Sirbendy

We had no gas in the old place..electric was again Npower, credit meter jobbie with Eco7. I had a fight with them as well..we had 2 astronomical bills for a 1 bed flat, and I bought a plug in meter that proved they were WAY off..I've never heard a company back-pedal as fast.. The prepay meter for electric is fine for me...it's bang on my estimate, about the same as the credit meter..I have no qualms with it at all...I sat and watched it go through the "new tenant reset", and i'm quite happy with it. The gas meter is an idiot device though...we got our new gas card, I followed the "slap it in the meter for a minute, then charge it with cash, slap it back in, job done" procedure that should have done the reset, and what did the damnfool box say? "3.43 taken for debt". Off a new card, from a new account? It can sod off, and BG got told as much. I'm SURE the damn thing is not setup right...BG deny all knowledge. I want an engineer out to check it..Transco say we should insist..BG say "not required". Missus is contacting the landlord though...I'd rather switch supplier first and see if they can make the thing run nicely..EDF get my vote. If the meter is still being stupid and the landlord agrees, then I will look into changing it out.

nope, no leaks..checked by Transco and the gas engineer.. As to getting the meter changed..yes, in theory we could..but I'd rather watch the "you've spent "X" display" instead of getting a nasty bill... I know it's higher on a prepay, but..that much? I think not... My electric is Prepay too, and it's bang on my figures..roughly £1/day..same as it was at my flat on a credit meter.

We charged ours up to £10.75 on Friday night...sunday afternoon, it had £5.72 on it...I'm just looking for opinions on the "normality" of this cost. To me, it seems extortionate..We have an A rated condensing boiler (2 years old), on a roomstat at 18 degrees. Water temp on tankstat is set at 45 degrees. Programmed to cut in at 6am to 8am, 12pm-1pm, and 5pm to 10pm. Off any other time. British Gas say "Viable cost". I'm floored..it's working out cheaper to run a fan heater when needed, immersion tank heater for an hour and oil filled radiator all night long to heat the place than the gas to do it all on timer... Anyone got any insight? It feels like I'm being taken for a ride without lube here...

hah... My friends and I tend to do this in the pub..it can bug you silly though.. Terrahawks was the last one we tried to recall the name of...that was a headache for a week..how could we forget Sergeant-Major Zero.. The funniest bit is the look on my missus' face when we're doing it...she's only 21..

I've been fiddling on a local Apache install, and tried errorlevel returning (1/0), tried shell_exec'ing and parsing output..nothing. Typically, it's my missus day off..she loves PHP fiddling.

She does get a little annoyed sometimes...she was threatening the school in general, but that's me by proxy... The Dept is NOT to blame if sprog is being stupid...sprog turned 16 a few weeks back..she should know better...and it's about time MIL got told as much. I said- "if she's getting bullied, we have anonymous intranet bullying reporting, we have tutors, we have..me..no reports ever been made. In fact, sprog and idiot boy are the best of mates to all appearances and purposes..there's nothing TO deal with except in your head.." We take our kids safety very seriously..she knows that.

Hah, yes. Been there. I don't drink, but had some ill-advised wine the christmas before last...last thing I recall is feeling really rather ill...it seems I was dancing on the kitchen table..and that's one of the less embarrasing bits.. Needless to say, that got round. Sigh. Also, when the new head started, I came in one morning and and all 3 of them ended up giving me a giant group hug, right in front of him/SLT.. That raised an eyebrow until we explained..:-) I don't mind who knows, TBH..the head has even met my missus..and he rather likes her direct approach to things...she doesn't mince her words..ex-student too.

and if so...do you enforce the law with them? My sister in law (almost) is now in year 11..and she's idle, manipulative and just out and out lazy sometimes, unless she likes her lessons.. She had a bit of an e-mail abuse session yesterday that ended up in her printing out a snippet guaranteed to enrage her mother and make her look like an innocent victim, while painting a lad she knows her mother has a historical dislike of as the bad one. This led to me being shouted at over the phone at work, a threat of "going to the media to show how badly the school looks after students etc.., which led me to point out a few home truths about said sprog...I offered to show mother-in-law the video of her daughter doing nothing for an hour except pillocking about, and I offered her access to sprogs webmail account to prove the point.. That deflated her a bit.. I then went home in a foul mood and explained to the missus why. She said "In the car..", went down to her mums and tore sprog apart in the kitchen..after which I made it clear I'll be asking her teachers about behaviour, I'll be splitting her from the other student in IT lessons, I'll be looking over her shoulder all day long, and if I find something out of place, I'll make her life a living hell as only I can..and e-mail? Not a snowflakes chance in hell.. I've demo'd PolicyCentral's screen monitoring, word pickup system, the web filter and reports system, and said "you can't escape, so don't even try it..". I've never seen her so well behaved as she was when she went back in.. Bloody children..if her brothers couldn't beat me, she has no chance..

