sonofsanta

Anytime I choose "Copy a Seating Plan" from the actions menu I get "No seating plan is available to copy" pop up, regardless of whether I'm on an empty plan (so do we copy them in from elsewhere?) or a populated plan (so do we export a completed plan to other classes?) How's it actually meant to work?

I've known microwaves knock out wireless before, but that one was new to me! Shielding on those copper wires can't be much cop, mind you...

Economy ain't gonna do so hot when 3% of the population dies, either, and a significant portion of those who survive are left with lingering health-effects. I've had chronic fatigue syndrome from a virus before, and it was no fun whatsoever. It sounds like it's not an uncommon lingering effect of COVID-19 already, and god knows what long term damage it does to the pulmonary and cardiovascular systems. The economy is screwed either way. But at least one way, fewer people die.

The Devil All The Time on Netflix, with Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgard, Robert Pattinson, Jason Clarke, etc. etc... follows a young boy/man (Holland) and the troubles he goes through in late 50s/early 60s Ohio, and intertwines the troubles and travails of a half-dozen groups of people in the local area with his story. Not a cheerful film by any stretch, but brilliantly acted and directed, and a gorgeous production. Helluva cast, too. Won't blow your mind but it is worth your time, if you're in the right frame of mind.

Looking like stock is gone for about six weeks already o_O https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/09/18/heres-where-you-can-actually-buy-an-rtx-3080-right-now Feels like nVidia just wanted to beat AMD to the punch, and rushed release before they had actual stock. Crazy stuff. Kinda glad I elected not to wait and just buy my 5700XT three months ago: still a mighty good card (and good value for money on FPS/£ charts, only losing to this new 3080) and means I don't have to get so frustrated by all this nonsense!

Interesting article on the current state of the science. In short: surface transmission less of an issue than thought, the virus dies on surfaces quite quickly (i.e. 24 hours rather than 72); aerosol transmission probably how it spreads in most cases; practical advice is therefore to wear your flipping mask. https://elemental.medium.com/the-most-likely-way-youll-get-infected-with-covid-19-30430384e5a5

In the realms of "minor issues I honestly wish I had time to deal with", but still. Our AD displayNames are set as Staff I Surname, and by and large Teams uses that for anything that happens in the channel. But! When there are collapsed replies, it decides to use the firstName field too, e.g. Anyone know how to stop this? I don't want to overwrite the firstName field in AD with anything else, because if I use the initial there it'll be worse than useless ("S replied..."), because it's useful to be able to look up staff first names in a variety of differents places, and because there'll almost certainly be a knock-on consequence I can't imagine right now. I just need Teams to use displayName there instead of firstName, but I can't spot any policy or setting to achieve this. Anyone else had to field this complaint from staff and found a fix?

People here are being pretty good about wearing masks (though one staff member got a bit uppity when asked to put one on in our office yesterday; one of us gets ill we all go home, so see how well that works out versus just putting a mask on) which is pretty lucky given that the boys' school in town has already been told to send their Year 7 home. That'd be the boys school where we share some sixth form lessons, and who our girls hang out with. Fun times ahead.

The Broken Earth trilogy is phenomenal. The trick it pulls in the first one with POV is staggeringly clever, and had me shouting OH SUGARPUFFS* out loud in my car as I realised what N. K. Jemisin had done. Brilliant ending to the whole trilogy, too. I just finished listening to her newest one, as it happens, THE CITY WE BECAME, which is more urban fantasy--five strangers suddenly become the avatars of the five New York boroughs, and find themselves under attack from a mysterious Woman in White who is in the habit of attacking cities as they awaken. Less heavy going than Broken Earth, though not without its share of commentary. Lot of fun in audio too. *may have been another word that I can't use on EduGeek

We were going to book appointments as normal, and then tell parents to use their kid's Teams account and hang around online about the right time; then the teacher will invite them into the video meeting when they're ready for them. Pertinently, Microsoft have just updated Teams to allow the meeting setting to be "everyone has to wait in the lobby", where before you couldn't stop members of your org diving straight in; that's only an issue if you hold the meeting in a Team everyone has access to, though, so probably the better approach will be telling staff to make a new Team with only them in, then invite people in as needed (you can invite people who aren't in the team) On hitting time limits: if you're the organiser of the meeting (i.e. you initiated the call), you can forcibly disconnect people. Bit rude, but a useful last ditch measure

I think I can answer this fairly easily--no, because with so much mixing outside the bubbles (buses, siblings at home, teachers moving between the bubbles) it would take very little indeed to shut the school, and they don't want to do that, so we all get to risk our lives instead. I have said expressly that we in IT will still be wearing masks as we inevitable get close to people in trying to fix their PC, and because I don't want to be breathing all over their equipment. Maybe we should carry a bottle of antibac with us too, so we can spray once we're done fixing stuff.

