Rydra

I can just see it now! I feel so comfortable ringing up a call centre and handing over my personal details, hell I might even throw in my banking details while I'm at it. Especially to an ex-bank manager caught stealing from his own bank...

As I post this I'm aware a few others have posted about it before, but all the previous threads seemed to have gone off on a tangent. http://uk.linkedin.com/ I've recently been suggested the site, but am struggling to find groups worth adding, or anyone worth adding as a network (I generally don't add people from work, or from the internet as email contacts as I keep my work, friends and internet life seperate.) Anyone recommend some groups? There are too many in IT/education/recruitment to search it effectively without taking out a couple of days to do it.

I've had suppliers ring me up trying to get my business that have completely failed before; they suggested giving away all sorts of things to me for free if i agreed to send them business. I'd rather they knocked off £300 off my order of laptops than send me a PS3, tickets to football games or other tacky stuff that I don't need, and according to most LEA rules now am not allowed to accept personally.

As I sit here, I kid you not, I overheard one snippet of a conversation by some 8-9 year old boys outside my office... "You should see my horse..." That was all I could catch of the whole conversation. Am I the only sick-of-mind person that jumped straight to "MMMM Sweet Lemonade!"

They sell a few bits to do with networking/cabling/TV, but mostly stuff to help install it in your home. I cannot pop down to the huge B&Q store and pickup a new CPU or some memory upgrades

Please package up your borough and send it to me please. Just put it in the post, I'll sign on delivery... This is not common. In a time when we are looking at firing Teachers, TA's and support staff, the thought that some random schools are being given thousands in computing equipment sickens me. Those items could pay for one of my training courses that the school can't afford to send me on, for my server OS upgrade that I didn't have the budget for last year, or to employ some TA's for another few months. Hell, it would even go towards some of our places hiring replacements for all the techies that have left and not been replaced by SMT's.

Sorry, maybe it is a little old fashioned, but I just cannot bring myself to buy computers and home theatre based items from a houseware and clothing store.... Someone here wanted me to buy a computer for their dept from Marks and Spencer a while back, thankfully I found it slightly cheaper from a business supplier. I refuse to buy computer equipment from a home store for corporate use. What next, taking my laundry to Comet? I wait for B&Q to start selling computer components.....

Wow, and my wife tells me off for drinking 2 cans of Pepsi Max per day.....

4 years ago I went to an RM conference and they gave away an RM teddybear to all attendee's. For 3 years that bear was subjected to the evil doings of myself, the other techie and the Network manager.... Over the 3 years the bear was: Crucified Hung Used rather inventively as the xmas tree angel Archery Target practise Body piercings Door wedge And eventually, it was hung from the ceiling with an arrow through it's chest... Till one day a teacher rescued it and refused to return it (that might be because we threatened to finish it as a guy fawkes and set fire to it the day they pulled out the RM network). I miss that bear, and the RM network has since been removed

No idea then. Doesn't match any of the regular font styles.

I'd say it's this one. It's definately not Tahoma, Verdana, Freight Sans or FF Din. The i and the t are wrong. Also pay close attention to the weighting and style of the upper curves of the letters m and n. Wheither is was originally Depot New Light, that is as close as can be determined and noone would notice the difference.

Thing is, that you still can't beat being able to walk into a store and look/touch what you want to buy. For example I would never buy a sofa from an online retailer if I couldn't see one beforehand. 10-20 years ago, if you worked in a store you had to know your products before they let you on the shop floor. Nowadays the average retailer would actually hire a monkey in a suit if they thought they could budget peanuts into the salary budget. Another case of "If Edugeek made electrical retail shops, they'd probably be the best electrical retail shops in the world!"

Didn't expect it to be quite that high, but it makes sense when you break it down:

I've always wanted to work in one of these stores, simply because I know more about the tech behind most of it than any of them do. And I have waited till the village/store idiot has stopped talking and readvised another customer before as the idiot was spouting rubbish. My favourite one was when i was shopping for a new Router for home, and I was stuck for choice between a Belkin and I think it was a Linksys one; same price, same speeds, pretty much just different OS's on them. I asked for advice on them, and they sent their "Expert" over... His solution was to pickup one of the boxes and read it, only read one of them, and recommended that one. I then started making up some stuff that i wanted the router to be able to do, and sure enough he said it could do it! Richer Sounds suprises me on that list, i've always found them to be pretty good. I know just enough about tv/home cinema to know I'm not being waffled, and the shop assistants there made some good points, sold me stuff that did exactly what I wanted, and I got a good price on it all.

