Pete10141748

Depends what you're used to I suppose, in the UK we are very used to / reliant on our weekly scheduled TV that never changes, over in the US they have always had more erratic shedules so that's just what they are 'used to'. They also go MAD and have adverts all over the place when a new episode is due to be on, so I'm guessing most people wouldn't expect a new episode to be on unless the see it advertised.

I'm just imagining this LOL!

Adding them to my wireless network was as easy as adding it to any home network, just use the on-board setting in the "Settings" app to set it up. As for saving to network, see this recent thread with loads of ideas: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/netbooks-pda-phones/77870-saving-network.html For my part, the biggest pitfall ot the iPads is physical security. They are VERY easy to slip into a bag unnoticed, so make sure you relay to the teachers that they MUST count the iPads out & back in when they use them. Label them all with security markings (I've got mine with a "Year X iPad X" label, an asset tag, and written the school details on the back using a pen that only shows up under UV light).

You get breaks in American TV schedules because the broadcasters want to save the new episodes for their "sweeps" weeks. If there is a particular episode that they know will get them lots of viewers (a celebrity cameo, such as LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner being in recent TBBT episodes) then they will wait until the opportune time to broadcast that episode. It sucks, because it makes it harder to ensure you catch all of the episodes and in the right order, but it's just what they do to get ratings and therefore money so they can make more episodes.

I've just downloaded this now, "CoG-Geekster" if anyone want to add me

If I was staying put I would consider blackout curtains at this point, all joking aside betwen 4-6pm now the sun shines right into the flat at eye-level when on the sofa, really annoying When I move to my new house I've already worked out where to put the TV&Xbox360 so that windows/glare won't be a problem I'd LOVE a room without windows, all that bright stuff outside is overrated anyway.

All the lighter evenings make me do is close the curtains earlier to stop the screen glare

You know, I never had TV when I lived on my own - 4 years at Uni, 2 with my parents again and then 2 in my flat and I never had it, which is what prompted my DVD collection to grow to 500+ titles and my gaming career to expand to over 80,000GS on XBox and pretty much every RPG played to death at least twice on the major consoles! About 3 weeks after my OH moved in 16 months ago her Dad gave us a FreeSAT box, which at the time I really thought I would never use as most of what I watch is either rented from LoveFilm, borrowed from mates or purchased on DVD. However, channels like CBS Action which carry ST:TNG and Walker:Texas Ranger caught my attention, as did BBC3's Family Guy and American Dad! doubles each evening. Throw in E4 showing the new epsodes of TBBT and now I wouldn't want to not have it!

We use SIMS here to store the pupil assessment data and I think one of the Deputy Head's has a spreadsheet that she spent days on end putting together to do the same job; not sure how it works where you are but here the Admin staff and that Deputy are responsible for inputting all the data - the class teachers just submit it on paper (massive waste of everyone's time, but I've gone blue in the face trying to talk them into any other way - they even pay a TA overtime to help them input the data at this point! *facepalm* ). Is there a reason why Sims is admin-only? Are they worried about people accessing or changing the wrong things? I know from what it was like here before that letting everyone have access to something like SIMS is a scary prospect for SLT members, but with the correct setup and permissions it just would save SO much time for everyone involved. Perhaps ask for a meeting with SLT and pitch the idea to them, focus on how it will save THEM time and hassle - they are more likely to go with it if it will benifit them in a personal-professional way. Failing that, can you not take the individual spreadsheets and put them together into one file, link the appropriate fields using formula so that if something is changed everything else changes accordingly? It might seem a pain but depending on how your school works a solution based on your current setup might be more acceptable to your staff.

Makes me think of Futurama! Leela: "Fry, this is the real world, not a TV show! Can't you tell the difference!?!?" Fry: "Sure I can, I just like TV better" And before anyone says otherwise, the fact that pretty much anything anyone says reminds me of a quote or a character from a tv show or movie pleases me greatly! xD

I leave work at 4.15pm (start at 8am) and am home by 4.30pm if I go straight home. No kids and no pets, just me and my OH who gets home from work about 7pm so I have 2.5 hours there to myself to watch my shows (TBBT, House etc) Once OH is home we watch one or two episodes of 'our' shows like TrueBlood (which we agreed never to watch without the other) while we catch up about our day and have dinner OH falls asleep about 10.30pm (she's the Site Agent at the school so she is knackered most evenings!) so I play some Xbox ad/or watch more of my shows. OH wakes up from sofa & goes to bed about midnight, I'm usually up until 1am at least. So on an average day when we don't go out, I have around 6 hours to myself to watch / do what I want. The benfit of living in a small flat means that I can be cleaning the kitchen and still see the TV so even household chores don't get in the way of my shows EDIT: I'm just going to add that 3-4 evenings a week we go out, our life isnt just work>tv>work>tv>work>tv.... lol

Just another good reason to get the rest of your family trained on the Internet / email / skype etc No more need to send cards if you can just email and free video chat.