Our suites have 3 cameras apeice...cheapie coax dome cams all connecting back to a P4/3ghz XP rig with a Geovision GV900 16 port card in it. That works quite nicely..not a cheap card though. That said, there are other ones out there now... We've had vandalism, kids dropping trousers, football incidents, teachers getting paper planes in the head..loads of stuff...quite funny. Eerie watching them record at 3am for no obvious reason..

Scissors are banned here. Phones too. Knives, most certainly. I've even seen a MOST creative bit of "prison engineering" using MDF to make a knife shape in DT, then slotting the end and fitting a pencil sharpener blade into it. As to mobiles..well, if I do a bluetooth sweep with my IPaq, I see lots. We've had lessons videoed and youtubed before...we get the task of requesting removal and tracking culprits. If we're lucky the phones come to us first and I take great pleasure in blanking the things. We've had a few occasions now where some of our..lets see, how to put it..um..less discerning girls have been phone video'd in lewd or similar circumstances, and then the lad/s in question have been bluetoothing it around. One of the girls still can't look at the IT tech staff without going red. Serves them right, too. Phones are a bloody menace though.

it's not Vista, is it? I've had 3 "stuck in boot loop" machines across my desk with Vista now, in 2 weeks. Ridiculous that an autoupdate can break the OS..

Micromart...although again, I've stopped for a bit due to little interesting going on.

Got my meter for £23 delivered..I did an eval of everything in the flat. The PC hibernates after 10 minutes, on an intelliplug. The corner stack (TV/Wii/DVD/Freeview) runs off a multiway that gets turned off when not in use. I've even got my router on one of those cheapie segmented timeswitches so that it's off when we're not there.

If you'd like some figures, I'll dig out my energy monitor plug and do some comparative checks...but it'd have to be tomorrow, as it's at home. I know our Dell 17" TFTs draw about 9 watts on standby, and the same after you've turned them off which is quite naughty. I did a full run around my flat taking measurements for everything when I had a big flip at NPower for overcharging my bill..I'll see if I can dig out the power usage of my 19" WS here.. Optiplex GX60's use about 45-50 watts constant.. I'm very tempted to do this as well..NM says poweroff at night is "not needed" and "saves no money, as PCs don't USE much power when not used.." Amazing how many other staff don't see it either..I had a big argument with the entire maths dept about it where I demonstrated that unless PCs are off AT THE MAINS, they will ALWAYS use power, and in use or not, they never drop down to the few watts of standby until powered down. The maths dept were quite stunned. Especially when I did the costs of 1pc for 24h, then multiplied it by the number of PCs in the building, , PLUS the monitors, plus the aircon to cool them..they all went VERY quiet indeed. I'm just running PowerOut now..every PC goes down if not in use for 30 mins after 6pm. If they complain, I just pull out the figures and say "we'll take it out of your budget, shall we?".

Excellent! Just what we've been after to avoid staff coming and bugging me to death because their flash disk has been allocated a mapped letter..heh. I find U3 drives are the biggest PITAs with regard to that, which is why I removed the U3 functions from my cruzer.

I'll have to grab that one off the site..heh..

Right..ok..lets see if I can recreate this on the fly. I deleted the bat months ago when I realized the versatility of making the source workstation a “standard PC” HAL based one before sysprepping it, and having sysprep choose the best HAL for me.. I used the XPSP2 CD (for XPSP2), XPSP1 and RC2600 discs. The HAL seems to alter slightly between versions. Get the right ones off the right CD for your intended version. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309283 ^^ as said, that page lists the HAL files for differing types. Find them on the CD (in their compressed form, they’ll be “.dl_”). Copy them to a directory, and copy expand.exe (or is it extract.exe? One of those.). Run “Expand(or extract) hal.dl_ hal.dll” to decompress them changing the names for each one. Then I wrote a .bat to ask me which one I wanted, and act on my choice to copy the related HAL file to the target disk, renaming it HAL.DLL on the way. The files and BAT file sat on my pen drive, and I booted the machines with the pen plugged in, using PEBuilder. It DID work, quite well..but then I did a bit of digging and found that simply doing this made life much easier: Boot a working PC with the build/image on you want to deploy. Log in as local admin Disjoin the PC from the domain Go into control panel, system, device manager, and expand “computer” Right click on the expanded computer branch, choose “Update Driver” Tell windows to get stuffed, and select “I’ll choose..” From the list, pick “Standard PC”..nothing ACPI or in any way advanced, just the bog-basic Standard. Reboot when asked. Log in as local admin, let the machine do all of the hardware redetect, and so on. Uninstall any and all “non-already-on-the-WinCD” drivers..no extra video, sound, or anything. Even if you have warnings in Dev manager, ignore them. Copy your Sysyprep setup to c:\sysprep, run “sysprep –BMSD” from CMD to populate the mass storage. Then open the sysprep.inf and add this under [unattended]: UpdateUPHAL=ACPIPIC_UP,%systemroot%\inf\hal.inf Close file, run Sysprep with the reseal, don’t reset grace period, and no activation” boxes ticked. Once done, ghost it and deploy to a test rig. That's all I do for ours..and as I say it runs on P2 to P4HT, AMD Duron-AMD Athlon X2, Celeron D - C2Ds..not had it baulk at ANY of our kit since. I keep a "non-domain" simple image ready for staff PCs as well, so if I get a staff machine "needing a reinstall", I can hand it back in 20 minutes. We use that same domain image on our virtuals..it seems to be fairly indestructible..

