nikaso

I did my Advanced Open Water with PADI back in 01 out in the gulf of oman, warm water, fantastic sealife with my favourite being on the night dive the instructor took us to the bottom and got us all kneeling and then told us to turn our torches off, then he showed us what bio-luminescent plankton can do by writing his name underwater......absolutely breathtaking, cue 5 minutes of us like kids on bonfire night with sparklers. The boat on the way out and back had an electric blue wake from the plankton as well, it was truly great. Quick PADI & BSAC anecdote, my then girlfriend was BSAC trained so we used to have friendly banter, my PADI instructor used to say the problem with BSAC is you end up having to spend 5 hours training before they let you snorkel (obviously tongue in cheek), I did get the impression that PADI was more accessible for the interested individual and delivered a nicely packaged qualification. The impression I got from BSAC was the training was longer and more thorough and would probably make you a more rounded diver but when you are on holiday you don't necessarily want (or need) to be as capable so long as you are aware of the limitations of your training. I certainly wouldn't jump in the water over here without training in cold water.

Rep given, this site is just what I am looking for, of course now I will have to scrape together and extra £100 or so but I am sure I have some stuff to sell on ebay!

Yeah I have got one of those and a 360 but do a fair amount of work and study as well as gaming on the PC so would like it to be quick! I really do play more games than I should methinks......

I am looking to upgrade my PC, I have a dual core Pentium chip (can't remember exact model but it is about 5 years old) 4GB RAM and a Geforce 9800 GTX+ graphics card at the moment. I am tempted by the pre-overclocked motherboard bundles particularly the i3/i5 bundles for between 300-500 squid but will really need a decent PSU, at the moment I have some Winfast budget PSU which I simply don't want to risk running a new mobo etc. on. Given a total maximum budget of £600 what upgrades would you suggest and in what order? Possibly get mobo bundle and save for a new graphics card later? SSD? New case? (existing case is a Dell XPS equivalent type case but from MESH) Thanks in advance for any advice.

I'm looking forward to it, just got back into WoW after 12 months absence so its a fast learning curve but like riding a bike its coming back, I have started a Horde character now to see the other side of the story but I really miss having a mount! Flying in Azeroth should be interesting.

No problem, we didn't necessarily do a world cup theme just ran it as a tournament, I was faced with a similar problem choosing games that were age suitable, would love to get a Modern Warfare 2 tournament going because all the kids blatantly play it at home but of course we can't be seen to be endorsing it.

I am running a FIFA 2010 South Africa World Cup tournament on PS3 at the moment, we get 35 minutes for lunch so I run 2 games (only playing the first 4 minute half) then the winner of each of these plays a final 4 minute half. This happens Monday-Thursday and on Friday we are going to have a grand final where the winners of the previous days play out the same format, 2 games then a Grand final.

I know what you mean, I suppose you have to pick and choose which ones you go for, I once was playing EVE, WoW and SWG at the same time and it was stupidly expensive. I've never tried GW, is it similar to anything else on the market? I mainly do PvE stuff and solo play so does it cater for that? Gameplay footage here and here for some examples

I've got a mondeo estate with 160K on the clock, had some gearbox / flywheel work done that was expensive but that was the first time in it's history at about 145k ! Other than that its been ok, think I am starting to reach the end of its useful life now, can't be worth much and don't want a big repair bill! I'd look at Volvos or Saabs possibly, high mileage isn't a problem if you have some good service history plus they don't tend to attract the price premium that BMWs / Audis / Mercedes do.

Yes it is, I figure I pay for them to continuously develop content so I am happy to do it for the most part, just when they massacre a game like SWG. I've played a number of interesting free to play MMOs before but they usually end up with you having to pay something or be at a massive disadvantage.