My OH was watching "Being Human" (UK version) after ploughing through the first 3 series' on DVD which I got her for Christmas. Not my cup of tea though, I love vampires and supernatural/scifi stuff but it just seems lackluster and quite stupid at times. I've not watched "Game of Thrones" yet but only because I'm waiting for the holiday next week when me & some mates are doing a non-stop run of all of series 1, expecting to love it though. "True Blood" now we're talking, love it. "Big Bang Theory" what's not to like? "Community" was the best thing on TV for a while Currently also re-watching "House" as it's been long enough for me to forgot some of the plots and medical terms

Wow, I can't imagine only allowing a few hundred MB's of storage for staff here, they'd go crazy! Most staff are usually in the 10-20Gb mark, though a few heads of year currently top out at a little over 60Gb! I archive & compress stuff where I can, but everyone here just seems to create so_much_stuff. Given the type of school we are and the pupils' abilities an awful lot of stuff made by the staff and pupils is video/photo/audio based rather than just tons of word files at a few kb each though. I've routinely told people to back up to their own external HDD anything they don't *need* for this teaching year, but few ever do. While space isn't an issue I'm not worrying, but in a few more years they'll have to start deleting things otherwise their laptops won't have an offline files cache big enough to hold it all!

Keep that hope up! Breaking into school-based IT support can be a real challenge - mainly because schools who know how important IT support is only know this because they already have an IT team doing a great job; schools who don't have in an in-house IT team don't know the value of one, and so the job offers wont be there! Kind of a catch 22 really. It could help to volunteer some time at a school without a techie and showcase what you can for them, get them to see the value of it and then create a job from that. It wouldn't be an overnight success but it's something proactive you can do at least! And voluneer work always looks good on the old CV too

Great advice from Rydra there, especially about the "outside of work" stuff. Schools, moreso than anywhere else I've experienced, expect all their staff to do more than just their job roles, wether that's helping out on school trips, summer fetes, or whatever. If you look enthusiastic on paper about doing things other than IT they will likely see you as a more 'rounded' person - if all you have on paper is a list of IT certs then you'll be percieved as the steroetypical 'it nerd' and that's not what schools want.

The crate is locked in my server room (not the office pictured above, the SR has no windows) when not in use and only I have the key. The crate is given out to a class for the day, and I get it back each afternoon. During the day they all leave their laptop trollies open anyway for a "quick access" at the pupils' want & need so no difference there. Not the most ideal solution but the safety of both above methods is pretty much the same, except that anyone poking around the school after-hours wouldn't know / be able to see the iPads stored inside the SR, as opposed to the obvious tech-trolley in the hallway.

Option number 1 for charging iPads via 3rd party: http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/5022/img0225l.jpg Cost around £300 for the trolley Option number 2 for charging iPads suggested by me & the LEA consultant: http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/4810/img0224lf.jpg Cost; £11 for the crate, £12 for the two extension cables I think I win here?

This blog post tells you one thing you could do; How can I block neighboring wireless networks? It's pretty simply stuff, but it won't prevent the staff/kids from manually choosing to switch to the unprotected network. Find out who's network it is, and tell them to password protect it! Failing that, hop onto their wireless and start downloading, or gain access to their router and set a password for them!* ;P *note: I don't actually advocate doing this.

Hahahah awesome! I'm so going to get that once I've moved into my new place & set up my home gym

Very large Primary school, 2-form entry (but we have pupils coming and going all the time) anywhere between 1100-1200 pupils depending on varying class sizes, 130ish staff members to support, almost everyone has a laptop, all of the 28 classrooms have IWB's & cameras & printers plus 4 more IWB's around the site, 6x laptop trolleys (with 2 more coming, at least), PC's in admin/finance/slt offices, trollies of ipads, 8 servers (in total over 500 'ICT devices' and still increasing) + an on-site nursery that I support their ICT for as well. I work 37.5 hours per week, term-time only + 5 days in holidays at my discretion. I always end up putting in tons of overtime though, am basically here full-time in term of weeks of the year at this point.

In the past I have used Recuva Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download set to "deep scan" (for a whole hard drive this will take hours and hours and hours....) EDIT: above poster beat me to it! That'll teach me to leave a half-typed reply open whlie I go to do a job lol

LOL with me it tends to more along the lines of "oooh, new game! I'm going to need pepsi/redbull/crisps/nuts/proplus/anythingCadbury/scotcheggs to get me through this at the weekend"

I doubt it, it's only one (ok, two if you count Game and Gamestation seperately) shops out of the running - there are still tons of places both online and on the highstreet to buy games from. At this point any company who puts their prices up is just saying "hey, don't buy from us, go to our competitors instead!" Plus, places like Tesco make very little profit on the game when the sell them for £29.98 instead of £35 or whatever, the reason they do it is that once they get you in the store you are likely to spend money on other things as well - and at this point, retail shopping is about getting customers to come to you instead of their other usual stores more than anything else.

If you sell/donate them to another school, I personally would load a fresh, blank install of the OS that the machine originally came with (in this case XP) and enter the product key from the sticker on the machine (the OEM licence, that is tied to that machine). That way when you pass the machine on the OS has the original OEM licence key that it would have had when you first bought the machine.