sonofsanta

After 4 years of chewing through Deep Space 9 on our holiday lunchbreaks, we're about to finish the final season today, just before the long bank holiday and on my final holiday day in school. The number 1 job on our list for this half-term was "get to the end of DS9": we've had to take an extended lunchbreak to get two episodes in each day, but my goodness, what a series. Still some of the finest TV writing there's been, honestly, and gets a depth and gravitas that the other Treks didn't get to without the long-term, long-form plot that DS9 had. It's the first time I've properly watched it through in order and it is my favourite Trek now. Finished Moon Knight recently, thought it was one of the better ones; more interesting than F+WS, with some great imagery. Just starting up Stranger Things 4, which is leaning even harder into horror now, and is apparently taking its cues from Nightmare on Elm Street this season. And really need to get to Better Call Saul; then there's Obi-Wan, and I've still not caught Boba Fett...

Off to see it this Thursday too! Very excited; it's reviewed really strongly, and I maintain that Top Gun is one of the very best movies of the 80s, with something for everyone. Watched it again at an outdoor screening a couple of years ago--which is to say, not at home, where I assume I know what's going on and only half pay attention, but actually properly engrossed in it--and it is still a brilliant film. Got round to The Batman (2022) last night and that is honestly my favourite Batman film now. So completely nails the atmosphere and mood of Gotham that I could have stayed soaked in it for another three hours. Having the maskless Batman look like The Crow was never not a bit weird but when he was mask on, he was as convincing and engaging a Batman as there's been; the fight scenes were superb, and really reminiscent of Arkham Asylum et al. Three hours is a long run time, but it felt weighty in a way that justified it.

Saw Dr Strange 2 at t'cinema last night. I don't understand how it's rated 12A and not 15, frankly: it's a bloody horror film (pun intended). They've actually let Sam Raimi direct it as a Sam Raimi film. Don't go with your kids, there are people being killed in gruesome ways and some proper demonic CGI going on that will give any kid under 12 nightmares. Some great set pieces and fantastic imagery, and some fun + nerdy cameos and references. You absolutely and completely need to have seen Wandavision before watching this, as the film essentially uses that as its establishing half-hour and instead skips straight into the all out action. It's fast paced from the off. Enjoyed it, but goodness me, prepare yourself for its tone.

Oh, and if you are looking at browser ones specifically: I've switched to using BitWarden as my personal vault recently after LastPass started charging and it's been ace. Free for personal use, looks like $3/user/month for teams of people.

We've been using KeePass for years. Free + open source, little application you can store on a share, encrypted and password protected. You can back it up as you would any other local file. Works better, IME, for sharing among a team than a browser extension: you don't need to faff about with 2FA for logging in, and you don't need 2FA as much because you are protecting it in other ways, as you are all your local files. Multiple people can have it open at once and it can synchronize multiple changes without issue.

Our timetable for exam support this year is six sides of A3 printer from Excel. I dug out an old timetable from a decade ago and it was a mere 3 sides of A4 from Word. On top of all the extra coursework requirements with video, encrypted memory sticks (online uploads when, AQA?) and what-have-you, no wonder we feel so bloody busy these days! Thank you @ass17 for the software, as always--having to go back to printing out scripts for candidates to sign this year, which is why we switched to EWP from WordPad in the first place (once the new "header on every page" requirements came in), so appreciating it all anew.

Just finished Ozark (Netflix) and honestly, I thought they nailed it as a final season. I know a few people found the ending unsatisfying, but I thought it was entirely in-keeping with the promises it's been making since the start, and whilst it does end on a cut to black, it is far less ambiguous than Sopranos, or even Inception. The writing and the performances were top-notch throughout, and they've ended it after 4 seasons, before it got too absurd and implausible. One of the best pieces of television of the last few years--similar to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul but with its own identity, and damn well near as well-delivered as those two.

And one last bump before it closes tomorrow. I have been doing site tours for applicants if you wanted to come round for an hour or two before (or after, given the deadline) applying. There are biscuits.

Bump! This closes on Friday, and there's no internal candidate, so it's wide open. Looking like interviews will be the Friday after. Yes, that date.

Ours is here (PDF). Wrote it from scratch in, oh, 2012? And refined it in the years since. In pretty solid shape, IMHO. Fair warning: it is long and boring.

Sonic 2 is surprisingly good. Lot of nods for old nerds like us. My 8 & 9yo were fine with the run-time, but then Lincolnshire cinemas still have an intermission for you to buy ice cream so this data point may not be much use. Moonfall is ace. I'd position it just below Geostorm and above The Core in the "stupid science that makes no sense but who cares anyway" league. It's Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow, 2012 etc.), you know what you're getting, and it's mighty entertaining on its own merits. If your expectations are adjusted accordingly, it's brilliant fun.

