maniac

If I told you that, I'd have to kill you! It's actually neither of the above, although I have used photomatix before until I discovered This - It's so much easier than photomatix, with pretty interesting results as you can see. http://www.curiousplaces.co.uk/images/ForumPhotos/beforeafter/hdr-15.jpg I won't post any more, I could fill this thread with them. (And yes that was a massive 10 foot high mirror) Thanks for the kind comments people Mike.

Cheers Webman, there's no thanks button on this forum unfortunitely! Mike.

I love HDR, something I do far to much of with my photos and I tend to goto extremes as well. Have one from me http://www.curiousplaces.co.uk/images/ForumPhotos/beforeafter/hdr-05.jpg Mike

I'm quite a keen photographer and base my photography around another one of my hobbies. You can see some of my work on my website; Welcome to Curious Places Most of the pictures on my website were taken with an old Fujifilm Bridge Camera, but I have a Canon 350d now which is ok for what I do, but not outstanding by any means. Mike

He wasn't unfortunitely, but his reputation in the school took a severe knocking because of the incident, and I think the students knew, they always do! Him apologising was good enough, we all make errors of judgement, afterall we are only human. After the incident things changed a lot, he had much more respect for us and we actually worked quite well together to solve the problems we were having, so much so that when I left he actually wrote me a letter thanking me for my support for the previous 2 years. Mike.

To be fair, I think LCD screen technology has moved on a long way in 5 years, I would expect even the cheaper screens used in the all in ones to be more reliable these days. It is noteable however that both stone and SCL only offer a 1 year warranty on the screen and chassis of their all in one machines. Mike.

Are the profiles that are still there also listed in the System->advanced->user profiles section of control panel? If not, then that's why as delprof I think uses this list to delete the profiles. If so, can you delete them manually from this list by selecting the profile and clicking delete? What happens when you run it manually from command prompt? Do you get any errors?? Mike.

I make a point of not loosing my temper at work. I'm employed as a professional and thus display a professional manner at all times. (How Cliché does that answer sound) If something gets on my nerves, I will normally walk away calmly from the situation then come back a little later and talk to the person involved and explain why whatever situation it was annoyed me and the reasons why. The worst time I had to bite my lip was when the head of IT at a previous school started laying into me about how poor the system was in front of a class of year 11 students. I'm sure he was just trying to provoke a reaction, but he didn't get it and ended up having to apologise about the whole incident after the headteacher got to hear about it. Loosing your temper just gets you no where, and In My Opinion if you are inclined to do so, then you're really in the wrong job! Mike.

Have a look at the sponsor of this section of the forum, SCL online, they do a good range of all in one PCs. I havn't personally used them (yet) but will be calling soon for a quote. Stone computers also do all-in-ones which use the same chassis as the ones from SCL, but I think SCL's prices are slightly cheaper. I have an evaluation unit from Stone at the moment (was delivered today) and it seems very sturdy although they are a little top heavy, but we plan to use industrial strength velcro to attach them to the worktop to stop the kids moving them around or knocking them over. (has anyone else done this, and does it work?) Mike

We were looking at these, but then realised we can get All-In-One machines that are a better specification for less money from a couple of places. They are a much neater solution, only need a single power plug per machine, and no external power box like the USFF dells have which means less cabling involved. They also take pretty standard componants unlike the USFF Dells, so no real worries about replacing bits when the warranties run out. Mike.

I sat down with the business manager the other day and explained that we need a minimum spend of £125k this year just to bring us in line with other schools. Luckily his response was 'that figure doesn't scare me' which was a relief, so looks like most of the proposals I've put forwards are going to get the green light over the course of the year. It's amazing how quickly things add up when you take everything into account, licensing agreements, extended warrantys that may be needed, consumables, maintenance and spare parts and a small contingency for failure of current equipment etc. etc. We're quite a small academy school with about 350 students, but the ICT we inherited from our predecessor school is so dated it needs massive investment over the next 3 years to purge the 4-5yr old DELL GX60 workstations that are the main stay of our system at the moment. As well as our aging CC3 servers some of which are getting on for 5yrs old as well, and to purchase some more storage as we just don't have enough at the moment along with a million and one other things that are just lacking in our school at the moment! Mike

:D:D

Sorry for digging up an old thread, but has anyone else got anything else to say good or bad about Viglen its learning? I've seen a demo twice now, had a sale rep into the school for a detailed discussion, and they are demontrating the platform to all our teaching staff next Friday on our inset day. Providing the teaching staff like it, it's looking likely that we will choose this as our learning platform, as it seems to do everything we would like and more, and the development team seem very on the ball and entusiastic about what they are doing. So anyone got anything to add about Viglen its learning? Mike.

