the answer given to the second is NO, RARELY IF EVER. And on this are our job evaluations built. For those who haven't gone through this process yet, and I shouldn't think there are that many, we were divided into 3 categories, those who took up their posts after the evaluation began, those in "unique" posts, jobs that no one else does (apparently NM's come into this category), and the large middle ground, taking in everyone else. After today's meeting, the unique category has grown and the middle ground has shrunk considerably. It's all got to be sorted by next April, though. When the unions gave their views on this the council told them that it was "too late for inclusion" in their considertions. We were told that when the eventual final job evaluations and attached grades are handed out, not to expect the new grade/pay scale to match the old one. My (highly coloured) view is that if our salaries can be reduced now it will make us more attractive to "tupe" or port, into private companies. If this is not coherent, don't blame me, as I'm only expected to use a keyboard infrequently.

no

We have a problem at our school in that we have different versions of the Promethean IWB in various classrooms. The teachers come in with their laptops, plug in and find that they don't have the right software for that board. When you try and install the correct version, it uninstalls the previous version, which means that as soon as they go into another classroom with a newer or older IWB. Is there any way round this? (I don't want to go inot the politics of why staff have laptops rather than a fixed machine in every room, thankyou) beeswax

this link has been posted before, but I think it's worth adding it here -

we have several laptops with a small button on the front which activates the onboard wireless card. The default is off, so once again chicken and egg. In the bios I found a setting which said "Turn on power for wireless devices and camera". This was unchecked. I checked this and rebooted. The light for the wireless card came on within moments of rebooting. Hope this helps.

...and of course, if you work in a school, a big slice of that pie also goes on time spent getting content from teachers.

I don't know how long you've been at your present school, but last year I'd just started work the week of the open evening. What happened was that I was called to one room 20 minutes into the evening to be told that the IWB wasn't working, and I couldn't get it to work there and then. It wasn't until I sat down with the other techies the following day to discuss the previous evening that that I discovered that this teacher was a particular problem (printer not working - not switched on etc). If you've any members of staff like this, double check that everything's working as it should. Ask them what they need for the evening, then double check it shortly before the evening begins. You may never see the parents ever again...

this a BSF thing? Yes it is. We (the techies) may well be out on our ears in a few years time, or tuped(?) though I don't think so. There is a teacher here who used to work in a secondary school where all the IT support was contracted out, his tales about that are our best ammunition with the head, who, to be fair, has said he'll fight to keep us. I judge him to be honest in this. As for the only jobs guaranteed being the teachers', all those just over 50 at our school have said they will apply for posts at the closing or merging schools in order to be offered early retirement (there'll be no compulsory redundancies - among teachers at least).

Had our meeting on Tuesday. 2000 excess places in schools so 2 are to be merged and one closed completely. fortune ately told we were one of the schools to be rebuilt possibly starting 2010. I agree these are worrying times for some. We were told there would be no forced redundancies, how they'll manage that I don't know, tho' some of the older staff have thought of applying for positions in the schools needing to close/merge with a view to being offered early retirement. Have to agree with Russ, the term value added comes to mind. At the same time as all this the council is running its job evaluation programme and we (the techies) got ours on Monday. It seems we are not required to handle sensitive data (so that's SIMS out the window), or plan ahead, or learn new skills, though it does involve a small amount of thinking. From what I gather the process is called a Question Trace, and they ask a "representative sample" of techies in the borough an opening question, then how you answer that governs which branch of questioning you're taken down.

Your in-depth knowledge of E-Learning will prove useful to those of us who are E-Learning managers, IT techies, website designers and wet nurses. beeswax

We used towelling for both our daughters and 16 years later they can still be used for cleaning windows etc.

I know it sounds like a good idea, but you could end up quite innocently storing other peoples' personal details on your machine at home, which wouldn't endear you to the data protection people.

This may not be the right forum for this question, but I don't know where else to post it. I need to buy a laptop backpack for my daughter before she goes back to university in a couple of weeks time. She's studying abroad and the airline allows students to take laptops on as hand luggage for free, and they don't count towards the weight limit. Obviously, we're looking for something like a backpack which is relatively large, and which can take some of her medical books. Does anyone have any recommendations?

I've just been imaging 15 Stone laptops with broadcom nics, and when it came to creating the boot disk the protocol.ini file was incorrect, in that it had a blank space where the drivername should be, i.e. "[protman] drivername=PROTMAN$ [pktdrv] drivername=PKTDRV$ bindings=nic intvec=0x60 chainvec=0x66 [nic] drivername = [this space was blank]" it should have had B44$, without the brackets, for the Broadcom 440X 10/100. worked fine after that. I've never had this problem before creating a boot disk.

Week 4 in the Big IT Office. H is busy trying to finish fitting the new servers in the new rack before being released on Wednesday. S is configuring the new security scanning device and preparing for this year's GCSE results. Beeswax is trying to finalise several images for roll-out, while the electrician figures out why the power keeps tripping, and the people laying new flooring in the IT suites finish their job a mere 10 days over time. Then he's being voted out at the end of the week when he's going to Italy with a paintbrush to "finish off" Da Vinci's Last Supper by adding a pda to the right hand of Judas. Let's see what Dan Brown makes of that. Kaleidos was already installed on the server, something I wasn't sure about when I posted my message last night. However, it needed some folder permissions changing, and an engineer from RM talked me through some other stuff as well. The client install was much easier than I feared (c/f KS3 Pilot). @Bossman: I'm interested to read that it works well with Promethean, as that's what we have here. Is there anything special about the relationship, or is it just that it projects well?

[align=justify]has anyone installed this software on their server? what, if any, were the problems encountered. I'll be trying to get it on a Win2K3 server sometime next week. I don't know what version it is at the moment.[/align]

some interesting replies. These are brand new machines from Stone, all with sata drives. I used one machine to prepare the image, installing the os and all the software, and took the image from that to my machine, which is how we've always done it, but it was very slow. Trying to put the image out to the other new machines seemed to be going well, with each machine picking up the session but then they would just hang until the process timed out. The ide machines, set up with the same os and software just sailed throught the process both ways. I'm matching like with like here, no ide to sata, for example. But that little switch, -NOIDE, did the trick. I'd like to say it all went swimmingly, but a fuse kept tripping (yeah man) which left half the room powerless. But that's another problem for another day.

..and the flex for the iron!

I can update this post now. After a tired and fruitless search last night, not long after posting here, I tried another search, and seem to have come up with an answer, i.e. the image is 33% done. Use the switch -NOIDE if copying and imaging solely between sata drives. If you have an IDE and an SATA drive, or only IDE drives -FNI Forces Ghost to use the BIOS to gain access to the IDE drive. Up to 44% now.

does anyone have any experience of creating and sending out images from ghost 8 and sata drives?

...and your point is?

did you get the stuff I sent you? beeswax