sonofsanta

I'm only watching it for the spectacle now. I'm not really invested anymore. Stuff is happening on too short a timescale--we get at most one episode of foreshadowing before Big Thing and All Its Consequences happen, and stuff that was foreshadowed is over without a blink (e.g. big bolt throwers fired from ships = 100% accuracy, building up the battle at Kings Landing... only for all of them to miss spectacularly for no special reason, wth). And yeah, there's been hints of $character's latest turn, but... also lots of hints in the other direction. This felt forced. This felt cheap. It feels like characters are just acting in the way the plot demands they do now, not the way that makes sense for them. I can't believe Jaime's arc ended the way it did after 6-7 seasons pointed the other way. I can't believe Cersei just stood there and accepted everything happening without a trick up her sleeve--seriously, that was a massacre even before the bells rang, what a one-sided affair after everything. Anyway, going back to episode 4 and all our complaints about the bolt throwers: someone ran the numbers, and to be as accurate as shown they'd need to be flying 2000m/s (twice as fast as a sniper's bullet) and would hit an altitude of 74,000 feet if they missed. Maybe not, eh?

I suppose that, instead of tweaking the big gap, you could beef up the final part of the series and have a break there--be a bit of a downer ending for S1, but that's rather fashionable right now, isn't it? And he'd be perfect for Abner, look and voice and everything. Who would you have as Joshua, though? Tom Hiddleston would be tempting tbh--halfway between Loki's charm and the Night Manager's righteousness. A showdown between him and Ron Perlman as Damon Julian would be a magnificent thing...

I would love a Fevre Dream mini-series. I suspect you'd have to tweak the ending, because an 11 year gap to the last 10% of a book sure is a thing, but I adore the atmosphere and ambience of that story. The version on Audible is read by the guy who played Rodrik Cassel (he of the great whiskery sideburns up North) and it's bloody marvellous.

...I don't think the books will ever be finished. Book 5 came out alongside Season 1, and yet we still haven't got Book 6. I think we'll get that one, but then the pressure/scale of Book 7 will mean it's never done before he dies. Which probably means someone else gets the job to finish it like Brandon Sanderson did with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, because $$$, but that's never the same.

Oh man, Lady Stoneheart. I thought we'd at least get a reference to her when the dead in the crypts inevitably woke up (genius tactic btw lads, stick your most vulnerable in a room full of the dead before you fight a necromancer, brilliant, love it), but they couldn't even give us that, the cowards

We have LanSchool for classroom management and Impero for safeguarding. Except they still haven't split Impero up properly, so we still have the full thing installed, even though we're only licensed for the safeguarding side (EdProtect, iirc?). Which was a delight for me a couple of weeks ago when a new display driver for the classroom management started mucking up my photography room and interactive boards--we don't use that side at all, aren't meant to have it, but it's still causing problems. Joyful! Impero is much heavier on resources than LanSchool IME. And more expensive: for our school of 550 PCs/1200 kids, we pay less than £1k p.a. for LanSchool Support. And if you're happy going without updates, you don't need to pay for support, as we did for a few years Win7 (just took it up again with the move to Win10). I know LanSchool is building up the safeguarding aspect right now, but it isn't quite as full featured as Impero still.

I'm less concerned by how quick they built the bolt throwers--they've had a few weeks, and the Northmen built trebuchets faster (only to deploy them in front of their infantry, fire them once while their cavalry was already charging, and then, uh abandon them?)--than by how bloody quickly they could reload them, given that there was enough tension in them to punch through a dragon. And their accuracy! It's hard enough hitting a plane from a stationary AA gun on the ground; pretty bloody certain you're not going to hit a less-predictable dragon from a moving ship on a windy day with every bloody bolt you fire. So much of what's happening now is happening because the plot demands it and they want the story to go a certain way, rather than because it makes sense for the characters to act that way. It's never been quite as good as it was since they went past the end of the books, tbh; they've fallen into fantasy cliché and predictability, and there seems to be a lot of plot armour keeping characters alive these days :/ And I'm really angry at Jon for sending Ghost away without even a hug. He only did it so they could save on the CGI budget! Ghost is such a good good boy and he deserves better than this

It was, yes--paid the invoice, got a new licence key, PCounter continues to work past its previous expiration date. All is well and above board

Had to Google that after the movie too. PMing you!

I loved Endgame. Cried about eight times. Not so keen on how they treat one character's trauma for laughs, but in general the character moments in this one landed much better for me than in IW (which felt a bit shallow to me), and it does a frankly astonishing job of referencing 11 years' worth of films. So many good moments.

Hehehehehehe (got my tickets for tomorrow and I am so excited :3 )

A much more reasonable 3! More likely to find myself that way for another professional reason, though, so I'm sure I could stop off on the way if so...

Alas, 4½ hours drive for me is a bit painful for a 9am start, and I don't like staying away from home overnight, 'cos soppy git that I am I miss my kids too much. Can someone make sure @ICTDirect_Dave is okay without me? He might be a bit sensitive on the day. (Just means I need to come up with an excuse to head Preston way for a factory floor tour...)

