Pete10141748

I really don't know why we bother looking into space, everything we see is millions of years old already and for all we know the universe could well be largely empty at this point with nothing but the aeons-old light from stars travelling around it's emptiness. And if there does happen to be another intelligence out there watching our planet, they're so far away that from their perspective we humans don't even exist yet; by the time they do 'see' us, chances are we or maybe even the whole Earth will be long gone anyway!

Projectors are just costly non-stop To buy, install, repair, replace, lamps........ I'm forever moaning at staff here to switch them off, yet they remain on at break, lunch, after school, sometimes overnight or over weekends I gave up what seemingly became a losing battle, and moved on to trying to reduce printing costs instead. That proved to be equally as difficult, so now I just repair what breaks, order new supplies, and if anyone from SMT/Finance moans about the cost I'll send them to the members of staff that are responsible. It's not worth your own time/stress trying to deal with it, just let them suffer when the lamp blows mid-term and you don't have any replacements due to lack of funding.

I think my colleague had that running for a bit last year (maybe longer, time flies in this place!). Seemed to work really well, we used it before we got all of our remote desktop stuff working.

WAAAAGH! KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!!! lol

hahahahahah! I lol'd for about 5 minutes at that!

I get stuff with purpose or use, but a gadget for the sake of a gadget is pointless! Currently running: 1x 42" HD Sony Bravia LCD TV 1x Xbox 360 connected to Sony TV by HDMI 1x 20" Sanyo HD TV 1x PS3 connected to Sonyo TV via HDMI 1x 17" unbranded PC monitor (a freebie) 1x nearly-2-year-old Dell PC (that's better than 3 of my 4 servers ) dual-screening with Sony TV as main and PC monitor as 2nd Additional external HDD for PC Usual extra's like webcam, microphones, cat5e cabling, a switch to connect everything up to my broadband and so on. WACOM Bamboo Pen Tablet, and a wireless keyboard/mouse from Maplins (don't know the make off the top of my head) + keyboard and mouse for Xbox360/PS3 HTC HERO mobile phone and 3rd Gen iPod Nano for music (never go anywhere without the two of these!) I did have a Nintendo Wii as well but donated that to my younger brother. Also had an HP iPaq PDA but it didn't get much use once I got my Android phone so I sold it, and an Asus eeePC which was a great bit of kit but I have a genetic eye condition and the small screen was too impractical for me to read, so it got sold also. Strangely enough I don't currently have a printer, but haven't needed one lately so not worried really. There's also various other bits and pieces lying around the place too like extra keyboards/mice, PC parts from previous/upcoming upgrades, spare CAT5e cabling, USB extension cables, spare VGA/HDMI cables, spare Xbox360 controller, 2x Rock Band guitar controllers, Rock Band drum kit, Xbox/PS3/PC compatible USB microphones, spare PS3 controller, tons of batteries, spare power cables..... basically if anything breaks I've got a spare on hand already! Currently saving up to put in a projector and a surround sound system, hoping to have it up and running by mid-to-late Summer this year (providing no other big expenditures come up unexpectedly!) Personally I don't think that's much at all, even though everyone around here looks at me like I'm a loon for wanting a projector in my flat! lol

He obviously got VERY lucky! The truck hit him flat but looks like it's raised off the ground as it passes over him.

Maybe he was drunk, and fell asleep while wearing dark glasses! A triple triage of a trouble!

From what I've seen here it's pretty standard, they do offer a lot of healthy stuff at least, even if the kids don't choose it There's always something left over and put in the staffroom, but I'll always pass on that thanks, leftover cold school dinner? I'd rather go hungry for the last few hours of the day!

Mine's worked fine all day......... It changed for me over a week ago! Maybe they're rolling it out gradually and something happened with it that stopped some email accounts today.

The whole thing is just dumb. The controllers are a blatant rip-off of the Wii controllers, and the Wii sucks as it is. Same goes for the Xbox NATAL project as well, to hell with that, if you've seen the youtube video of Jonathan Ross trying it out you'll know what I mean, it looks and plays like a piece of junk. If someone wants to get into gaming but is put off because they can't/won't use a controller, then obviously they didn't want to get into it enough did they. I wouldn't go to play cricket and then moan that I didn't like the bat and so use a tennis racket instead. If big games like Gears of War and Call of Duty start using the motion-sensor in the gameplay and it's not optional, then I shall be jumping ship from consoles to PC gaming very, very fast. I'm not against new things, far from it, but what I am against is stupid ideas that show the gaming companies are pushing more towards the "everyone can do something even if it's a simple party game" (Nintendo=every game) and less inclined to the "lets make an awesome game for the actual, hardcore gamers out there who will appreciate it".

