Rydra

Hmmm, that must have been one fat pidgeon..... My favourite bit, bottom left corner of the engine, you can clearly see a sign reminding not to put people in the Engine

You need a builder to come in and assess the building/wall. It can be done generally speaking, as creese said by putting in a supporting beam, sometimes they will leave a pillar in as well. There are so many factors in it, that it's impossible to say wheither it would absolutely possible, and if it would be affordable.

I've been studying with the OU for a few years, but I'm doubtful I'll ever finish the degree with them. Their current courses are all based around Java development, which I have little/no interest in studying. I'm doing a linux course they brought out this year atm, will do a CCNA next year, and a MS server course the end of next year. Unless they release some new courses tied to my field, I will likely stop studying with them. I work in education IT, mostly network management and support... Java does not really backup my existing experience, it sets a new tree to follow, one which would take me again years to gain experience or knowledge in that would really benefit my career.

Design a School intranet site, website, or other web project. Get them working in small groups on each little area creating content, initially in word or similar, and then transfer to Frontpage, which should be within the score of their abilities. I created my first fully featured site including animated buttons and all sorts this way at the age of 12/13

I wish I could afford to goto uni and do CS. At the age of 26, married and a home owner, it's looking more and more likely It won't happen. But I know if I did, my salary potential would double or treble almost overnight. I have the experience to get looked at for a lot of work, but lack the piece of paper that says I can do it. In the last 5 years, only 2 jobs have turned me down on the grounds of experience (after interview), both of those were because they wanted experience in the private sector rather infuriatingly, which I haven't worked in for 5-6 years now. But what that article covered does not just cover the College/Uni level, but below that too. I never took GCSE IT, which was brought in while I was in year 9, as even at that stage I know as much if not more about the basic operation of a computer. By the time i reached 6th Form, where they made me do Key Skills IT, I walked out of the first lesson, having completed 6 weeks work in half an hour to a level beyond that of the teacher's expectations, then had the teacher exclaim "wow I didn't know you could do that" when I right clicked on the start button and opened up Windows Explorer. Over the years I've helped IT teachers copy/paste files, switch a computer on (!!!!), reconnect the keyboard, and taught them some things with MS Office they didn't even know, which were on the syllabus they were teaching!

New/upgraded servers, that will last a minimum of 3-5 years of use without major expenditure, all running Server 2008 R2. Windows 7 rollout to all workstations, probably MS Office 2010, and ability to run sharepoint etc for the collaborative tools. New, managed network and wireless system with no bottlenecks/daisychains of routers/switches. Dedicated space for servers if not already got it, no more servers sitting on desk in IT suite or office! Proper Toolkit! oh how many IT techs have to scrabble around for the right key/screwdriver/bit. Couple of speedy Portable hard drives, and Universal caddies for IDE/SATA. Godsend for copying data etc from laptops killed by staff. A mini fridge! A couple of laptops, and probably a spare projector, solely for IT use in case of idiotic teacher breaking something and desperately needing something to work with, last minute visitor etc. A decent desk/chair for your office. A NEW OFFICE THAT ISN'T A DISUSED TOILET!!!! A spare technician to do the jobs you don't want!

I run AV scans from Kaspersky, which I have installed but not running most of the time once every few weeks, at minimum once a month. It hasn't picked up anything in years. I don't really do torrenting except for the odd TV episode i've missed (i missed house a couple weeks ago as I was out for the evening!), and any other software I don't install updates or new stuff immediately, I learn from Sims.net, always wait a few weeks before installing stuff in case of bugs that break more important things! Viruses only really come in one way: I've clicked on something I shouldn't have. And nowadays, the most malicious of viruses are these 'fake' virus/AV cleaning ones, which from my experience even the best AV systems don't pickup on. I teach the staff here if they ever get a window up they don't like/want, and I am not a phonecall away, do not click any grey buttons within it. Click the X's in the corner, press Alt+F4, or simply log off the PC if neither of those are available and they are unsure. Clicking things is what causes viruses! Lastly, I'm a stay at home nerd who plays one of 2 or 3 MMO's, I have about 12 different password sets, all of which are unique within a set area (So no two Work PW are the same, no two game PW are the same etc etc.) I don't have enough money in an account to worry about, don't own a credit card, and rarely buy stuff over the internet, I'm a cash/card man. I like looking at things before buying, and don't like stuff being delivered if I can avoid it. I'm not 100% safe, but if any of these people REALLY want my credit card details, or my game login's, a simple home AV is not going to stop them if they can still get past a hardware firewall, install a trojan without my knowledge, then run password scanners, steal my email/forum PW, then crack the PW's to my games, and the 4 seperate details/passwords required to get into my online banking

I will however, always recommend a normal home user runs AV/firewall. My wife's laptop has one, and I wouldn't dream of removing it.... Why? Because I don't trust her to always click/download the right thing! And most home users will not click the right things. And it will save me a lot of time and hassle knowing she's 90% safe from idiotic virus attacks.

