sonofsanta

I've had a pretty horrendous week this week, and have spent most of it trying to track down internet gremlins. It has been the sort of week where I hate that we're wholly independent; 99% of the time, I love being able to do what we deem necessary, and be masters of our own destinies configurations, but this has been the 1% where I dearly, dearly wish there was someone above me to pass the buck unto. Everything involved - Smoothwall, core switch, internet connection - has checked out individually all along, but something about the specific combination made the internet through the filter unusable. The sporadic clues I gathered were as confusing and contradictory as they were enlightening, and I spent all of Tuesday & Wednesday on the phone between Smoothwall and my ISP, unsure which was at fault, desperate for someone, anyone, to talk to, in the hopes they would have an idea and be able to magically fix what was incomprehensibly broken. It does appear, however, to be at an end: I have run some 50 odd tests over the last two days without fault, where normally the problem pops up after 2 runs, so I am as confident as I can be that the situation is resolved, and that it turned out - in the end - to be a faulty config with our virtual firewall at the ISP's end. Smoothwall were, in the end, blameless, despite the problem being specific to that device and strongly implicating it. Despite it being no fault of their own, Rob Wilson at support has spent probably 4 to 5 hours on the phone with me this week, has listened patiently to me detailing exactly why it has to be the Smoothie at fault, has patiently explained back why it isn't, has helped me test, diagnose and discard possibilities, and gone above and beyond in helping on an issue that wasn't - in the end - his to deal with. So this is me saying thanks, to Rob specifically, and Smoothwall support in general. There was more than once this week I muttered the words "I hope it's the Smoothwall, so it's their support I get to talk to". You guys are ace On a related note, anyone know how much it'd cost to trade-in an SWG-1200 for a new UTM device? My budget bid is due soon...

After this week, I'll have mine with Baileys in please. Go easy on the coffee, though. Didn't fill the kettle up, you say? Oh well. I'll just have the Bailey's then, thanks. Oh look, Netflix have emailed to say House of Cards S3 is on now... I'm, er, just taking my Bailey's to go and, um, perform some preventative server maintenance on my own. In the server room. With my headphones. Don't disturb me, it's very sensitive work.

Yeah, that rear-left tyre (the right-most one in the picture) has got quite a few holes punched through it. Personally I think it's more Johnny Five than Dalek:

Big Hero 6: bunch of science nerds save the day with the most adorable and awesome robot ever imagined. You will laugh, you will cry, you will weep that you can't actually own your own Baymax. Utterly brilliant.

22" 1080p monitors in classrooms here, for about the last five years; compared to 17" square they're cheaper, easier to source, with more range (it can be bloody hard work getting decent square monitors with DVI), look better and have more screen space, even vertically. In an ideal world I'd have 16:10 monitors, as I prefer them, but they're not cheap. Teacher PCs are either 17" square for standalones, or dual monitor with a 22" & 17" in a computer room that has 22". I've just bought some refurb monitors from @ICTDirect_Dave for these, though, as I'm sick of paying so much for such old fashioned monitors - he's about a third the price of a new monitor.

Curiosity Self-Portrait at 'Mojave' Site on Mount Sharp | NASA Full resolution (18029 x 9233, 32.4MB JPG) Makes for a pretty awesome wallpaper. For those clever enough to wonder: the reason you can't see the camera arm is because the image is a composite of multiple snaps, and the arm moves to take each photo; when NASA stitched it together, they patched the arm out, clever sorts that they are. (and yes, the headline was deliberately clickbaity, for those lols I hear so much about)

Ooh, that reminds me, I had another article to link in here - there's some interesting surreal photomanips here, with links to the artists for more: 25 Fantastic and Funny Photos Celebrate Photoshop's 25th Birthday - My Modern Met

Do you know what we call alternative medicine that works? "Medicine".

To lighten the mood and lessen the anger we all feel that people like this think they are capable of making decisions for us all: He seems the kind of person to believe the "humans only use 10% of their brain!" myth, although to be fair that does appear to be true in his case. In good news, there's a Monster Raving Loony party candidate in my constituency this May. I am seriously considering it. At least they're honest.

"I can't tell you why, but I promise you, $competitor will BREAK YOUR BRAIN. Just trust me. Honestly, I'm completely unbiased here. I can't tell you why, it just will, alright." Completely buying it.

I can understand his issue, but it's not with Word, it's with his publisher's workflow. Once you get to a suitable level of complexity, Word becomes untenable for a large writing project, because you can't easily skip around and back and forth. I think authors that do use Word still will create a separate file for each chapter to stop it becoming unwieldy. But Scrivener will cross-reference characters and locations and tie in with outlines etc. so is actually built for the job. His description of it as an IDE for creative writing isn't far off; while you could write a quick ASP in Notepad, once you ramp up to a full project you want Visual Studio to keep track of all your assets. So really, his editor should learn to deal with Scrivener, because it is relevant and useful software to their profession.

