Posts by Terry 6

Re: Similar tale in a hospital

It's that old adage. If you fail to plan you plan to fail. What is interesting is how often I and I assume many others of us here, seem to meet managers who do just this.Repeatedly. And seem to get away with it. Often to the accompaniment of several barn doors being slammed shut with excessive force and much too late.

Re: Watch Your Backs

Or even those above willing to twist words, often said informally and out of context, to make someone especially someone not too far down the ladder, look bad.

Yes, I have been got that way. When my and another service amalgamated we, the two managers were simply moved into new roles according to scale. So as the lower paid/younger I became deputy.

In the interim period we were chatting about management. I, having done some training and thought about our roles running teams of highly skilled, specialist, quite senior peripatetic advisory and support teachers expressed the view that our role as managers should be to set the requirements and monitor them in jobs that needed to be pretty much self-managing. It was how I'd worked very successfully. It was how my previous boss had worked and he was at the Giving-advice-to-parliamentrary-committees level.

She, I'd later learned, was in her current role because she'd been rejected from previous redeployment exercises and given this one instead. And was a true micro-manager ( and alcoholic and liar and... well you get the picture). But I also learned, years later, that she'd taken my informal and still reasonable comments and recorded it formally as my saying that I didn't believe in managing- to our bosses.

Re: Who else remembers having to buy the high-quality fan-fold paper...

Local primary school?

Re: The philosophy of WordPerfect....

From there it is an incremental learning process, rather...

Which makes a lot of sense if someone has the opportunity to learn on the job. Less so if you've been given a short 1 or 2hr training session followed by a pressured, time consuming task- (possibly several weeks later with no time to practice in the interim).

Re: Imperrfect

I have very poor hand-eye coordination. Coupled with a crap primary school teacher or three and being Summer born meant that my education was seriously hampered*. Handwriting was actually quite painful and looks messy. Six decades later it still is, though I still got a decent degree- somehow. And I can teach it brilliantly, my letter formation is actually correct. As long as I don't have to do more than a few words at a time.

But mum taught me type. and once I got a device, in my early 20s, life just changed. Starting with a Brother portable printer and quickly moving to proper printers on computers.

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*It didn't need to be. They just needed to be a bit less horrible about it and to remember I was also a year younger than some other kids. Luckily once I was in high school some teachers were, so those were the subjects I flourished in. And of course it's why I ended up as a Special Education specialist teacher.

Re: Rather computers than cars

Not so much with the newest cars.

This very week I tried to connect my Android phone to the car's display (with Android Auto). And it just wouldn't.

I tried various problem solving things and eventually went back to the dealer- who was puzzled. We sat in the car, turned on the engine. He asked me a few things and then to connect the phone's USB. It connected first time. I thanked him, went home and then tried again. And it wouldn't connect. Removed and replaced the USB lead. Nothing. Tried connecting before I turned the engine on. Nothing. Tried after, still nothing. Unplugged USB again, sat thinking for a minute or two. Had another go. Connected perfectly.

After several attempts along these lines, sometimes connecting,sometimes not I've concluded that it will only connect after the engine has been switched on and running for a minute or two. As if there was a boot sequence going on.

Re: Rather computers than cars

My favourite there is drivers who can't position a car to turn right on a junction-with-traffc-lights. Blocking the junction so that cars wanting to go ahead and all those further back get stuck behind them.

And then there's the ones too nervous to change lanes on the motorway- often driving along in the middle lane at a gentle speed.

Re: School SEN teacher Also 90s

However a SENCo ought to be able to do two things right;

1) Pre-empt problems

2) Review events to prevent re-occurence in the future

In this case find out what to do before the next time she started on a document.

Re: Imperrfect

We had an advisory teacher come into our school when I was still a class teacher, to get us to start using WP. "Easy as Pie" she'd said.

Maybe easy if it's what you do all day. But I was very aware that the admins used this stuff, and they kept lists of formatting codes to insert into the text. In the office you'd hear them asking each other "What's the code for...." etc.