I haven't run an AV/Firewall package in years on my home PC. it just caused constant issues and problems, blocking stuff i wanted, taking up system resources. I let it run a full scan once every week or two, then turn it off again. In 5 years I've had no attacks, viruses or troubles. The days of people hacking into your PC via unprotected ports is mostly a thing of the past, noone does it anymore, and if they did it would just be to work out how best to send you more spam mails about male enhancement or something. I have a hardware firewall built into my router, and that is more than enough for me. I don't DL anything I don't recognise and/or trust from anyone, anywhere. And my irregular AV scans haven't turned up a virus in years, the last one it flagged was a false alarm, deciding a mIRC installer i've had for 8 years was a virus created 2 years ago! The need to keep Antivirus system's running 24/7 is, in my mind for peace of mind for those who want to download whatever they like or have no clue what they're doing. If you are careful with what you DL, and what sites you visit, and trust those who use your machine (aka, yourself and noone else) you should be fine.

I've always envisaged one of these free schools to move away completely from the standard "School structure" and move towards a real world, business structure with an education focus. Run the school, AS a business, and tie it into the community as a conglomerate support company, providing all sorts of services and solutions. The head would in fact be the managing director, with a board of directors being the teaching staff. Your departments would be comprised of the student body, with your traditional subjects broken into the departments. Marketing department would be exactly that, and the basics of presentation, geography, business studies, History could be covered. Accounting and HR covers Mathematics and sociology, Administration covers communication (english, ICT), You then have the services covering ICT, building maintenance, and so on and so forth. The work would mostly be project based, lead by the department head (aka the teacher) who would steer the project, and provide support along the way. It is a massive step away from the way education is now, but the key factor is a massive grounding in students taking responsibility for their own actions, having to think for themselves to achieve their goal, and being used to a standard operating practice that is used in most real life businesses. Wheither it would work would be the challenge, and one heck of a challenge for the MD!

I've got mixed reviews on these. Firstly, I'm curious what will happen to support staff within schools or tied to working in education. As is frequently pointed out, we are not Teachers or on teachers contracts, so I can see there being some cuts in this area in places, but not widespread. There is one simple reason for all of these redundancies that the government want to do. A person on unemployment benefits while they cannot find a job is cheaper to pay than someone who is earning a half decent wage. The tipping point, comes when the number of unemployed (who don't pay taxes on income and some other things) and the reduced payments as a result start to outweigh the income normally obtained by working people paying taxes. The risk they are taking, is to lay off people and hope the private sector can take up the slack. The process of redundancies needs to be carefully managed. The last problem, is converting public sector jobs into private sector ones. There are many roles in the civil service that are not easily transferrable to private sector, where the people doing that job have either a specialist qualification, or just done the job for 10-20 years. My mother took voluntary early retirement/redundancy about 2-3 years ago now from the pension service, did some contract work for the local council in a similar role, and now works in a high school doing support work such as exam invigilating, Helping on trips etc. My father is waiting to hear how much of his dept is being made redundant and who, and as a database analyst, work is not exactly easy to come by. And I have a few friends who work elsewhere in civil service, such as the 14-19 provision, all of which have been axed. The rumours of university fees and places worrys me greatly. So many people struggle with the debt of university already, so the proposed hike of £3000 up to £7000 per year in fee's will see to it that only the richest will be able to afford university, and cutting the government funding for 40% of their places will make this even worse. Plus how dare they scrap the Ark Royal and the Harriers... Two of Britains most Iconic items of war, our aircraft carriers and our harrier jumpjets, and they are being mothballed. It's not like you can park the Ark Royal on the Thames and turn it into a museam like the HMS Belfast!