The 2018 Robin Hood is absolute nonsense, isn't it? By the point the 14th Century knights were dispersing a line of fire set off by a Molotov cocktail with their riot shields my brain had got up, walked out and gone to sit in the woods for a bit. I think it chose the woods because it was so confused about the complete lack of trees in a Robin Hood film. If you can turn your brain off entirely, though--and I mean entirely--it is kinda fun. It's definitely a better Assassin's Creed movie than Assassin's Creed was.

The Radio 6 shows--one with Charlie Brooker chatting about his favourites, two of them a broader dive into the history and technique of game music--are excellent. Listened to them while playing Two Point Hospital this last week, as after 60-odd hours I've hit my limit with that music and need something else in the background. Ironic that I used this, I suppose

...I may have cracked it with this guide, in fact, though it'll need some testing to make sure it's reliable: https://nathannagele.com/how-to-remove-choices-in-google-forms/

So Maths have asked me if this is possible, and it seems like it should be, it's just finding the best approach. They want to make sure Year 11 kids are coming in for revision sessions during exam time, and so they want a booking system where they can choose which revision sessions they want to attend. There are 14 potential sessions, each with 30 available spaces, in a week, and each week will be treated differently. Kids will need to attend exactly 3 sessions a week. My first instinct was a Google/Office 365 Form where they could fill out their name, maths group and then select three sessions with checkboxes. That'd all feed into a spreadsheet that could be used to generate registers, check sign ups etc. But I'm not sure how I could get the form to dynamically update the number of seats available based on responses already received, such that a session with 30 participants could no longer be selected. I also thought about using Office 365 resources, but I don't think that can handle multiple people booking a resource at once, nor would it give us the data in as useful a format as a form. The other option is to set up multiple free trips on WisePay, but that'll be more work than a simple form, especially as Maths want to treat each week differently--with a form, I can just duplicate everything, but with WisePay it'll end up being (say) 4 weeks of 14 sessions = 56 blooming trips. I don't think it'd be possible to enforce the exactly-three requirement, either. ("Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out...") I'm open to suggestions, either for making the above work or any other approach. Doodle.com looks a plausible option in its free incarnation: it can do the limit of 30 places, it can export to Excel, but it can't insist upon exactly-three and I can't add specific notes on options to state the room (though both these problems can be mitigated by adding a description). Anyone ever done anything similar?

Had this too. Raised my scam hackles a bit with "we've got no details of your licenses, please can you tell us then pay this new bank account?" but Companies House does list the liquidation: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04380885/filing-history

(Reposted from original thread due to new closing date) Assistant IT tech post working in an office with three others (one of whom is me, as NM), 52 weeks/year, 37 hours/week, in an all-girl's grammar school in Grantham. We're a lovely place to work at--hence me being here 9 years and change now--and I try and make sure everyone has ownership of their own projects and expertises. Job satisfaction is important, y'know? Windows 10, Active Directory, Office 365 site. If you know your way round a camera it'd be useful, given how much of our time is spent filming video evidence these days... Full details on the school's vacancies page. Not had a great many applicants as yet, so the odds are more in your favour!

Closing date pushed back to the 8th, because the response has not been particularly overwhelming (doesn't help that the local paper charges SIX HUNDRED FLIPPING POUNDS to post an advert, which we can't afford...). So, y'know, you've got a reasonably good chance if you do put your ticket in. Hint hint. Nudge nudge. (Makes you wonder about whether we should join up with some kind of larger jobs market where workers could move freely to help protect against these problems and even out variations in employment and vacancy rates...)

Right, that makes sense, cheers. DPO hadn't heard back from anyone as of last night, but if I can catch up with her I'll see if they've said anything yet...

I don't understand why they assume there'd be any difference between the accuracy the first time and the second time, though. The data is verified the first time it's manually entered into the MIS from a paper record. If anything, it's more likely to be wrong the second time because people are fed up of having to repeat a job. PMing you

So in your far-more-knowledgeable opinion, this isn't an unreasonable stance for them to take, even though it hugely increases the risk of them having inaccurate data? It feels like a Catch 22 to me, except one option is practically speaking going to have far more impact on a regular basis whereas the other is (from my perspective) more theoretical? And since they're not disabling automation in favour of asking parents to update directly (which I could see the logic of), but instead asking us to update manually, how is our word more trustworthy with the latter mechanism than the former? (I'm not arguing with you here, genuinely trying to understand. Your expertise in this area far surpasses mine!)

They've had to modify GroupCall already though to stop it doing what it was doing, so they could have just modified it to grab what it actually needed (fundamentally, contact details, which is directly relevant to their service anyway). It really does seem like they actually believe this bobbins. They've been our online payment provider for... seven years? More? And honestly been brilliant in all that time, so it's not a straw at risk of breaking a camel's back. It's just infuriating. I want to grab them and shake some sense into them.

But then they're happy for us to update the data manually. And they've not even asked if our forms have a checkbox along the lines of "I am happy for this data to be shared with third parties contracted specifically to provide services for the school only on the basis that it is used for school business" etc., which would be a box-ticking exercise anyway AFAIC but surely be enough if that was their concern? We are using the exact same sync tool to synchronise data to other suppliers, yes. One more part of the ridiculousness. I wish it were as easy as "should be good to go" but the task at hand, fundamentally, is just convincing them they're overreacting