jcollings

Me personally!

Sadly I'm excited by the fact I'm on it! I really must find more to do with my life!

I have had cards & cancelled them over the years and it doesn't seem to have had an impact on my credit rating as far as I can tell.

Worth giving these guys a shout Audioworks (NW) Online We use them for lots of stuff and they're very good.

No - it's really easy to get it reduced. Step 1 - ring and cancel the account Step 2 - Cut card into many pieces Step 3 - Post bits back to company Step 4 - No limit issue on the card

I whole heartedly agree. I did the ambassador training a while back and it was probably one of the best courses I've been on (and one of the most shocking). Well worth the time.

We've got some secure desks but haven't had that issue. We have had an issue with some of the cabling and things and I have to say Ergo were fantastic. They came out and had a look and decided to do some modifications. They did this the next week and put an engineer on site for the day to tidy up all the little niggles. I would certainly drop them a line and see what they say. I couldn't have been happier with the way the handled our problems.

Surely the charge is possesion of prawnography

Can you play around with distortion & effects in Audacity? Something at the back of my mind seems to think you can but I don't use it often enough to know for sure.

We have a SharePoint based VLE hosted by LP+. We also have access to Moodle provided by our RBC however for a long (and dull) list of reasons we didn't take up the RBC hosted Moodle and decided to use SharePoint. It has been very well recieved here and we now use it as our public website, staff portal (all info. is disemminated via this), student portal, governors portal, subject sites and for parental reporting. Currently the parental reporting side is limited but we are building on this as LP+ develop more SIMS webparts. Having spent most of my time for the last year or so working with staff to embed this into our Teaching & Learning / admin areas I think it's a fantastic route to go down. If I were starting over I would still make the same choice although I'd be hard pushed to come up with a logical argument as to why - it somehow just felt like the right thing for us although I know many colleagues are running fantastic Moodle sites. I think more important than the choice of platform is the ethos behind how it is implemented. If a school (and I am not saying this is true in your case) just want to have a VLE so they can say they have one & tick a box it will not work. We have put considerable resources into making it work here; hours of training, one to one sessions, building sites for people, sharing that within our federation etc. Teachers have prioritised it, it appears on at least one member of staff from each departements performance management. This has all been backed by a very clear line from SLT that it is important and something we are focusing on. We are now at a stage where the VLE is growing in use as more & more departments start to use it for resources etc. We're also talking to primary schools about bringing them on board soon. It's been fantastic to be leading the project but I have not doubt it would not have been so successful if it hadn't been backed from the top. After that long winded ramble, in a nutshell what I am saying is your SLT need to know this isn't just about choosing a piece of software. Mike Herrity at Twynham School is a good guy to talk to - they're doing some very exciting & innovative stuff. Also LP+ are worth talking to - they've got some excellent strategies around bringing a VLE to fruition.

Sharepoint is pretty good for most things we find.

We do this on a regular basis. We basically ask staff to give us an indication of all their ICT wishes, this can be anything they see improving T&L/Admin including IWB, projectors, laptops, netbooks, software, staff development etc. etc. All of these things go onto a school wide "wish list" and the IT strategy group look at how much money we have to spend annually and prioritise the list. Obviously that is a simplification of our process and much dialogue happens. The other thing we do is publish the costed wishlist and are totally transparent about how & why something sits in the list where it does. Of course all this is tied into the schools wider development plan. It seems to hit the mark for staff and works well here.

If you've had the RAM & some batteries and only paid for those bits you have received I don't really see the issue. Unless I'm missing something all you need to do is cancel the order for the missing bits (which you haven't paid for yet) and place it with someone else. It's a bit annoying if you have to re-source and place a new order elsewhere but no more than that surely.

You've a long way to go to smurfdom yet. Check this guy out [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq8C0GknwAM]YouTube- Blue Man[/ame]

I'm just in the process of giving lessons (to supplement his instructer led lessons) to my 17 year old lad and things certaintly seem different than when I did it many years back. I've also been getting quotes for insurance for him and am struggling to get anything under £2k on the cheapest, non-chav cars I can think of! Any tips on who to try from the youngsters on here would be most welcome. He's happy enough to have an uncool car just to get on the road! At 2k plus a year I think he'll be sticking with his scooter for another year or so. Does anyone know - if he gets a years no claims on his bike can he transfer that to car insurance when he switches over?

Totally agree - as someone once said "better to arrive 5 minutes late in this world than 5 minutes early in the next"

I spent ages playing that as a kid - loved it!

Well I'm off to North Wales for the week tomorrow with 200 Year 7s so I hope there isn't too much snow to interupt our travels! On the other hand a massive snowball fight whilst there could be fun!

We use Lesson Monitor for all registers, AM, PM, every period and it generally works well. A few moans to start with but now it's just second nature. SLT drove it hard to begin with which helped. We are about 1440 students inc. 6th form and all years are recorded. Every staff member has a laptop which helped as did the introduction of managed site wide wireless. The SIMS side of things has never really caused us any issues (touch wood!) Having it all in one place is great and it ties into our text system for 1st day contact etc. All in all a resounding success here.

I wouldn't believe all you read in the reviews. We have a version her - Dance Ejay and the music staff love it. They use it a lot in their area and the kids seem to enjoy it too. Ejay are very much alive and kicking though: Ejay

I certainly wouldn't let not having server skills put you off applying. The last guy I took on was up against people who were probably more experienced/more qualified but there was just something about him we (the panel) liked - he was keen and just showed the right attitude. As a result he got the job - now he is learning server stuff & becoming an excellent & popular techie around the school. Personally I look at the whole person when interviewing and I'd rather take someone on who is perhaps less qualified but has the right attitude/people skills than someone very qualified who can't relate to people very well. IT skills are pretty easy to teach someone with the right attitude/apptitude - people skills are much more difficult to teach IMHO I stress this is just my opinion based on what I've seen when recruiting over the last 15 years or so.

Del's dad doesn't die in the next one (hopefully) as he appears in Only Fools & Horses later.

I thought it was pretty good. Lots of lovely little details drawn from Fools & Horses, great soundtrack & interesting characterisations. Even the odd Pinteresque moment in the cafe/Johnny Ray scene! All in all good stuff. Be interesting to see more of it.

I send my junior techie in for 10 mins - if he comes out blue it's cool enough, red - it's too warm.

The download manager works fine here so I don't think CLEO have it blocked in any way. We've tried to steer people away from Photoshop (in most cases it's totally under-used - even in our Art department) and towards some of the free products. GimpShop being one.