Rydra

InFocus IN2114 I recently bought for my main ICT room. It's got a fault with the firmware at the moment on that model (Digital Zoom keeps resetting, makes it a pain putting it as a replacement to get the throw right). But quality is high, brightness is excellent, and lots of connection options. Price is about the £500 mark, and it comes with a 5 year warranty, and filterless. It replaced an older infocus projector that had lasted 9 years of daily use, and only had 2 replacement bulbs in it's time. I've found the epson's though cheap tend to be short on bulb life, and not great on brightness. The NEC's i've had serious problem with brightness on, and will now have to replace 3 of them this year. one of them was a brand new bulb, and my glow in the dark watch is brighter! projector less than 2-3 years old, but bought by external company so we don't have the warranty details anymore.

4 years, I was offered a chance for 2 trips. The first I couldn't do, cos my passport was off for renewal (French trip for 2 days). The second was a visit to a local heritage site for a day, which I had to decline. I'd been working on editing a video for the school's production, and had, for free, worked 20 hours over the weekend, and a further 15+ hours that week in my evenings on it. I couldn't warrant taking a day out of my working life to go on a school trip, when I hadn't seen my wife in 4-5 days due to work, and then have to add another day at my weekend to catch up on it!

degree assignment due next monday, so been up late most nights studying before completing it this weekend. That, plus hayfever plus some damned flu-like bug i picked up a couple weeks ago that is still lingering, means I wake up every morning feeling like i've had a dozen carlsberg the night before, despite the fact i've had nothing stronger than a can of pepsi max or a glass of blackcurrant squash! I can normally drink carlsberg if I have to, but myself I prefer german lagers. The Reinheitsgebot (and yes I really do know that word!) means you get the nice hoppy drink with none of the junk. My old local had Warsteiner on tap (I miss it, but parents still living there, so I pop down there occasionally), lovely stuff, on the strong side for lager, but it's easier on the system (just not so light on the head the next morning if you have a few!)

10 years ago... where all a student had to do to hack your system was pull the network cable out on login, or just escape Oh the fun times of playing unreal tournament, quake 3, and various motorcross style games

"Can you fix my computer?"

-If you come across a student doing something they shouldn't inform the teacher at the time of who, and what they were doing. it may be that they did not notice, or the student was in a position that they could switch before a teacher noticed what they were doing. I had a timetable of all ICT lessons, so I knew who was teaching where, and what subject. Let the teacher know and deal with it, it's their class and their lesson. You are there for support, so support them as they require. On finding the little darling doing what they shouldn't, I would normally take screenshots and check logs, then phone the teacher. For serious problems, like bypassing security, vandalism, or inappropriate material, the NM would go to the classroom directly and speak to the child with the teacher, and make them aware of the situation (and usually a small amount of humiliation by being hauled out of a class by "The IT Guy". If the site is obviously a games site (a number i've seen recently are not even in english, which is generally a good giveaway when they are in an IT lesson studying databases, as can be seen by the few who ARE working....) then they can simply be added to the blocklist during the process above, and inform the teacher that it is being done. If you notice a reoccuring trend within a particular room, teacher, or specific class, then gather the logs, and use the line management to report this. Although it is not your job to "Police the teachers", it is sometimes the classes where students get away with the most that have the least reports filed, so management may not be aware of there being a problem. And the primary concern for anyone within the school is the education of students, and anything affecting that should be reported accordingly.

If you have a case of mass amounts playing them, block the sites they are on initially, and then phone the teacher and inform them. If a student, after being blocked from playing a game site, then goes to find another one, then this is bypassing school security, and is a more serious punishment. Make sure you record all who did what, and on what machines first, incase as you say they decide to take out their frustration on the computers. If you find that the problem is always a specific class, or a specific teacher, then as much as they dislike it, if you are aware of substandard conditions, you are there to help the school, and in turn to help the students to learn, and should report it up the respective channels to their line manager, with relevant details and evidence to back it up. I know of a case in another school, where the technicians found evidence that a teacher was in fact just sitting on facebook, hotmail etc. instead of teaching the class. As a result, logs were taken of usage over the course of a week or so, the evidence was presented to SLT, and a school-wide change to time-based filtering for non-educational sites was put into place. During lessons, no social networking or games were allowed. During breaks and before/after school, the sites were allowed.

