Iain.Faulkner

I'm taking delivery tonight of the first bike I've owned since I was 16 when I was hit by a car (12 years ago!). Looking forward to a nice long hot sunny summer now so I can get some use on it :-)

Hi all, Last night I walked the Manchester "Shine" Midnight Marathon in aid of Cancer Research UK, starting at 10.15 I managed to do the full 26.2 mile course in 8 hours 48 minutes. But boy oh boy am I paying for it now :-( very sore feet, legs, back and I've got several huge blisters on my feet, but overall it was worthwhile, and it's always nice to do your bit to do some fundraising for such a worthwhile cause :-)

Sent you a PM :-)

We use Netsupport here. Nice piece of software, if a little on the expensive side. Netsupport is the base package that is used by Viglen for Classlink (albeit a stripped down version) and is also used for Ranger in the same way as Viglen.

We've been buying these recently.... Toshiba Satellite Pro A300-2C4 Notebook PC - Misco.co.uk I know it's a little more expensive, but with the £50 cashback it's a significantly higher spec than the other Toshiba on the list and only a couple of quid more. We've now got about 10 of them, and not had a fault as yet, plus the cashback offer seems to come through fairly quickly.

The last days play was absolutely awesome, the shot Mickelson played from in the trees to land on that Par 5 green in two was out of this world, possibly one of the best/bravest golf shots I've ever seen played :-) Tigers Eagle on the 7th (I think it was) wasn't bad either :-) Devastated for Westwood though.....especially as that was where my money had gone before the tournament started!

We use Netsupport for classroom management, this has the functionality to do what you are wanting to achieve.

That is stunning! Off to buy Volksworld after work today now :-) My other half wants a Type 2 Bay Camper (not something I'm going to object to and will obviously support :-) ) but it just won't be the same as owning a Beetle.

I'm very jealous of your Beetle - without a doubt my dream car....one day :-)

We've just deployed Ruckus (having looked at all sorts of options available to us, including Meru, Extricom, Netgear) into our PE department purely for wireless registration. Having done the various tests, we found that Ruckus provided significantly better signal strength and coverage than the others we trialled, whilst also requiring fewer access points. Where the alternative manufacturers were specifiying 10+ access points to cover our PE area, we found that Ruckus could easily do it with no more (and we suspect we'll actually only put in 4 of the 6 we've bought). As a result of the fewer AP's required, it drives the cost down as well. Ruckus was significantly cheaper than the alternatives we looked at. Do take Simon up on his offer though for the demo kit, it really opened our eyes to how easy Ruckus is to install and manage. By far the easiest solution I've ever seen or used.

I just bought my first pair of glasses in about 4 years last night :-( Went to a place called Optical Express in the Trafford Centre, two designer pairs with all the various coatings and scratch proofing on them for £296, including a pair of prescription designer sunglasses. Seeing as I had budgeted to replace my sunglasses this year anyway, I felt that was a reasonable price to pay.

Nice one, thanks for that. That's what I assumed, but she really wouldn't take a "no I'm not interested" for an answer. We are covered online at least as, as mentioned in the op, the council does our filtering and monitoring for us which I had assumed would cover us for esafety (certainly at its lowest level anyway).

Afternoon all, Just had a sales call from Securus, fairly standard call would you like to trial our product for a month etc etc. Politely informed the saleslady that we wouldn't have the funds for something like this for some time due to our summer reinstallation that took place last summer plus our council do our web filtering for us, and that although I believe Securus to be a good product I wouldn't want to waste their time by taking a box off them for a month knowing in advance that I would not be purchasing. Her response surprised me somewhat..... Apparently there is a Government requirement to have an e-safety system in place that provides the functionality that securus does (such as monitoring kids for work they do in school, ie monitoring words typed into documents as opposed to just filtering their web access), within the next 18 months...... Now is this right? Or is she just pushing a hard sale? Has anyone else heard of some government requirement for this?

This is something we used to do at my last school, and was well appreciated by staff as the majority enjoy being kept in the loop. Ours took the form of an "IT Update" and we sent it out on a half term basis on the first day back after the shutdown. The Update would normally be outlining the work done during the shutdown period, as well as any work that would likely be carried out during the next half term. It's something I am going to try and implement at my current school, as communication between us as a department and the rest of the school is poor to say the least.

We changed our last summer. For students we now use their six digit date of birth followed by their initials. For staff we use the very basic first initial surname.

Afternoon All, Slightly strange one this. We've recently invested in a number of Canon Photocopiers for around school, which have all been networked and installed on our Print Server (running Server 2008). The photocopiers have installed fine, and you can send a test print to them from the server, which again prints fine and as a result I rolled out the photocopier via group policy to those users who required access to it. However, when they try and print to the photocopier, they are prompted for an account code (as we expect) which they enter, but once they press enter to send the document through to print they see the following message "Could not get device information" and as a result they cannot print. I have now set the photocopier in question (an IRC3080I) up as a lcoal printer through a standard TCP/IP port and this allows the users to print successfully, but obviously it means we cannot track how many copies are being done and by which account, which we'd like to be able to do. Has anyone else had similar issues?

Just to offer my thanks as well to both Ian and Luke..... Wish you could find me something in the Northwest though :-)

How about the usb pet rock?

Good shout, I saw White Lies at Glastonbury last year and loved every second. Their album is quality as well, really looking forward to seeing these again. I'm also looking at going to Wakestock for a day, purely because Maximo Park (probably my favourite live band) have been announced as one of the headliners..just waiting for them to confirm whcih day they're playing :-)

Morning all, Just been looking at the lineup for V Festival this summer. Having bought my ticket last September when a limited number were put on sale at the previous years prices, I was pleased to see Kasabian and the Kings of Leon as Headliners (along with bands like Editors, Stereophonics, The Kooks, Madness, Doves, White Lies, The Prodigy etc etc) given it was a relative risk buying the tickets so early with no idea who might be announced. So I thought I'd see if anyone else is hitting V Festival, or any other Music Festival this Summer and what you think of the lineups if you are going?

We bought 350 machines from Ergo last summer. Had very very few problems (thinking off the top of my head I'd say we've had 5 develop faults in the 6 months we've had them in). Would definitely recommend them.

After leaving my first school (where i'd been for 4 years) I went into the private sector for just under 12 months and hated it. Yes there were some perks (free nights out once a month, company breakfast every week) but I missed working in a school, so I got myself back in as quickly as I could :-) Do I miss the private sector....not a chance.

Just thought I'd add my piece to this....... We had Stone as one of our final two potential suppliers in our tender for a full network rebuild last summer. We were invited down to their HQ it Stafford, their sales guys (Jake and Miles) couldn't have been more helpful and I was very impressed by their setup and the proposal that they made. Certainly on the supply of PC's, their PC's appeared well built, and the only issue I had with the case, was that the blanking plates were a little flimsy. Ultimately we didn't choose them (but that's for reasons not to do with this), but it was so incredibly close that it was actually really hard to ring them to tell them that unfotunately they hadn't won this order (unlike when we range RM, Ramesys and the other companies who tendered).

I've got the 32" version of the Sony, and I have to say I love it. I am slightly biased in that I pretty much buy only Sony when I look for electrical items though, as I've been buying them for 15 years and never had a problem.

Woohoo!! Our council finally fixed my access to Edugeek...only taken them nearly a month!! The best birthday present I could ever have....except of course Simon's post :-) Cheers Simon