Valentine

I have been asked to find a way for teachers to have an easy to access list of parent's email addresses for the students in their form. All the emails are in SIMS and I don't hugely want to take the data outside SIMS to do this. The other option I can see is to export everything from SIMS and to set up public folder lists in Exchange for all forms but that would require a lot of maintenance and has some data protection issues if a tutor decides to just add all addresses to the To: field in an email.

I haven 't switched as such (still playing WoW) but myself and a few of my WoW guild members also play Rift. It's great fun, i kind of like the fact that it isn't perfect, things glitch, you fall through the world, bosses sometimes do insane things. It's a nice change from the pixel perfect super polished WoW which i think has lost some appeal because of that. They are constantly updating, changing, fixing (a patch every other day or so) to fix issues that occur. The classes and soul systems allow for all kinds of fun with how your character works and there is actually more then 1 way to play each class (which may have been a concern to some). Instant public groups make popping on for 30mins very viable as you can log on go find something big in the world to kill and just join a group that is doing it also, no sitting in lfg channels for hours to get into the action. If you have played WoW you wont even have to look at the tutorials as they *cough* borrowed a lot of the controls, interface etc from it. For new players i can imagine it might seem a little daunting as with any MMORPG but the tutorials are good and you can't do anything that will screw your toon up in the long term.

If you want a fun easy to play casual game i would also put a vote in for Rift. I play Rift and WoW currently and WoW is all about end game/items etc, levelling is just something you do to get there. Rift on the other hand is new for everyone, no-one really knows what they are doing yet and levelling and grouping is actually part of the experience.

Some useful websites: www.wowwiki.com - Massive amounts of information about every aspect of the game. Useful for Beginners and Experienced players. www.wowhead.com - The place to look up items, spells, recipes etc. http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php - The goto resource for end game raiding and theorycrafting. Not for beginners.

For beginners the in game pop up help system is actually quite decent now for teaching you the basics of how spells/talents/combat works. Due to the nature of the game and how it is constantly changing the various websites dedicated to warcraft do become almost essential and i would have to say a book would probably not be much use for more then a couple of months after buying it. And you only need to drink/eat to recover mana/health not for any survival reasons

Also on Earthen Ring here, it is an RP realm but there is very little RP going on horde side. The RP isn't why I joined the server though it's just generally a much nicer environment to play in without stupidly named chars running about and far fewer annoying kiddies (get enough of them at school).

My son told me about this thread - so I'm using his logon. Re the lens choice, it is actually pretty hard to buy a bad macro lens. They may vary in Af speed and whether the lens extends when focussing and build quality but optically they are all very similar in performance. I always use MF with macro lenses and also preset the the magnification I want before moving in on the subject, so AF speed and lens extension are not a problem at least for me. I'm fairly well known in internet macrophotography circles (as LordV) see Flickr: Lord V's Photostream for some pics. I currently use either a Tamron90mm or a canon MPE-65 macro lens. Valentines Dad

The recent alpha was bordering on horrendous on most parts, they are going to have to do a huge amount of work on it for a Sep release. Considering the beta doesn't start till the end of July the release date seems a bit optimistic to me.

I think this is what you are looking for! World of Warcraft Addicts - EduGeek.net

For those also finding DA:Awakenings too easy by far can i recommend installing the mod at Awakening Plus v1-0, it makes Nightmare mode actually a decent challenge. (Some bits on the nexus site could be deemed NSFW but you have to be logged in to actually be visually offended).

Playing through Awakening now and it seems a lot less epic then Origins. The story and dialogue is top notch as with every Bioware game but the characters seem somewhat less... characterful. The fact you can unlearn all skills and talents at will and pick new ones is a nice feature but they lose their individuality. It's also stupidly easy, Nightmare mode with a far from "ultimate" party and no problems so far over half way through it. On Nightmare mode i expect to have to do boss fights a couple of times, it's no Mass Effect 2.

We had this issue and they requested we fax them a copy of the original invoice with the laptop and warranty on so they could update their records. This was actually done fairly quickly which is quite rare for Acer support.

Been getting through the hard modes now with my raid, some really do require mind bending coordination, but much enjoyment. Our webmaster set up a page to show how cool we are Boy Racers - Earthen Ring [EU] (im the little blood elf girl with bunches and a big sword who is usually facing the wrong way or standing behind a flag, make of that what you will)

At last a reason to get a Mac.

Just click HELP in the page where you run the session, it says what all the status commands mean. Also i did chuckle this morning during the exam when i was looking up what to do if a students pc crashed, the help even tells you what to do if you have a bomb scare or a gas leak

Yes very frustrating. We are currently working on Thorim hard mode which for us has the not so amusing side effect of 2-3 people disconnecting as soon we we enter the fight. We have once or twice managed to have an attempt with 24 people .

Ours are used with staff laptops so they get plugged in and recalibrated fairly often.

One of our many Smartboards has an odd alignment issue which becomes very obvious when drawing horizonzal lines (attached a pic of me trying to draw straight lines, note the blips about half way down some of them). The board doesn't have any power lines or large metal objects behind it. Anyone have any ideas?

You need your latest PLASC export which should be in "S:\SIMS\STAR\ASCout", the XML file with the newest date should be the one. You will also need to run it through the convertor you can get from the RM website, DocRef: DWN1402674. Otherwise it imports the parents instead of the pupils which although most amusing isn't very useful.

Have cleared the "easy" mode ulduar on 25man now with my raidgroup, the first to do so on our rather backwards RP server . The Yogg Saron fight really is quite a nicely done fight, really taxes everyone without being stupidly difficult (Muru springs to mind). Now onto hard mode....

Ulduar now released, anyone had any fun in there yet? From my first short raid yesterday where we managed to kill Flame Leviathan and XT-002 on 25man mode I have only good things to say about the place. They have upped the difficulty hugely compared to Naxx which although obviously isn't as good for casual players it gives the raiders a little more to work with. Edit: Oh and even the new VoA boss is a challenge.

Very few people actually "roleplay" on an RP server due to the fact most are just there to avoid idiots, whether this is a good or bad thing depends on who you are i guess. I do think you will miss out on a lot if you don't immerse yourself in the lore of the game a little bit though. I would recommend any warcrafter having a browse through "http://www.wowwiki.com/" if they have a spare 5mins.

End game raiding is only really worth it if you have time to join a proper raid guild. Going with random people to Naxx and other raids is what causes those horrible 14hours in Naxx. From my point of view the content isn't challenging enough and there isn't a lot of it at the moment. While in TBC my guild could quite happily fill 3 evenings worth of 4 hour raids per week we can currently do all content in one 4 hour raid. The instance encounters that are there are all nicely designed, with interesting fights and hard mode achievements. If you want to get a flavour of it then start with the Vault of Archavon or Sartharion as they are both easy encounters which you can do easily just joining any group. Malygos and a full Naxxramas do require people to have read up on the fights a bit before hand and for at least a large percentage of people to know what they are doing

The RP servers control to some degree what can be discussed in channels and naming convention etc, full info below: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/roleplaying.html

RP servers have generally a lower percentage of idiots because of the various extra rules hence i have always been on Earthen Ring. Managed to get the first Sartharion kill on ER too which got me a snazzy title