I seem to do this a lot. I blog for a while, then go for ages without blogging anything. So, this is my first post since April 2005. I hope you enjoyed the break. After being twice previously awarded the Microsoft MVP, this October I did not get the award. I can't really say I'm surprised, my presense in the newsgroups has been practically non-existant. In the home security/virus groups, it became increasingly difficult to answer any question with a reply other than "scan your computer with antivirus

I seem to have come down with a cold.. or as some men would call it.. flu (or chicken flu, SARS, or just plain old traditional "oh my god, I think I'm dying"). So my nose is all bunged up and my throat is sore. In a warm room, the gunk inside my head melts and starts to dribble down my face. Sleeping is interesting, I'm sure you've all had a cold at some point so you can appreciate the game of snot-chase. You lay on one side, you feel it all drain into one side of your head.. then you roll over and

The first few days of the students being back has been mostly uneventful. We sacrificed one already completely broken laptop to fix as many of the keyboards as we could, so we're back up to (almost) a full compliment of classroom laptops now. There's now begun a big push at work to try and get lecturers to actually take responsibility for the equipment being used during their classes. They are being encouraged at the end of the last class of the day to take the time to shut machines down, turn off

We've discovered three more broken DVDROM drives, in the same room. We were attempting to install some software from CD onto one of them, and it was working. However, there was some noise and vibration from the drive, but we thought nothing of it. After a while, the disc would no longer read. After ejecting the disk, we saw why. There's a deep groove been carved into the surface of the disc. I haven't yet looked at the drive to see why this happened (or how they did it) but I'll be posting a picture

Today we had a chance to find out the extent of the damage the students have caused. In one classroom, we have so far found two defunct DVD drives. The mechanisms were completely trashed, most likely by ejecting the drive, then grabbing hold of the tray and forcing it in and out at great speed, far greater than the motor and gears will allow, causing all sorts of horrible things to happen. Also a common occurance is the 'moneybox' effect. Student places money on the CD tray, which goes into the drive

Today was raining. Continuously. Well, it's stopped now, but it was raining all last night and most of today. I had to go into town after work today and thankfully it had stopped raining by this time. This leads me to the point of this post: What bugs me is people who walk around with giant umbrellas.. and it's not even raining. Now, personally, I don't even own an umbrella. If it's raining, I'll get wet, and I don't really care. My job is informal enough to be able to wear jeans and a t-shirt, and

It's a quiet day here on Campus with no students around. The weather is grey and miserable. What a change from the weekend where it was blue skies and sunshine. I don't really want to do any work but I guess I can't sit here all day surfing eBay and posting to my blog. So, for some entertainment I've put some images into my Blog's Gallery. Feel free to have a look, I'm sure I'll add more over time.

My blog looks awful in firefox. I'm gonna have to experiment with the different skins to find one that isn't broken to any browser other than IE. To anyone viewing my blog in Firefox, I apologise.

I didn't realise that the clocks went forward last night. I woke up at what I thought was an early time and it was only several hours later I realised half my clocks were wrong. Only my computers and the VCR were correct, they'd adjusted themselves. It's nice having a day or two to adjust before having to go back to work on the new schedule. It's a good job I don't have any trouble sleeping... just waking up! ;-) I seem to be spending a lot of time playing online games at the moment, my current favourites

It's a long weekend - but in a good way! Four days off from work, and then it's two weeks without the students being there! Finally a time to do some preventative maintenance to the network, to repair things they've broken, and to make some new posters.. At least, so you'd think. Three days out of the first week we can't do anything because there are students in working to catch up. They'll be doing the work they should have been doing during term time. So, as the first week is only four days anyway