These jokes are getting like Pastured cheese! Best of luck, let us know where you end up and how much more fun/money/stress your having! BTRD will always be here to hear your rants

Open Office deployment... Wasted 2-3 days fighting with it creating, testing, then wiping build's for this. Gave up in the end and imaged it. Seconded for Testbase, when every single teachers laptop requires it. The network version is awful and would even cause the spawn of satan to shake it's head in disgust. The Testbase online looks promising though! Otherwise my #1 contender, worst piece of godawful software ever created for any computer later than Windows 3.1.... WinSuite. Try googling it, then try looking up the manufacturer.... The manufacturer has removed all links to it from it's own website.... It's clunky, ugly, buggy, slow, 15-20 years old, a pain to work with, and absolutely no support for it whatsoever. It's main purposes are also mostly done by Windows Active directory now, it just throws some interfaces over the top that confuse things more than fix or assist them.

I have server 2003 based network, and XP desktops. I attempted to package deploy via AD most software, and the one I had the most trouble with was Open Office. Either I got error boxes after packaging, Or I couldn't disable the registration box which pops up for every user, or the customer experience window. I eventually gave up and just imaged it, as it caused a lot less issues. MS Office though not flawless, is a lot easier to package as it was partially built to be deployed in that manner. It also had no clipart, which in a primary school is something used very frequently. You may not want/need it elsewhere, but when teaching a 6 year old, you really do not want them searching google images every 5 minutes to find what they want. Yes I can go buy a clipart set of 65,000 images or whatever, but again MS office already comes with this, and it works. I don't have to go hunting for it in a shared folder somewhere. I've had issues with documents going between MS and OO, where things like borders and layouts broke during the transition. Yes I know this could be caused by MS, but it wouldn't happen if I didn't have 2 differing suites. It doesn't support Smart Notebook to work within it properly for writing recognition we've discovered. Many of the shortcuts or features found in MS Office are either different or missing. This is as much an education problem, but again one that would not have happened if I hadn't moved to OO. And it's not supported (currently) by Capita SIMS.net. Some might find it useful, and some might prefer it. But I said I would not recommend it on my experience. So far, the only arguement I've seen for it is that it's free, and in looks it's like software released 7-8 years ago. As to the ribbon arguement, it's just an education problem, just as it is with Open Office. The difference is, there are guides and courses aplenty on MS office usage. The support for open office in this manner is sparce, if not even non-existent. And MS didn't just release it for the sake of it. From what I gather, a lot of time and effort was put into research and studies on a more efficient menu style, and that is what, apparently worked out. The talk is, the OOo team are working on their own Ribbon based interface anyway

A lot of the public sector IT was supporting software or departments, many of which were tied to or reliant on quango's. Where quango's weren't involved, councils are cutting workforces in an attempt to cut costs. Less users means you need less support staff to support them.

Example CV.doc AS requested, a copy of my CV with any interesting names removed, and dates. Where I've put silly text where a date should be, I would normally list the month/year of start and finish, eg November 2006 - October 2008 I've even kept my grades on there from my GCSE's, because I'm o-so proud (aka not bothered) by them! Hope that helps. (PS, if anyone finds some hidden data that points you to all my personal data hidden in there, please PM me so I can fix it accordingly)

I have to agree with the video. We moved to OOo's suite over the summer, and we've just found it to be a huge pain to run and maintain. The teachers are not familiar with it, so in some cases the students know more than they do. It doesn't come with any Clipart worth mentioning, and trying to find a decent OO supported clipart bank that's free, and works is difficult at best. Plus we've had all sorts of issues with layout errors moving between MS and OO, and missing features. I know a good part of it is education of those working with it and supporting it. But in the end, this week when I roll out MS Office 2003 again, there really will be a sigh of relief, and likely some cheering. Maybe it could work if you have someone who is an OOo guru who can run training sessions on the major differences and quirks, but the pain caused when trying to interoperate between suites with other people who don't use OOo just wasn't worth it, and I wouldn't recommend it to others. It is fine for throwing out the odd word document with no fancy stuff being done, aka average home user. As soon as you start working with other parts of the package, or getting into the more advanced stuff, it just doesn't do what you want it to without hours of research, troubleshooting, trawling forums, and installing addons most of which will throw errors, or not work the way you want them to.