We have about 8 In Focus DLP projectors, and they are awful for colour reproduction, get constant complaints about them, but as they all work rather too well I can't justify replacing them. Images are sharp and clear, just the colour reproduction is very poor! Personally I recommend NEC projectors, we have a lot of these as well, and I can't fault them. Not the smallest projectors in the world, but a pin sharp image and nice a quiet. Mike.

We have office 2003, and to be honest I really don't see the point in upgrading as we purchase licenses outright, so would cost a bit to upgrade, and office 2003 does everything the school and curriculum demands from it, so no real problems. I think we will probably wait until the next release of office before upgrading, 2007 just doesn't seem worth it. If sims would work with open office, I'd gladly put forwards the idea of using this across the site. Mike.

Must admit I've been a tad confuzzled by this thread, the initial idea sounded a bit odd, but interesting none the less, but googling reviels very little about this idea. The only thing I can find a lot of data on is the idea of ditching air conditioning in favour of better air flow through the server room, and getting the optimal temperature for your servers to work in can in principle have positive affects, as every matter has a temperature zone where it's physical properties change, so if you can find the optimal temperature to run your servers at, in theory you can extract better performance from them. However I'm skeptical that this has any major benefits in the long term. Mike.

Sometimes you need to put a delay at the start of the login script to make sure the user is properly logged on before the script runs, particularly with newer faster machines that try and run scripts before the user is properly logged in. I've had this problem and used this at the start of my VBS login script. Dim WSHNetwork Dim strUserName Set WSHNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network") strUserName = "" While strUserName = "" WScript.Sleep 100 ' 1/10 th of a second strUserName = WSHNetwork.UserName Wend What it does is wait for the username value to be populated before continuing with the rest of the script. If you want to convert your whole drive mapping script to VBS, then here's the whole script. Dim WSHNetwork Dim strUserName Set WSHNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network") strUserName = "" While strUserName = "" WScript.Sleep 100 ' 1/10 th of a second strUserName = WSHNetwork.UserName Wend call map("P:", "\\server\public$") call map("S:", "\\server\sims$") end sub sub map( drive, share ) on error resume next WSHNetwork.removenetworkdrive drive, true WSHNetwork.mapnetworkdrive drive, share end sub Obviously you can add as many map drive lines as you like for different drives. Just save it as something.VBS and use it insted of your batch file.

Unfortunitely the people behind SSL explorer seem to be the latest case of an open source development that have realised that they have a pretty good almost unique product, and now they are cashing in. I used the community edition at a previous school which is still in place for remote access, and was considering the enterprise version for my current school as it is so damned easy to setup, and does everything you need from a web based remote access solution, including full VPN access. Shame they've decided to go down this road. Mike.

6/10 - not bad considering some were pure guesses!

MLH is an excellent helpdesk, I was lucky and obtained it when it was free, but there's been a new version since, so I will probably buy a license at some point so I'm eligible for the upgrades. It is very good value, £75 is less than £1.50 a week, and for a piece of software which will organise your entire department that's not bad at all! Mike.

ICT rooms here are locked all the time and the only people with keys are us, and the ICT teachers. If a teacher books a room, they have to see us to unlock it for them, and student's won't be let into the room by us unless a member of staff is present.

Here's the other side. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~pzwong/100_1111.JPG lol I actually built a PC in a metal flight case once after reading an article about someone else who did the same thing. Actually worked amazingly well, and was the perfect size. Wish I'd kept it in a way, but it was only a Cyrix 6x86 120MHz with an amazing 8mb RAM! Also built a PC in a plain metal box once wired to a 12v powersupply as an MP3 jukebox for my car. Connected a 3 line LCD display to the serial port on a long cable and used a special winamp plugin to output the information of the currently playing track to it. Controlled with a wireless mouse, and input into the car stereo via an FM modulator. Even had a wireless adapter in it so to upload music to it, it only had to be parked on my drive and turned on. I had far too much time on my hands in those days. That became a victim to damp, but served me well for about 2 years. Mike.

That's very unusual, the network managers role is normally an exclusive one in a school with the amount of ICT you have. There's no way our business manager could carry out both roles, there just wouldn't be enough time and the skill set for each job is totally different. Unfortunitely there is your problem. If they had someone in there exclusively managing the ICT support, they could probably get the place running more like a team and make the whole department more efficient. Unfortunitely this would probably make some of the technician roles redundant, which would easily cover the salery of a full time network manager, and the overall gain for the school would be massive. was just thinking about there being ten of you, our helpdesk gets about 300 tickets a month, but some of these are just for simple password changes and the like. average of 21 working days in a month, that means each tech gets about 1.4 calls a day, that would be pure bliss! Mike

I've done the good old 'history of computers' time line before, which I think can be made relevant to any age group. Tried and tested, but maybe a bit boring? Mike.

How about simply "aaagggghhhhhhh!!!"