Main problem i see with the MS vs Open Source, especially on the office front, is matching it within the local system. As a Primary School NM, we cannot afford the Microsoft volume licensing (it would consume almost my entire annual budget!), and so look towards Open Office as an option for new machines. The PROBLEM being, all the high schools, who are going through BSF, are going to be using Microsoft, and will be using 2007, if not 2010 by the time BSF actually finishes. And most of them use it already. Because of the change to the ribbon from 2007, Open office is now essentially 10 years old in it's layout, and the skills and knowledge to use one is not (at least easily) transferred to the other. From a compatibility point they might work together, but not from a teaching point. Spending their first (and most important) years being taught one way, just to move schools and be tought a completely different system...

Anyone would think you were getting married soon?

Doesn't matter who it is, or which way you do it. When you get a new contract, be it with the same company or with a new one. You are cancelling one contract, and subscribing to a new one. There is a code you can request from your provider to transfer the number if moving from one company to another, which you can give to the new company. If however you are just changing contract via a same supplier, the only reason not to transfer over your existing number is the lazyness of the sales staff. I went from a standard contract to an iphone contract 2 years ago, carphonewarehouse just did the switch. I got a new simcard, and it took 24 hours for the new sim to pickup the old number. I enquired at the time if i was to dump CPWH and go direct with O2, and transfer the number, and you have to whine at CPWH to give you the code, and when you setup the new contract, you give them the code, and your number gets transferred.

Now now, don't overload their poor brains. They are too busy sneaking out and drinking round their mates houses while "Going to do some revision"

I have a degree assignment on proving programming code based on recurrances functions using mathematical inferrence. In simple talk, I'm proving that 1+1 = 2, and applying it in terms of computer psuedo code. They could have summed up a whole book of 50 pages with about 5, and then given me a handful of examples to work through.... argh. Oh, and breaks will be taken in between the dozing off reading boring textbooks with a small dose of EvE, maybe an episode of Babylon 5 with the wife, and an hour or so of Battlefield BC2 with a few mates!

WTB: Job that pays me $1.6m to uninstall Seti@home from 5,000 computers... (yes i know that their reporting on this subject doesn't necessarily say that, but it's funny to assume it does, and it's just as likely as half of the rest of the things they are claiming!) lets see, say 10 minutes work per machine, 50 machines per day... 100 days work, that's 20 working weeks...4 months give or take a bit for a single person to uninstall it one machine at a time, and that's being lazy. A cheap/reliable IT contract worker is about £10 ph or about £100 per day. So cost just to pay someone to uninstall it all manually is gonna be £10,000, which i think is about 15,000 dollars at current exchange.

I'm Mr %surname most of the time, and get greeted by almost every child I pass in the corridor. I can be rather distracting to be honest! But my last place of work, I was LUCKY if they referred to me as sir. Most of them didn't know my name at all, and referred to me as "Techie" (usually adorned with some other flowery name), or just stuck to calling me some colourful descriptive name none of which are repeatable here. We quite happily nicknamed ourselves "the IT Crowd" though. The server room was either "The bomb site" or "Where we keep the fridge with the cold drinks" depending on if we told them we had the latter

The only notes I ever get left are when someone wants something fixing

That laser etching looks like it is more aimed at metallic laptops, than plastic ones.

don't forget the spinning Wheel trim add-ons that make it look like your going faster. Oh, and the blue LED lighting is a must. I dare you to try adding tinted windows to the laptop too, or maybe add a subwoofer in the back...

bah hate it. Showed the link to the ICT coordinator, who managed to register (awaiting activation) And now, whenever I goto the site it complains i need to enable cookies. I suspect there is a problem either with their site, or my ISP blocking things though, as it told me that on 3 different PC's, with both firefox, and IE 7 and 8, and even says it now on the PC that registered half an hour ago!