Star Wars: The Old Republic here for anyone that hasn't seen it. Check out the Decieved and Hope cinematic trailers and if it doesn't get you excited then you are dead. (IMHO ) I used to play Star Wars Galaxies pre combat upgrade, returned to it once since and couldn't believe they had cut the number of professions from something like 30 or 40 down to 8, and the servers were now filled with Jedi because you could choose it as a starting occupation whereas pre-CU it was a huge amount of work to become one, left very quickly. Played WoW up until last year and then stopped because had some serious personal stuff going on and never really got back into it, I have always loved Star Wars though so definitely looking forward to it.

Snap, HTC Desire but no proxies with Wi-Fi, means my boss can continue to sneer at me over his Jobsian mind control device, I sneer back about flash and lack of openness. The proxy settings omission seems quite a large oversight though.

Hmm, maybe we will just play a half as a game, could fit a decent number in then.

I've discussed this idea with some colleagues in the Media Studies department (as they own a PS3 thanks to me persuading them it was a good idea for their film club) and they are wanting to do some lunchtime tournaments for the kids. The idea is the kids pay 50p and play in a mini tournament (haven't decided whether it is just to be played over a lunchtime or over a week) and the department raises funds for school trips etc. I have suggested only well behaved kids can enter and we do 2 or 4 minute halves (seem to remember thats an option?). Anyone done anything similar or have any thoughts?

I second this, we have a couple of these and they are good pieces of kit, we've also got some slightly older Freecom Network Drive Pros which have been fairly reliable, one needs restarting periodically but it does get hammered.

My bike history so far: 2001 BMW F650CS 'Scarver' (what a ridiculous name) 2006 VFR 800 (Fantastic but not agile enough for city riding) 1999 BMW F650 (Bought off ebay, ran for 2 weeks then the gearbox ceased, miraculously didn't lose too much money selling it again) Ex-police 2001 Pan-European (didn't fit on it very well being 6'6, seemed to have slightly too long legs) 2006 TDM 900 (excellent bike, had to sell as couldn't justify running a car at the same time) 1998 XJ600 Diversion (bought because I missed 2 wheels so much so went for something cheap, it wasn't much fun...) No bike at the moment but dream bike right now would be a big trailie like a BMW 1200GS

Doing an audit of every bit of IT equipment in the school so we can show the Governors how backward we are and hopefully get some funding!

Secondary school with 6th form (or Post 16 as it's supposed to be called now): 1250 students about 130 staff About 600 desktops probably no more than a 100 are dual core, 100 laptops and a handful of ageing iMacs thrown in. 5 physical servers IP CCTV and bloody unreliable normal CCTV say roughly 25-30 cameras in total. Projectors in every classroom, vast majority 4+ years old. Smart boards in a lot of classrooms, IWBs in others. Various other random bits, presentation laptops / projectors, video camera, digital camera. Support everything that has current in it seemingly - 1 FT NM, 1 FT Tech, 2 Term Time Techs (1 of which is me). Forever putting out fires with virtually no time to be proactive.

As has been mentioned the 'not buying fuel from *insert oil company here* on a certain day' etc. type things don't work. I used to work in Fuel Card sales for my sins and basically we were told it doesn't matter which company you buy fuel from because in a given area all the fuel will come from the same refinery. For example if you live anywhere near Liverpool (and probably into Manchester too) you are going to be buying fuel that comes from the Shell refinery at Ellesmere Port whether its bought from a BP or a Texaco or an Esso or a supermarket. Whether this is still true or not I don't know, what I think though is there should be massive subsidies of motorbikes! This way I could afford to have one again!

PM'd it to you.

Hi all, I'm Nick and I work at a school in West Yorkshire, I've worked in school IT for 2 years (prior to that did most jobs under the sun) and plan to cross the rubicon and become an IT teacher in a couple of years. Likes: Gaming, Squash, Motorbikes Dislikes: Power cuts, arsey staff, the lack of tasers in schools. :-)

Deputy Head: "Are you any good with heights?" Me: "Err....I suppose so?" Cue spending the next half an hour clambering around the roof of a school building taking photos of holes that had been left by some cowboy contractors.

Driving to work and wishing you had rockets on your 'Warthog'