This might seem a strange thing to say, but I'm getting a little fed up of phone calls offering me various jobs. I keep my CV up on Monster and update it periodically (about once every 2-3 months, sometimes longer if I've had a lazy year!), as you never know what might come up. My last update was early September, and since then I can tell my CV has been viewed on Monster in the region of 70-100 times, and I have recieved 4 Job offers by email, and some 40+ by telephone. Most of them are either silly locations (40+ miles away), contract work, or not enough money to warrant moving jobs. I have only said yes to 3 of the offers so far, 1 turned out too far away for their liking, 1 i got to interview but trumped by someone with more corporate/ITIL experience, and the 3rd was only this morning and wont know till the end of the week. I've even been offered jobs directly (aka not via some silly recruitment agency) by HP, McAfee (I lol'd and sent them back a ridiculous offer), and 4 multinational companies, and the highest salary I've been offered so far was 35k + pension, healthcare and bonus. Am I alone in being bombarded with job offers? Do I just have an especially good CV (For a guy with no IT qualifications, and 5 years of working in schools), or is this a sign that the economy is recovering? A year ago when I last updated my CV, I got maybe 10-15 offers in 3 months, so far I'm around 50 in 5 weeks, and still getting a phone call per day. The job I was unlucky with yesterday, I've been told that if I'm still looking for work in 6 months or so, they hope to expand the team and hire some new staff, so I might get a job there. I'm curious to see what others experience is at the moment.

Doner Kebab and chips is what about about to go and have The food stuffs of (unhealthy and slightly overweight) champions!

ms sql isn't a problem, i have a few copies of 2005/2008 lying around It will be a week or so till i get time to work on it some more, but all advice is good advice, I just don't have to pay attention if I don't like it!

This may belong in some other area, but I like it here, so here's where I'm posting. I have decided out of madness to try and build a database, to better manage my scout group. Scout HQ in the UK has promised us a software suite to do this for the best part of a decade; personal info, badge records, attendance, subs payment, event planning, all of it. But they've yet to release anything, even a beta version! Lacking anything else, I planned to start at the bottom, and simply build an access database for it. With time I'd love to make it a proper web based front end that I can package and give to others to install either locally or on a web server and all that jazz, but first thing's first is build the database! Now the snag is, I've never learnt Access beyond flicking through some awful books/guides over the years, though I have a good understanding of the maths/theory behind it due to some degree level computing study. I've never made, in fact any style of database before... So I'm looking for any hints/tips the experts out there might have that I can implement straight away. Any suggestions, since I'm starting with a literal clean slate for other programs that would work better from the get-go (free, I'm not buying a whole new application package just for this!), or whatever. If there's some fellow scout leaders here, make a few suggestions for what I might include in it! I suspect this will take me many months/years to get fully completed, but gotta start somewhere!

Off the top of my head, -Staring at a small screen for long periods not good for them. SOLUTION: Enforce regular breaks of not looking at it. -Taking out and putting away of laptops in trolley requires low level manual handling. Make sure trolley is safe and free of sharp edges/corners, and electrical supply is well maintained. -Site where they are using them is not designed for use. If using in a non-specialised room, make sure that the furniture is suitable for use. Also consider safety if chargers are used outside of the charging trolleys in respect to cables. -Is it suitable for use by people with disabilities, whatever they may be? Requires some knowledge of what disabilities are present within the school. -Cleanliness. Children are naturally unhealthy creatures. Many ICT rooms will have a scheduled clean, or a cleaner will wipe down desks/keyboards briefly during normal cleaning duties. Do you have anything in place for the netbooks? That's all I can think of for now.

That's more than my current PC had. I replaced it 3 weeks ago, then found my new pc's motherboard was faulty Then my old PC's graphics card died! Not a good week.... A fresh install should see you able to play almost any game on the market at the moment. I play most multiplayer games on a Core 2 6420 2.2GHz, 8GB of memory, and (Until it died) an nvidia 8800 GTS 368MB, with 4 different SATA drives (1x 1.5TB, 2x 500GB, 1x 250GB) OK i can't run it at 1920x1080 with all effects, but mostly i find that distracting anyway. I'm having to use my new 5870 in the old PC atm, and it doesn't like it. the CCC didn't install, and I think the display drivers aren't installed properly either. But since I should get my new motherboard back from repair/replacement soonish, I'm not too worried. I'm having to play on the PS3 instead!

http://lolsnaps.com/upload_images/real/581.jpg

I still hate their customer service, but really I don't see the issue with them and why so many hate them. They sell exactly what they advertise. You can download 24/7 for no extra cost. I've had little to no downtime in the years i've had them. Just hate having to call their customer support... Personally I prefer to pay for a service that works 99% of the time and have poor support when it fails, than pay for a service that at it's best won't meet what you pay for, charges me extra when I use it a lot, and only marginally better customer support for the 1% of the downtime they still get.