I would personally say that household income is the mainstay, forget the rest, and I'd classify the broader classes as this, with lower/middle/upper within each: If you earn less than £50k per year as a household, then you are of the working class; You actually have to pay attention to what you earn and what you spend. You work for your living and have no alternative but to work, probably till you retire at 60+. Middle class would be 50-100k per year, then you are living above comfortably, nice house, car, holidays to most places you can think of, but your still on a salary so can't go and buy a new merc every 2 years. You are probably looking at an early retirement, a holiday home somewhere hot or a nice country cottage, or you can chose not to work on occassion. Upper class, simply don't care about money most of the time. You can buy pretty much what you want, live and do what you want, and essentially chose what work you do and when you do it.

In what way does the school have to be special? We have a high number of "Free School Meals" students here, and we also have a dedicated Visual imparement department that I believe caters for up to 12 students. They have a TA/support worker with them for many normal lessons, as well as 1to1 tuition, and most of the rooms now have a VI screen added to them, for those who cannot focus on a whiteboard/at distance, as well as Visualisers in all rooms. For ICT, they have a large screen set to run at lower resolutions with enlarged fonts and a high vis cursor set. This year we also pushed out iTalc, for remote viewing of computers and classroom management, but primarily for VI children to view the teachers work on their own screen. There is also for their use a digital magnifying glass thingy, and one child has a laptop with a special webcam and controls built into it, which she uses for zooming in on classroom demonstrations etc, again due to being unable to focus at a distance.

Apparently I'm mr average; 50/100 70/100 50/100 were the scores, and i scored average/above average for everything. Apparently living in a terraced ex council house in a ghost town with less than £30k household income (after tax) and £3k of savings is above average! Says a lot about our economy that the majority are lower in the economic scale than I am....

32" monitor on a desk is overkill, especially as I dual screen; size of the monitor is almost irrelevant, but bigger than 24" starts to get too big to sit at the desk with. 27" is just about doable, but even that's pushing it. I need a large desktop area, not a monitor i can see from outer space! Looks about the same as the other Iiyama, but LED, higher contrast and no adjustable stand. Might take a look at that one too. There's nothing really special about it, it's just huge. I think having 1-2 of these on the desk will dominate too much, so not sure on it really. 27" monitor would have to be something special to warrant it over a 24". I have an ATI radeon card, so 3d capability is useless to me, and I wont be buying 3d Bluerays as my TV in my living doesn't support it. I hear 120Hz 2d gaming is meant to be good, but from what i've seen the 3d capable monitors come with a dozen little niggles and issues that affect 2d performance.

By the same arguement why do I need to write out those maths equations; the teacher can just tell me them. And why read that shakespeare play, the teacher can just review and recap it for me. And why write an essay on that history topic, someone else has already written one if you look on the internet.... If all we ever did was point at a powerpoint, youtube clip or amazon review and said "That's it folks!" education would be a sorry place. You cannot replace experience with being parroted stuff by someone else. Many people learn through experiencing things, children especially, either in it's entirety or re-enforcing what has been taught using other means. Most of us even if we had to cover this topic would not have the resources to do it, and therefore we would HAVE to rely on external sources for our information. And we all know a lot of reviews are biased in some way or another. Hell, why not teach ICT skills without a computer. I'm sure if you teach people the theory of it they don't need to actually USE a computer... Both experience and teaching is needed. One without the other is useless. The OP has the chance to do what many of us could only dream of doing within our work environment. Yes it will require some effort and preparation on the part of the teacher, but what part of teaching doesn't?