Oh yes. I find that I only get it it I'm in contact with the suspended ceiling tiles...they really set me off. No idea why...I just keep a 100box of Latex gloves in the drawer (much to the amusement of my colleagues and the fright of the NM when I do the whole doctor "stretch, snap, "BEND OVER BOY, It's party time.." gag..

Hah, this takes me back..um..IIRC, I had a batch file, the HAL.DLL, NTOSKRNL.EXE, and..no, I'll have to look that up again. I did the "slave disk, change files on slave disk" thing too. I had a dig around the XPCD looking at th different HAL files and the loaders for them, then wrote a .bat to rename/decompress them accordingly on a USB stick, so I could copy them over. In the end, I just did the base ghost as a "standard PC" one that'll run on anything, with a sysprep line to sort the HAL out for itself on first boot. I looked at the UIU as well, but TBH I've not seen anything that my method has failed on yet.

Zaf? Good call. One of those moved my sofa and fridge this weekend. 1.9TD..and the sports pack suspension is startlingly good.. Although, the MIL has an automatic Nissan Note..and if you can overlook the "frog" eyes appearance, it's tiny but with masses of space inside.. It took 1 Zaf, 1 Note, and several trips in the arsetrap to move everything to the new place.

No, we don't. They'd never pay us to either. We get told off if we're here at 6pm..heh. Even if we did point out it was due to us moving the video-entry phones around, which involves unpicking years of cable above the roof. We do sometimes VPN in...

It's something I sit and explain to our new teachers...they often come in and complain about the kids and their behaviour, and only see the kids in lesson, and eventually it really starts to get them down. I point out it's NOT personal with our kids..one second they'll give you hell to find the buttons to push, yet 30 seconds later after the lesson finishes, they hold the doors for you, smile, chat about anything, ask questions, and be totally transformed. They DON'T hate you..they're just not used to the discipline. The other thing teachers lose sight of is that if you give a kid a button to make you go bang, they don't forget it..I get called "Gay", "Weirdo", and I even had one lean over my door and say "I had your mum last night..."..I just smile. I said "Glad she's keeping busy..good lad. ", and he went away utterly confused. They're wind-up merchants, that's all. I came into suite 1 yesterday, and plastered all over the IWB was "Steve and Carl are GAY!" in red text..I just smiled, and corrected my name to a "K". They really have a lot to learn about winding me up.. See? Case in point then. Several kids lean over the door and ask the head of IT "Are you playing HALO this weekend Sir? "..."Yep".."Excellent! We'll see you in there." Ian's quite a n00b at it, so the kids were telling us how they defend him and cover him in game to give him a chance. They also suggested on the last day of term we should turn this LAN into a big multiplayer "Staff Vs Kids" showdown..heh. I think that'd work really well..Maybe not HALO..Worms maybe.. And now the NM has got kids taunting him with printed screenshots of Level 11 of a flash game that he plays where he can't get above 7..I must say, he's taking that well.."arse" is quite restrained..

Indeed. Which is why I try to find out the kids hobbies and try to encourage that, and why I think it's both hilarious and good that some of our kids are currently pasting the head of IT's arse to the wall out of school on XBOX Live..heh. Quite a few of our "challenging" or "less academic" kids are actually very active outside school with "less usual" activities. You'd expect them to be in and out of trouble based on their behaviour, but..no. One is rebuilding a mini with a Vauxhall XE engine..we can sit and have some good discussion about that. Another is a landy nut, and currently owns 3 in various states of rebuild, plus a baja bug. Some fish, some are on apprenticeships, some work part time.. I've got a lot of time for kids like that..they may be a teaching headache, but they're good kids at heart..very level headed, very responsible out of school, and very pleasant to meet outside. Just because kids don't engage with the teachers and the "authority" bit, doesn't mean they're bad..

oops. Ignore me, pasted into the wrong thread!

Oh, I know all of their little tricks...I said to the woman, as soon as that last payment comes out (and she gave me the date for it), the DD is being nuked by me, and HSBC will be instructed to tell them to go forth. Heh. The line will move on Saturday, and Jem wants to be in for Sunday...and sods law, the damned boiler has just blown the PCB, so we have no heating. Ah well, BG have promised the part will be here in a few days. How will I cope with no internet? OMG! I think I might just...smile, and do some DIY or gardening. It's so therapeutic after using a PC all day. I feel so much less stressed this week. Make that I don't HAVE the energy to get stressed this week..