I still cannot fathom that the official advice for crowded buildings of 1000+ people, potentially from a relatively wide geographic area (our catchment area is at least a 30 mile radius here in Lincolnshire), stuck inside with each other for 7 hours, is explicitly to remove the mask on entering the building. If they exempted the kids I'd not be delighted but could at least understand their logic (even if I didn't agree with it--I'd prefer "better safe than sorry"), but to tell the staff to remove them as well is just... well, I haven't got a word that encapsulates the callous nonsense.

Starting to question whether all this is a conspiracy to track us through masks. There's evidence out there that the MSM are deliberately suppressing. Wake up, sheeple! Just look at this video! [Twitter]

You can just deploy the MSI that Microsoft offer, but it does indeed install directly into AppData for each user on login, which means for anyone with UE-V and no local profile stored, it takes a few minutes each time before it's available. It's a pain in the wossit, frankly; I gather it's done this way so that the client always has the rights to update itself, because it's updated so often, but it reeeally doesn't work with the way a school works (see also: syncing to OneDrive for Business)

Yup. And I warrant there's been more cleaners on site every day than there have been teachers.

So I imagine the rest of you have already spotted the problem with this announcement, seeing as it's the same problem we here have had for a decade... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53478404

We put 65" screens in. I was concerned about the loss of size at first, but here's the thing: the width of a 16:9 65" touchscreen and a 4:3 77" Smartboard is damn near the same. The size you lose is in the vertical dimension, but practically speaking you lose the bottom of the board that can't be seen over other students' heads anyway. The actual usable space is pretty much the same, but the text is much crisper, the contrast is greater, and you don't need to turn off the lights. An 80" would be better, sure, but they cost twice as much as a 65", and given money is finite, I'd rather make a difference for the biggest quantity of students I can.

I love a touchscreen and install them where I can, but it costs 3x the price to fit one as it does a projector, and with 70-odd classrooms you're talking a £100k project to replace them all, when honestly a projector is fine for the majority. The Casios were bright enough and low maintenance enough (and with later models, cheap enough--the Core was only £400 and never cost you owt more than that) that you could throw them up all over. We rarely use touch, so the only places I need a touchscreen are where I can't install a projector on a pole and a UST projector isn't powerful enough (they're never powerful enough). I had confirmation from my usual supplier on this a month or so back, abd I know they wouldn't bullshit me, so it is true. Which is annoying, because they've all I've installed since the A series first came out. Every standard projector in our school is a Casio of one stripe or another, and while they've not been flawless (had about 5-10 starfield repairs over the last decade), they've been a damn sight less trouble than a normal projector. Mighty grieved to see them go, given that there's no obvious replacement.

I watched Hamilton too, and... look, I am really not a musicals person at all. There isn't a musical out there I actually like, in large part because my simple brain can't manage to appreciate a melody and parse the words at the same time, and also because I just really don't like Andrew Lloyd Webber's music (sorry). But my god, Hamilton is brilliant. It helped enormously that I could put subtitles on to keep up with what was happening, but the lyrics are incredible, the music is catchy and interesting, the performances are amazing and the story scratches so many of my personal itches (friends to rivals! What happens after the revolution! Brought low by your own inability to compromise!). It's well worth a go, even if you don't think it'll be your thing.

Hotel Mumbai with Dev Patel, Jason Isaacs and Armie Hammer. Dramatisation of the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. Not at all an action film filled with heroics: a surprisingly touching and exceedingly tense film. Worth the time.

Oh god yeah, I had this. Booked Civica in for an appointment to change over back in April or something, and about two weeks after June's launch I realised I hadn't heard anything from them. They'd just not bothered to tell me everyone was on furlough and the work wouldn't be done. Great stuff. And then it transpired they can't switch MIS source without also switching payment source, which we weren't ready for yet as we hadn't launched MCAS, so yeah, bit of a mess from Civica's end. You need to keep an eye on those third parties.