Run the EXE (but don't go through it) then open C:\Users\%username%\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\ and the MSI is in a folder in there

Oh ff... cheers. Edugeek resized the file down, presumably because of its enormous vertical resolution.

3 meters long? http://www.edugeek.net/forums/jokes-interweb-things/68704-infographic-evolution-batmobile.html EDIT: just noticed link in that thread is dead; here's the file

Avoid the cheap brands because you will suffer with the interface. We had a cheap Technika TV from Tesco once and it honestly took about 5 minutes to get from BBC1 up to the other end of the channel list to see what was on - each channel took around ten seconds to load and it wouldn't let you go through the EPG without loading the channel. Proper brands are worth the money, I promise. LG are fantastic for the money - got a couple at home and been delighted with them.

We did the same thing as you - trips, then cashless catering - and looked at (IIRC) ParentPay, Tucasi and WisePay. At the time Tucasi was quite old-fashioned - data was synced manually through a batch job, and it used a clunky old Windows application for administration. I believe it's been updated since but can't comment. ParentPay looked good, all online unlike Tucasi so always working with live data, but around the time there were threads on here complaining about how flaky the service was in September and how hard support were to get hold of which made us wary. WisePay were the best looking of the lot (the product, not the sales rep) and the most knowledgeable; it always bodes well when a sales person can answer your question then and there. Even without the worrying threads about ParentPay, WisePay came across as a more competent, capable, professional product. We've been with WisePay now for (I think) 3 years; initially trips only, later the admin back end as well, and for a year and a half tied into our Nationwise cashless catering system. Our finance people swear by it, it's never given me any grief and support have always been superb - quick, helpful, flexible and willing to work with us instead of just telling us "that's the way it is". Thoroughly recommended and well worth talking to.

I'm not doing so good so far, but I'm going to try harder better faster stronger till I manage it. Best song ever? Maybe.

Also, @StevieM - does this mean you need to install a pair of giant USB ports and some giant audio ports on your pirate ship now? So it all matches up?

TAP licensing was basically the difference between you guys and the other two quotes last Summer. Which means it's looking good for when I start talking to you in a couple of months about the new batch we want this summer it made a massive difference to our costs last year - it's something like a £60-70 discount per device, is it not? Properly awesome stuff from MS. And having just saved a big chunk by opting for Unifi over Ruckus, I can spend that extra money on more & better PCs instead...

As if matrimony and fatherhood are excuses for staying away from what's really important in life: fellow asocial geeks like us. Good to see you newly rededicated to the cause (I jest. Congratulations!)

I've always had it on my MIS server for one reason or another (county, or sync to an external system) and it's always just sat there and got on with its job. I only have that experience of it as an end user, but it's been painless for five years.

What did she expect to happen? Cue loads of stupid types protesting about her "freedom of speech" without ever considering the freedom of consequences attached.

So I'm sure you all immediately rushed out and bought those SATA cables for your internal drives a couple of years ago. But I bet that, since then, you've shifted all your media from internal storage out to a NAS, and never even thought about the destruction of audio quality wrought by your sub-par ethernet cables. Even if you hooked your NAS up with those super fancy pants SATA cables, what good does that do you with only cheap copper Cat5E 'twixt you and your music? But fret no longer! The AudioQuest Diamond RJ/E Cat7 Ethernet cable at only $10,000 for 12m will restore your music to all its former glory! Cables of this quality are manufactured to be directional, and have arrows on each plug indicating the direction your music should flow. Concerned about multiple nonlinear time-delays? Don't be! With AudioQuest's Dielectric-Bias System insulation, a strong, stable electrostatic field saturates and polarizes the molecules of the insulation, ensuring your very time-sensitive multi-octave audio is delivered as accurately as possible. Don't forget you'll need two - one from your NAS to your switch, and one from your switch to your player. Surely $20,000 is no money at all though, for the peace of mind that comes from knowing you're hearing every last bit of your audio at the very finest quality - just as the exhuasted, over-worked, under-appreciated producer who was sick of dealing with that recording artist's nonsense intended it to sound! (Source: To the audiophile, this $10,000 Ethernet cable apparently makes sense | Ars Technica)

A blanking plate for a computer we don't have. One of my technicians was so flabbergasted at the waste of time and money it represented that he posted it back with an angry rant. I wouldn't mind a tree, though. Or Skittles, though I do think the packaging is a little stupid...

Don't forget the Midlands as well - it might be alright for people in the Central Midlands to make their way up or down without too much grief, but both Preston and Oxford are nearly 4 hours away from me in the East Midlands, where somewhere like Nottingham or Leicester would only be a couple of hours and driveable without too early a morning. Rail links in Lincolnshire are awful, by the way, to the point that my home town doesn't have a train station - I'd have to get a bus to Lincoln to get a train - so early morning drives are the only way I ever get anywhere!