Well. Here we are. As mentioned in other threads, I'm moving on from my school after 12 years, and thus my role as Network Manager at Kesteven & Grantham Girls' School is vacant. Details & application form available on our website, but for your convenience: IT Network Manager Network Manager - Advert (PDF) Network Manager - Job Description (PDF) Network Manager - Letter to Applicants (PDF) We're a single-sex (but trans-inclusive) selective 11-18 academy, the sole school in our academy trust. On-roll numbers are around 1200 kids, and we've been oversubscribed every year I've been here; we're one of the top schools in Lincolnshire, and on some results days in the country, and that's based not only in our selective (grammar school) nature but also our value-added scores: our Progress 8 in 2019 was +0.91, as per the letter on our website. We take bright kids in, sure, but we challenge them and push them to achieve their best. The best part, though, is that we not only help them thrive academically but personally: the House system and the activities that run through it (panto, choir, dance, baking etc.) really does produce rounded and mature kids. I've always taken huge pride in our sixth formers leaving as decent people, and they're honestly great company, if a bit free with helping themselves to the biscuit tin. The atmosphere is honestly unlike any other school: damage to ICT suites is almost unheard of, they don't give a monkey's about hacking the network, and the air of self-motivation is honestly a little unsettling--gods know I was never this committed to my studies at school. There's a staff body of about 80 teachers and 50 support staff, and the unity and cohesiveness amongst them is the starkest difference to other schools: the sense of equality between teaching staff and support staff is remarkable, and you'll not feel excluded or looked down upon. It's a hard place to leave. After 12 years I'm still probably only average in terms of tenure: there's a large cohort of teachers who've been here twenty years or more, and a not-insignifcant proportion of ex-students who've come back to work here. One ex-Head of Art (now part time) has done, what, 45 years? He's been here so long they've ended up building him two new Art blocks in that time. No-one ever wants to leave, and those that do end up coming back as supply (or, in one Sixth Form admin's case last month, after only a week at their new job). The network is about 550 desktops on wires, because I've always believed in Keep It Simple, Stupid--I'm the stupid, after all. Win10, Hyper-V server stack, SCCM, Office 365, Bromcom, Unifi wireless, Smoothwall etc.; we're not doing anything unusual or fancy, I've always done it the consistent and reliable and affordable way. It's worked out pretty well, if I say so myself. It's not perfect (there's only so many hours in a day), and there'll be a list of "this is stuff you need to get round to", but it's in pretty good shape. We're not in the RBC, we've rolled our own leased line for a lot of years, so you are the be all and end all of IT here. There's two full time techs you'll be line managing (senior tech + tech), and both know their onions; no shenanigans with a new apprentice every year. The office has air-con AND daylight! A kettle AND a fridge! Senior management are a decent bunch who've always given me authority along with my responsibility, and trusted my word. Work/life balance is good: there's a longstanding resistance to emails out of hours, and everyone is strongly encouraged to stick their out of office on in holidays. No competitions for who can send the latest email here, and they've shown me a lot of flexibility through all my personal troubles and travails these last few years, with plenty of compassionate leave for hospital appointments, funerals etc. Oh--speaking of, it's 27 days holiday a year at this pay grade, with +5 once you've done 5 years. No overtime pay at Grade 9 I'm afraid, but you do get TOIL, but honestly, overtime is a rare occurence--mostly just parents' evenings now, and that odd day where something has gone wrong at 3:30pm and needs fixing before the morning. I have rambled enough. I love this school, and you will too; it's only personal circumstance that is forcing me out. If you want to know any other questions, feel free to ask here or via PM. I'm technically finishing July 3rd, so the hope is that the right candidate can start in June and we can have a week or two of transition before I go on holiday ahead of starting elsewhere, and I'm starting on my Big Doc of Documentation for you now.

They sent us a copy of the contemporary terms and conditions from the time we signed the contract for a software upgrade 3 years ago and it did indeed include a provision for Term that stated it would continue until cancelled with 6 months written notice. But we did argue them, with much grumpiness and complaint, into confirming that they will not now require us to serve notice. Pointed out that (a) 6 months notice on a 12 month contract is absurd (b) they've dropped this from their current T&Cs, so they can't claim it's standard practice if they don't do it anymore © they didn't send us the renewal quote until 4 months before, so if you want to have 6 months' notice, you need to send such quotes at least 7 months before. Also had the leverage that this will have bearing on our decision for a new system in the next few weeks. So it is an argument you can win. Good luck...