We were meant to switch MIS just after Easter, with our first on-site training day scheduled for, I kid you not, the first Wednesday of lockdown. I was hovering over the news praying we'd get three more days, just three more days... but alas. So: in conversation with Bromcom (our new supplier), we pushed back our launch date to the June half-term, in the optimistic hope that all this would have blown over and we'd be able to get the on-site training day done in May. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Never mind. What we ended up doing instead--we did need to change still, our existing MIS contract runs out at the end of this month--was buying a bunch of long HDMI cables so that everyone could connect their laptop up to a TV, and so follow the presenter on a big screen while logged in to the system themselves still. Not as ideal, but it did still work okay. People have gotten surprisingly competent at working from home through all this. The downside to launching during lockdown has been that we've not been able to as easily have conversations on the way we want things configured--I actually went in to school yesterday for a couple of extra webinars (stuff that wasn't essential for launch), and we were able to make decisions there and then on config settings as we were all in one room discussing it as we were trained. I've also not been able to just sit down with our new data manager and just blast through a load of decisions/precedents--there's been some long email chains, and that's a slower way to work than a conversation in person. The upside to launching during lockdown, and tbh it's been a considerable upside, has been all the pressure off. Our live system was handed over about 6pm on a Friday, and in other circumstances I'd have spent all weekend working to get it ready for Monday 9am, but in the event there was no-one on site needing to take a register. I spent half an hour Sunday evening getting logins out to everyone, but other than that I've been able to work on the system without the pressure of "normal school business can't proceed until you do this" and without interruptions for printer jams etc. It's been a much more relaxed way to launch something that otherwise I've spent years dreading as a task due to the scope. This is the only Bromcom migration I've ever been through so I don't know what it would have been like under normal circumstances, but I've never had a "I'm on furlough" autoreply, I've never struggled to get hold of anyone or been stuck waiting for a reply, and it's all felt pretty much business as usual from their end. Migrating now is absolutely viable, maybe even preferable.

I can't remember the pricing specifically--the Head dealt with that aspect and just kept me informed, though from my perspective an MIS is too important to base the decision on price and I'd have argued for a pricier option if I thought it was better--but I think SIMS was far and away the more expensive, something like 25-30% more, and the others were all similar too each other; but then, of course, you have to account for third party services you might need, and so Bromcom (already competitive on price) became the cheapest option as well as the best. Everybody I spoke to who had been in the demos (SLT, Exams, Pastoral, HR, Finance...) independently said they liked Bromcom best, so that it worked out the cheapest too was very happy coincidence.

We're a selective secondary academy (i.e. a grammar school), not part of a trust but going it alone, with about 1200 kids. We were on FacilityCMIS for a decade, and have just migrated to Bromcom this month. We had all our demo meetings in December/January, so pretty recently; we looked at four options: SIMS, who are still not on the cloud, and still giving a vague "two years' time" for when their cloud platform will be ready, and they've been saying that for a lot of years now apparently. No thank you. Arbor, who to be fair looked really good, but are still ramping up their feature set for secondary schools and so weren't quite there yet for us. I'd recommend everyone who is looking to still look, because in a year or two they're going to be a really good option, but right now it didn't have everything we wanted (still relied on 3rd parties etc.) Bromcom, which I'll discuss more below as the choice we went with Progresso from Advanced (now called something generic, School Cloud or Cloud School or Cloud Cloud or whatever), which was... competent, but fell short of Bromcom in myriad little ways all over. It just wasn't as good. Top things we liked about Bromcom, keeping it brief: the interface is very intuitive, and still improving. Information is laid out in a sensible, useful fashion, and tasks you'll need to do are arranged and set out in ways that make sense for your work flow (as opposed to Facility, where everything was laid out according to the data structure, not any human need). It can do absolutely everything: room bookings, payments, communications, safeguarding... and because of that, you have more data in this system than you would in any other, and that allows you to expose more information from that data (and the reporting engine is very straightforward, and there's PowerBI if you want something more powerful). And the product is always improving: about half the things we asked about in the demo, the presenter could name the school that had asked for this improvement, so there was very much a sense of collaboration where others (Advanced, for example, who we asked specifically about this) were very reluctant to let schools influence their product development. Migration from CMIS involved uploading a SQL database dump via secure FTP and providing a Facilityusername/password, then Bromcom did everything. The only data that's not come across are some user-defined fields and assessment data, as we need to rebuild the assessment structure in Bromcom ourselves, and we can then import via CSV. I can't speak to a SIMS migration, but I imagine it'd be similar. They do two data cuts: one early on, so you can check the data and have a play with the system without worrying about damaging your data; and another a week before launch, so you don't need to spend weeks/months doing double entry (again, something not everyone did). Training is via webinar, which has been fine; having the test system to play on really helps. Launch has been a little odd for us under the circumstances but has gone smoothly, and we get a weekly phone call with a consultant, free of charge until we no longer need them, so we can ask all the little questions that have arisen from finally using the system in anger. All in all, very happy with it, and it's much easier to use even while we're working our way through the learning-a-new-system stage (the global search is a godsend; you can guess what a setting might be called and turn the page up that way, instead of menu-hunting). By the time we've probably got our heads round all the aspects of it in a year or two, it should be amazing.

Hello this is a reminder that What We Do In The Shadows is absolutely superb, all on BBC iPlayer, and so far Season 2 seems even better than Season 1. Go get you some.