In my experience, no matter what combination of filters, search engines and proxy settings you use, if you are on the Internet searching for images then sooner or later (probably sooner) you are going to spot something innapropriate, it's borderline unavoidable at this stage We set all the pupil's accounts to use Ask Kids as their homepage (though I admit it's not a nice one to use), and without fail the first thing they all do it use it to search for "Google" *facepalm* but then that's up to them or their teacher to decide, I've set it to a child-friendly site, if they choose to change it that's up to them. Quite often here I get asked beforehand to put together a folder of pictures around a topic and then the pupils can look through that instead of using the Internet. It's a pain, but I'd rather do that and reduce the risk of them spotting something on Google Images that they shouldn't see. As we don't do in-house filtering (all done by the LEA/ISP) at least I don't have any personal responsability towards to the filtering which saves me a headache!

I've loved each of his movies so far, for many different reasons but ultimately one: they are entertaining! And I love how quotes and themes cross over between his movies too (such as the "chocolate covered pretzel" from Mallrats being referenced in J&SB)

LOL that's good, but only us Star Wars geeks would find it even remotely funny!

I use lovefilm.com for DVD/Bluray/Xbox360/PS3 rentals (average 6 disks a week), and have a Cineworld Unlimited card so I see every new film that comes out, I happily pay for it and if there is a film I like enough to get the DVD/BluRay I will pay that cost too, but only because I know I will get at least several viewings of the DVD; I currently own over 400 legal DVDs and every one of them has had at least 4-5 viewings over the past 6 years of my collecting, I usually watch at least 1 a night. I don't care about the ads/warnings etc, I just put the dvd on and then go make a cup of tea or something, come back and it's ready to go: it's called planning ahead people! lol and I can't honestly say I've come accross that many DVDs where you can't skip almost all of the ads/warnings or just press "menu" twice to start the film, and most of the BluRay's I've rented so far go straight to playing the film without pressing a single button! The one thing I refuse to pay DVD/BluRay prices for is TV shows, especially if I want to watch something from years ago (ie The Original Series of Star Trek), the price of the DVD/BluRay for TV is ridiculous, so I get those solely on rental.

Gotta love XKCD!

Really looking forward to it, he's been chatting with us fans about the filming/editing/publicising etc for ages on Twitter

Never had a Commodore 64, my parents got me a Spectrum ZX+ though, still ran on tapes and has awesome games like Paperboy, Outrun, Jet Fighter and my personal favourite "Colin the Cleaner" which was a logical-puzzle game. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDo_rQsMU_0]YouTube- Colin The Cleaner (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) (1987)[/ame] Sadly my Spectrum ZX+ stopped working when I decided to take it to pieces to find out how it worked........ still, I was only 4 at the time so I forgive myself Old games like these though just prove that you can have all the flashy 3D graphics you want, but they don't make a good game on their own.

I very much agree - I had friends at university who got addicted and ended up doing nothing social anymore, just sitting in their room playing WoW all hours of the day and night, and if I did manage to get them down the pub they'd just be talking about their next "raid" as they had nothing else to talk about; for all intents and purposes they vanished from the real world. It was a shame because of course the frienships were just lost. And yes I'd certianly say it's not right for a primary school aged child. Not because of the content of the game, but because of the online/social networking aspect side of it. You have no idea who the other online players are, and if they are using voice chat then you've not control over what the children hear either.

CoG Geekster I play pretty much everything, currently Bioshock 2, Borderlands (100% complete but still playing lol), Burnout Paradise and GRAW. The "CoG" is for 'Carry On Gaming', our site is http://www.carryongaming.co.uk we've been active for about 3 years and we're the best friendly Xbox community on the 'net I reckon! If you need online buddies come visit us and sign up

TGIF is right, looking forward to my 9 days off, espeically with my copy of Bioshock 2 waiting patiently to be played.... oooooh yes This is also the first time in 3 years that I'll have not been at work during a holiday (except Xmas when the school is actually shut) which is made even more awesome by the fact that I've never been paid for any holiday work being a term-time only employee!

Windows XP............ in Spanish

oof, tell me about it, I'm not looking forward to all the cleaning to be done here during the summer!

My office IS the server room. and the school general resources room. and the PPA room. and a pupil quiet work area room. and a meeting room when needed. and a place to bring naughty kids at lunchtime who have to be seperated from the main population of this lunatic asylum. *sigh*

Here in Luton myself and the Techie are term-time only + 1 week, so in theory we get all of the school holidays except for 5 days which we work outside of termtime when we want to. In pratice, we end up being owed at least 15 days of time off in lieu for all the work we actually have to do in holidays which (as we all here know) just can't get done during term time with the systems being in use all day every day. As "ICT Manager" I get a little over £18k a year, which isn't too awful considering it is only supposed to be for 40-odd weeks of working time. Me and the Techie are looking into getting a job evaluation and asking for ful-time contracts as we so obviously need at least 4 week's worth more of working time than we are currently contracted for, and we now have 2 years' worth of proof of that!