FishCustard

If I were to replace any interactive whiteboards I'd probably get one of the C-touch interactive LCD screens - no bulbs to replace, no pens to worry about.

Just found out that we'll need to use this software soon - oh dear god.

Haha, wow - I hope I manage to do that well tomorrow!

^This^ Here students study coding from (at least) Year 9 onwards, and have generally found it a challenging but far more interesting alternative to 'make a PowerPoint animation' and 'calculate these figures and make a chart' (like I did in my IT GCSE!). We should be training potential software developers, not restricting kids to the mindset of 'IT = Office'. How long do you think it will be before the 'cube worker' jobs are mostly automated away anyway?

There are already dedicated hours in the primary curriculum for ICT, I would assume it'd use those?

@TechMonkey - that's basically my feelings on getting children coding - it's unlikely to do harm, so why not? Kids may well not discover coding on their own, even if they'd love it if given the chance. Logical debugging/troubleshooting skills are another great transferable that you can get through learning to code. Just because Gove is generally a prat doesn't mean that he can't have some good ideas.

Thursday and Saturday, looking at various things for school (no money to spend at the moment, but it's good to see what's out there), generally ogle all the shiny things and chat to MIS suppliers about APIs and integration...

This. All that should need to change is the floorplan and pins/exhibitor details, something which is easy to get from a server on-the-fly (an image and some JSON/XML). This also makes the app easy to update if exhibitors drop out for instance. I'm honestly tempted to build that app now...

Reminds me of a conversation I had with a Year 7 child a while ago: Kid: My password don't work. Me: [on instinct] Doesn't. Your password [i]doesn't[/i] work I think you mean. Kid: Yeah, er, that. Me: [brings up ADUC and the 'reset password' screen] Type in a new password - at least 7 characters long and with a number in. I turn away to grab a cable or something, turn back and she's typed about 20 characters into the box! Me: Er, probably want to pick something slightly shorter otherwise you won't remember it. Kid: Oh I will, it's just the letter 'a' repeated 22 times with a 1 at the end. Me: [Wat.] What was your password before? Kid: The same, except it was like 15 times or something. I forgot. Me: [Head, meet desk] Pick something else.

Thanks - I probably should have remoted into my work PC where I have Acrobat but meh...

Here's an A3 version with the map and exhibitor lists on one page each so that you can actually read the thing! Thanks for the find @plexer! Linky

Thanks - I'm assuming that's because the plan is quite fluid up until the day?

Is there a floorplan available on their website at all (like a PDF of the show guide?) - I find it far easier to see what's on and plan my routes using (shock horror!) pen and paper.

^That's your problem right there! In other news, loving the purple theme!

Definitely looking forward to seeing this!

I'll be there on Thursday and (probably) Saturday too, so I'll make sure to pop by! I'll be identifiable by my 'Fixer of all the things (aka IT Manager)' pass, and the fact that I'll probably just tell you who I am anyway...

This is an interesting (and very valid) point - in some parts of Europe you'll see three generations of the same family under one roof, and nobody thinks that this is unusual or unsuitable. However, in Britain and even moreso the US people are almost expected to move out when they hit 20 or so, and if you don't then there's something wrong with you.

Visual evidence of ours. It was... uninspiring. Peas and carrots with Christmas dinner? Is that a thing now?

Has anyone tried getting OS X 10.9 to play nice with a Windows network, including mounting an AD user's home directory? We've been fiddling about with it and it seems to be unable to mount the thing if the user doesn't have explicit read access to the root of the share (determined empirically, all it says in the logs is that 'mount of smb://foo/bar gives status -1073741412' and other similar errors with the same code). 10.8 and older works fine, so I imagine it's something to do with their SMB2 implementation. Any ideas?

I mean the canteen food is bad, but it's not so bad I'll contemplate eating soap as an alternative! Thanks for all the suggestions!

Mary being played by a boy: interesting, and a nice take on things (particularly if all the roles are gender-flipped) Mary being played by a boy just because they don't want to appear sexist: wat.

What a fantastic idea - I do rather like miso soup (and most Japanese food to be honest); I shall pop into Itsu and see what they've got. I could also have a look on Amazon I suppose, they seem to do everything these days... Thanks!

While I have for the past nine months or so eaten the food that is served up by the school canteen for lunch, what I got today has made me reconsider. I got a chicken salad baguette where the tomatoes were warm and soggy, the chicken was grey & the baguette was dry and then a muffin which smelled vaguely of meat. Yep. Call me crazy, but I don't think cakes aren't supposed to have a meaty aroma. Clearly they've been storing things where they shouldn't. The point of this ranting is this: can you recommend me any decent microwave/just-add-water type meals that I can keep in the office? Think Pot Noodle but actually edible. Thanks in advance!

I didn't bother with a Christmas wallpaper (couldn't think of a decent way to modify our standard one in time - I will by next year!), but feel pretty Christmassy regardless (and I work in a secondary school)!

If you want a managed option (i.e. you buy, provide & admin the phones) then I'd go for Windows Phone devices and connect them directly to Exchange. EDIT: Haha, BES in Room 101 - yep, that's where I'd put it!