The downside to most IPS panels is it's response times. 14ms response time is pretty bad, and my 5 year old monitor beat this. The viewsonic screens are OK, I have an older 22" screen currently as my main monitor, but they just don't cut it on image quality. Yes it's an IPS panel, but the amount of corners they've cut to fit it into that price bracket mean it's a no go for me. Iiyama I've heard mixed reviews on, and seems to depend on the exact model, and they are more commercial use than home use nowadays it seems. That certainly looks interesting, i've read some good reviews on it.

The interface you use for the game is key to how the game is played and experienced. How many games in modern times have you played that you dislike the interface/controls on, but still play the game anyway? Could you imagine playing WoW on a DS sized screen with only 4-6 buttons? How about looking at how Call of Duty varies between the PC and the console, what effect does the control interface have on it? Personally I have Battlefield Bad Company 2 on both the PC and the PS3. I hated the PS3 controls, I found them irritating and clunky and after a few evenings of playing barely managed to hit rank 1 or 2.... On the PC I'm almost rank 30, with 100 hours of play time logged. How about looking at how Super Mario was played on the NES/SNES, compared to the latest iteration on the Wii? Are they still the same game, despite the controls? Do the controls make them better? Was one of those versions better than the latter ones? How about also looking at experience of working with the consoles themselves. How does things like the load times of a modern game/console compare to that of consoles 5-10-15-20 years ago? The PS3 refuses to let you play some games unless it updates itself every time you turn it on. How did the original games consoles fit into the home life, compared to modern ones? My parents would never have dreamed of owning a SNES, but they are looking at buying a PS3 to act as a Blue Ray player and have other functions like facebook ap, BBC Iplayer etc. Having the items themselves to be tested and used appropriately in the right context cannot take the place of a Youtube clip of some German kid emo-raging about being pwned in Counter-Strike.

My wife broke the power button on one of my monitors last night, so it's time to look for a new one! It's served me well for 5-6 years, but has a line on the LCD now, it's brightness isn't what it used to be, it's only 1280x1024, and now has a broken power button. I'm looking to upgrade this significantly, but there's just so many damned choices out there. Monitor will primarily be for gaming (FPS games, LOTRO, or Eve online), but I do watch some movies/TV on it from the sofa I have behind my chair, so I need reasonable viewing angles, AND/OR decent tilt/swivel options. What I want: -22" to 27" max, preferably around the 24" mark. -1920x1080 or 1920x1200 resolution. -Decent refresh rate for FPS gaming -Enough colour range to be decent for Full 1080p HD/blue ray movies (I have a BR drive in my PC) -HDMI and DVI connection What I'd like if I can: -Tilt/Swivel/height adjustment stand -VGA, DVI and HDMI input for using with any PC/input And budget wise, Absolute roof of £300, but would prefer the £200-250 mark. Anyone got any suggestions from experience? PC wise I have an I7 950 with a Sapphire Radeon 5870 graphics card, 6GB memory, BR drive and running windows 7 in case this affects the choice.

I think trying to buy one of each will mean you don't have enough scope for each generation. I'd go for: PC (HOW COULD YOU FORGET THIS!) Xbox 360 Wii PS2 Gamecube N64 SNES Megadrive Atari ZX80 Then DS N Gage GameBoy Gamegear. The Xbox/PS3 are essentially the same thing, with a small handful of titles unique to each. The dreamcast and the Saturn never took off as well as they should have, and all Playstation 1 games run on the PS2, all Xbox games on the 360... Handheld wise, the DS is way bigger and more influential than the PSP, which nowadays is just a portable DVD player and addon/cutdown version of the PS3. It's just not as big as it could be. My suggestions for early gaming consoles is mostly a pick of linear usage from memory, my first gaming was the NES/Megadrive with friends, and my first gaming machine was an Atari ST 1024, shortly followed by the Original Black and White(Yellow!) Gameboy.

Am I the only one who just doesn't give a damn about what some guy said on the TV about a sports game involving overpaid men in tight shorts? I enjoy PLAYING a good game of football when my fitness level dictates i can run more than 30 seconds without collapsing, but I find sport trully boring to watch, and only watch it on the big games to be included in social conversation occasionally and as required. If everyone got sacked for saying something they shouldn't and being overheard then we'd all be unemployed by now.

The ICT technician!!!!