Also consider, it's just what happens with a computer when you turn it on. Consider a standard/normal computer. When you first turn it on.... -Usual hardware startups etc, check any USB devices that might be plugged in. -Fire up windows systems it's running, including messenger -Windows checks for updates -Adobe, Messenger, Real player, google toolbars, Itunes/quicktime, and often others startup their 'quick loaders' or tray icons. -Above programs goto the internet to check for updates -Most AV have scans that check the startup objects that are checking all of these one by one as they start up -AV goes to talk to the world to check for updates In the meantime, the impatient user is opening outlook, SMART software, a web browser to check their personal mail or facebook quickly before the kids get in, Word or excel for the first lesson, and for some, your registers program. Add into that, 1-200 people all trying to access something from the server, be it their login profile, or their documents/emails. Each request might only bew a few bytes, but each one is a request on the hard drive(s) that it can only access 1 item at a time per drive. And users wonder why the computer responds slowly in the first part of the day?

I've posted elsewhere that I am looking at doing similar to this. My 'plan' for OU structuring would be to have 2 top level OU's, one for computers, and one for users, and then break down within them as follows. -Computer - Admin PC, Staff PC, Staff Laptop, Student PC, Student Laptop. -User -- Staff - Admin Staff, Teacher, Enhanced Teacher (enhanced teacher for ICT teachers or similar, who require some administrative access over staff and/or student areas that a normal teacher may not require.) --Student - Year 1/2/3/4/5/6 + Generic login for reception class (mostly for easy management of students joining and leaving, unlikely to be different policies applied here) You could go into heavy grouping of computers and their uses, but in the end, most teachers will use the same software, and access the same items. Anything more granular than this, you are most likely better off installing items individually, or relying on security permissions on the shares. On the topic of shares, I would do the following: -Student Shared (For shared resources amongst students) -Staff Shared (For shared resources amongst Staff -Multimedia (For storage of seperate video/audio or other items. Suggest seperate location to other shares, as this is an expanding area, and you are likely to need to expand on this in the future, so account for it now!) -Software (Some networked software requires mapped drives for them to work) -Hidden secret share (for you to store required but restricted items that you don't want most staff getting access to, but might need to access from other machines occasionally! Especially good for storing license-restricted software, the admin toolbar, and other useful apps, installers and documents)

Some of the newer TV's have internet@TV on them, where you can plug a network connection in and browse the internet on app-style browsers. I'm fairly sure facebook is one of the ones they now support. As another alternative on the PS3 front, did you know you can plugin a Keyboard and mouse to a PS3? I have one of the really cheap Logitech Wirless kits on mine just for that.

Sigh, another case of stupid people winning a case for the sake of gaining publicity, money and generally whining. If I leave my front door open, can I pursue prosecution to the person who sticks their head in the door and says "Hello?" on the grounds of trespassing?

I am looking to do this in the near future, largely so I can have central management of logins and access rights across the whole network. We already have seperate VLANS's for admin and curriculum, which we will do again when I combine the two domains. What does adding a trust in between 2 domains ADD, and what extra functions would be added by physically combining instead of adding the trust?

I started to get them last year, randomly though i'd never really had them before. Like others, drugs did nothing, all I could do was sleep. Sleep usually too the edge off but never quite cleared it. I actually found, and there are some studies on it, the Caffiene alleviates the affects, especially in those people (like most of us) who are avid drinkers of coffee or coke during our daily routines. I now have some of the off-the-shelf painkillers with caffiene built into it, and find that the migranes never went away, but became managable enough to get out of bed. I used to take one of each; aspirin, paracetamol, and ibuprofen with caffiene, and had a can of coke (or coffee on a cold morning!) while sitting in the dark room, then would gradually work myself up and out into daylight and the waking world! I've been quite lucky though, longest i've had one is 2 days, and haven't ventured to the doctors about it yet, as I was getting them every few weeks for a while, and have now had 5-6 months without incident.

I am interested in doing the FITS courses, but the information on FITS in general is hard to follow/come by. The fits website is partially under construction it seems, some links lead nowhere, others lead to different documents with the same name, and when i actually tried to get to the framework, I gave up trying to find it or read it, since it's all online with very little structure to it seemingly. Anyone got some info on these courses, like costs, time involved, method of study etc? I study with the OU in my spare time, but work have shown an interest in supporting the FITS courses. Just need to make sure I don't take on too much!