broc

We had a fibre link fail & when the cabling engineer stuck his head up through the false ceiling he came face to face with a very large rat! I have never seen anyone come down a step ladder so fast Turned out the rat (or one of its friends) had munched the cable.

I won a prize for a chocolate pizza at Christmas last year, but it never turned up...... may I be entered in the draw please?

Buying new cars is not a good idea from a financial viewpoint, I agree with you there. If you want a new car with less financial pain then a budget brand like Dacia offers buyers a solution. If you lost 100% of the Dacia's value in 3 years (unlikely) the annual depreciation would be less than £3k pa. I doubt there are many newish cars you can buy with depreciation that low. The guides seem to indicate 3 year Dacia depreciation to be around 50%...... so it is likely to be around £1.5k pa. As far as diesels are concerned, modern Euro IV and V emmission regulations mean they are generally more expensive to buy, service, fuel, and repair than older engines. DPF regeneration can be problematic on cars used for short, low speed trips, not to mention other diesel related problems with turbos, EGR, DMF, piezo injectors, high pressure fuel pumps.

Not everyone wants diesel...... you need to do the sums to see if diesel is right for you.

I think anyone wanting to buy a new no-frills car on a tight budget should take a look at Dacia, a company owned by Renault. They are very popular in mainland Europe. Prices start at just under £6k including a 3 year warranty.

I have a pair of 23" Dell monitors, our admin systems all use 19" widescreen (Lenovo all-in-one)

the proposal for a curfew was between 22:00pm and 5:00am

stage 3 Meru with approx 570 laptops

I scored 104, one of my colleagues (a Learning Mentor, young & female) scored ZERO!

My wife & daughter are scared of spiders. I use a large jam jar & a piece of card to evict the spiders. The jar goes over the spider, the card slides under the jar, the spider lifts its feet & then you can invert the jar with spider inside. A quick trip out the door & job is done.

This looks like far more fun; a kit to build a 3D printer for £700 Velleman K8200 3D Printer Kit : Printers : Maplin Electronics

I hate getting up & going to work in the dark.... & coming home in the dark I would vote for a white Christmas & cold, clear & dry for the rest of the time. What I suspect we will get will be mild, wet & grey most of the time.

I once loaned a cable reel to a member of staff; she brought it back saying it had tripped the circuit breaker in her room & the fuse had gone. She was right, the fuse had gone, probably because the insulation had melted in the core of the reel where she had used it coiled up with a kettle plugged in! Our site manager was not amused!

Social networking sites at my school are banned. Computer Games are not considered to be part of the curriculum and as such are blocked, apart from those sites judged by staff to have educational value.

doze off........sat in front of a screen

In a previous job I commuted between Edinburgh & Newcastle for 6 months, I used the time on the train to sleep

Our caretakers have rolls of some sort of plastic sheet material that gets spread over our auditorium floor during exams to protect the floor.....

You all need to remember, your aim should be to 'work to live' rather than 'live to work' & also remember you have a life away from work & family & friends who value the time you spend with them. The nature of our jobs in IT means there will always be problems to solve, products to install.... it's an endless treadmill & it is all too easy to get trapped on it. I am at the end of the road as far as my working life & career is concerned. I have worked with computers since the early 1970s and spent my entire life surrounded by IT. I am preparing to retire 'again' soon (I retired 10 years ago & got bored after a few months). I can honestly say I am now ready for a permanent break, I feel burned out.

Most people won't see it is costing them £709, they only see as far as the monthly cost. A bit like buying 2nd hand cars for only £39 a month finance over 5 years.

Our lower ability students seem to cope with Serif more easily than Adobe CS5.......

A £709 phone provides it's owner more bragging rights than a £100 phone..... It's the same with PCs, & cars. Humans don't grow feathers or antlers to show off like the animal kingdom...... I would imagine a few thousand years ago it was the size of your spear or stone axe

In Germany they have double decker passenger railway carriages, couldn't we increase capacity by using these? I am sure it would be a lot cheaper than HS2? Sadly our existing Victorian railway tunnels will not allow for that The German double decker coaches are not that much higher than single deckers.....

Far better they invest effort in technology to maintain safe distances between cars when on the move, as pioneered by companies like Volvo & others. BMW have an adaptive cruise control option that uses front parking sensors to maintain a safe distance from the car in front which varies by speed. My satnav has an option to generate an audible alert if you exceed the speed limit, it uses speed limit data stored in the mapping info. A smarter system would be to incorporate some form of electronic tag in a speed sign that was read by the car & alerted the driver if they were exceeding the limit?

Having been a TALK21.com email user for donkeys years, I was dismayed to receive a mere 1 months notice from BT that they are pulling the plug on TALK21.com email accounts unless you pay for their premium email service or switch to BT Broadband. Setting aside any moral issues about the shortness of notice, nor the fact that I am a BT landline user & PlusNet (my current ISP) are owned by BT, and I am not about to switch broadband supplier or pay BT any money for email, which 'free' email provider would you recommend?

There will always be jobs in IT for the people with 'current' skills. I have worked in the IT industry since the early 1970s and have seen many technologies come and go, the one constant is that IT products are still designed by people & contain defects because of that. I think there will always be a need for the human element. I have had a rich & varied career working in some of the largest data centres in Europe and more latterly looking after a school network of 800 PCs. I have been fortunate to have been in full employment all my life by adapting as things changed. It's no good sticking your head in the sand. Have you ever stopped to wonder why you can take 30x identical PCs out of their boxes, image them, install software and at the end find that they have not all behaved identically? I put it down to being designed, built, & coded by humans, who unwittingly introduce minor errors & faults which are minutely sensitive to timing & yield different results as a fluke. The trick to staying employable is being flexible & having the skills that are in demand. There are a number of members on Edugeek who like me cut their teeth on mainframes such as IBM System 360, who have seen centralised IT, decentralised IT, 3-tier client/server IT, thin client, VDI all come and go. We are in another iteration at present. I am sitting on the fence as far as cloud computing is concerned; to me it looks like another cycle of data centre dominance but I have seen that come and go a couple of times; it remains to be seen how many 'enterprises' embrace cloud. I can more readily see some of them going down the private 'cloud' route. Cloud computing offers much for end users, but the occasional well publicised 'cloud bursts' in recent years might put a lot of people (like me) off. I have been discussing the 'evolution' of IT in schools with my Head Teacher for a couple of years now; Trying to 2nd guess where the school wants to be in a few years time is difficult because staff still don't have a grasp of how things could change in the classroom. It's all pretty academic for me now as I shall be retired before the next wave of IT change hits my school