Really not The maintenance is on the order of £3k a year. It's only half a dozen tills and a cash loader! It's always been overpriced! Then they've nickle-and-dimed for every job anyway, and taken months to respond! The maintenance has never included software maintenance and so they were unable to resolve our latest problem because our server is out of date and guess who's fault that is, motherflippers?! It is probably not wise for them to get me in this mood just as we're about to discuss a potential upgrade and renewal!

Well in today's exciting revelations: did you know that if you pay annual maintenance to Civica for their cashless system, the terms and conditions mandate a 6 month notice period for cancellation, that must be delivered by post and explicitly cannot be sent by email? Utterly bloody ridiculous, how can a notice period be half the bloody contract length! asdaskjhfdghsjhgakjhfakfa

In a desperate attempt to earn an additional entry, seeing as how I won't be at BETT to get any there, I would like to add the following to my list of What Would I Do With That PC If I Won It: Twenty years practising these skills, people. Be nice if they finally amounted to something worthwhile

Funnily enough I've just started looking at upgrading some of the creaking parts inside my current PC, because my kids have gotten into Minecraft so I've been running it on my PC for the first time. Went in full of bravado, "oh yeah my PC will beast this, it'll run no problem", and within half an hour in a world the CPU is maxed out at 100% and my FPS has dropped into the teens... So yeah, I'd use it to play Minecraft with my kids without getting a headache. And then once they're in bed, all the other far more interesting games they don't care about, too I'd probably be able to sell my existing GPU on eBay for enough to afford a family holiday too, so that'd be a nice fringe benefit.

We were obviously just unlucky with the laptops they allocated us then--I think I got maybe 2 reasonable HPs with non-terrible CPUs, but the rest were all Atoms and eMMC storage, even the non-Geobooks (of which I also got plenty!)

Cheered a little cheer today when I received an email saying there are no more devices and they're closing ordering. They've been such awful devices, they are a waste of space in my office. The email does explicitly state "Your setting owns the devices it received through GHwT and is responsible for managing them"; does that mean we can now do with them as we please rather than having to reserve them for students who are self-isolating? Particularly as there's now no legal requirement for said self-isolation. (We're still doing it as a school, but practically speaking we've not handed out more than a handful of these laptops for that for over a year now.)

Just to be clear--because my 8am caffeine-starved brain managed to get confused on this*--this key that @chrisbradbury posted works for 64-bit Office: ...but if you have 32-bit office on yer 64-bit OS the key path you need is actually HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\Internet *I copied the latter into my own registry for testing, saw it worked, then somehow managed to copy and paste the other one into my GPP so that the fix didn't actually deploy. I'm good at this, me, proper professional.

...I'm getting a timed out connection still. Anyone else?

Exchange Admin Centre is still up though https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com

8yo has just tested positive. Two years through a pandemic, and it's finally got to us Now hoping he (a) doesn't pass it on to his 76 year old Nan who lives in the annexe (b) pass it on to his Mum who is just about to start immunosuppresant infusions (Tysabri) for MS, which wil undoubtedly be knocked back/threatened altogether by an infection © end up with any of the rather terrifying Long COVID symptoms. I've had post-viral fatigue before, it cost me a year, it ain't no fun at all. If only the powers that be could see past the end of their balance sheets and just get the vaccines out as fast and as far as possible to stop all these bloody variants popping up, because we'll never be free of it so long as they're prioritising profits over actually ending this global pandemic.

Last Wednesday: had to collect 8yo from school, not enough staff to keep his class open Last Thursday: notification from 9yo's school that he now needs to test daily, there's been a case in his school Last Sunday: text from my senior tech saying he'd tested positive and had symptoms This morning: text from a friend we saw at the weekend saying one of his kids had tested positive Today: government officially shortens the self-isolation period to 5 days, because they're just bored of us having the temerity to catch this plague and be off work sick. I know anecdotes aren't data, but the dissonance is striking, especially when we got through the whole of the 20/21 academic year without any cases in the office.

As someone who needs to upgrade/replace a 9-year-old NRS system this year, this thread makes for very depressing reading. The trust-e system we've got is actually alright--simple enough for relevant staff to handle, but details enough to do things like menu rotas, pre-ordered Xmas tickets for us--but as said, Civica as a company are horrific. It feels like we get nickle-and-dimed on every support request despite paying significant sums for equipment warranties every year. Any support feels begrudgingly given. I was really hoping there was a better alternative out there, but then I read this thread, and now I'm sad.