So asking full time teachers to somehow learn these codes, and sit trying to insert them into text so that once or twice a year they could type reports they'd been doing by hand for years was just a total non-starter. But it's the bullshit (these days we'd probably call it Gaslighting) of pretending it was so easy and quick to take up that annoyed me To the best of my knowledge no teacher in any local school was able to use this stuff for real life work.

Re: old kit and wp software

You new around here then?

Many of them have done so, at least in the UK. Sadly that public spirit seems to have drained away with far too many seeing a political role as a ticket to the gravy train.

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

That's a good tip. I thought you were going to talk in terms of master pages and formatting with page styles' rules. (Stuff I've heard of but never needed to get a handle on).

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

Pretty much what i do with my desktops.

The laptop is a sore point. Long conversation with Dell before I bought it. Yes there will be space inside the chassis for a second HDD and a connection for it....

It had neither . I complained, they apologised but did nothing. That was my last ever Dell. (Last PC was also Dell.Latest PC is Chillblast btw).

And the laptop's SSD began to fail just after warranty ended. Laptop's performance was slower than I expected too, quite sluggish for an i7- which is relevant. Bought a larger Samsung SSD as a replacement. Suddenly the laptop performance was much better too, no more sluggishness! (Told you it was relevant). Still not going to buy Dell ever again

Re: Partitioning

And on Windows systems, if the partition with Windows and other programmes gets too cramped, and if there is adequate total HDD space resizing partitions is relatively easy. Though not so much with the Windows built-in control,which is remarkable stupid- It's good for carving a new partition out, but not for resizing-when you shrink a partition from the left it won't let you expand the adjacent partition to its right,where the space is ( or is it the other way round - I forget). But there are plenty of reliable partitioning programmes around. AOMEI partition assistant (free) has done sterling work for me over the years. I've always tested a new programme on a partition, or a spare drive, that hasn't anything important on it/when I get a new system before I copy the data to it. I have plenty of old HDDs that I can play with- and a few I stick into new systems as backup drives or simply to make copying data over easier. Current PC has my old 2Tb HDD in it just for messing about with, dumping stuff to temporarily etc.

And to sell us more space when we find that the free offering is full to the gills (probably with stuff that we don't actually even need).

Re: I had a customer with almost the exact opposite

And I'm bloody sure she's not the only one. And as in your story, even tech knowledgable types will have been caught out by such Microsoft moronic stupidity

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

The Excel Lock and Protect thing strikes me as being fairly surreal.

By default everything is locked. Except that in practical terms nothing is locked. Not until you set "Protect" as well.

So to actually protect, say, a formula, you have to unlock everything else and then protect the document. With a concomitant risk of forgetting one of those stages and sitting scratching your head wondering why the thing can't be edited where you need to /be protected from changes where they mustn't be changed..

Who thought that this made sense?

Re: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

User files, not settings. The data we work with. And this should never be tangled up with the software settings. Or even on the same partition.

I thought my 'nux files were on a separate partition. In fact though it's a few years since I used 'nux (MINT) I'd have sworn to it.

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

I've never had any problem moving those locations (right click, location tab) to where I want them. But then I know where to find them to start with.

My home office files are on a separate drive. Partitioned with my sets of folders (T:|) My wife's (her initial:) family stuff (F:\) Photos(P:\) etc. etc.

And all the software seems happy to default to saving in these locations - though again it's a matter of knowing how to find the right settings' locations.

Re: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

This was my thought. Users should only be able to save stuff where it is meant to be saved. Presumably in this day and age on a network, in a network share. One dedicated to that person or that project or team as appropriate. Maybe even a personal folder for their own use, strictly at their own risk since that one won't be backed up and may even be on the local machine's spare space. But on the strict understanding that no work related files go in there -on pain of having the privilege removed and a disciplinary.

As to where Windows puts files. Madness. Buried in the C: drive in a concealed folder within "Documents and settings" as if user data was in some way equivalent to OS function and needed the same kind of access.

I assume built upon the misguided view that computing would all work by using desktop search to locate files. You'd type in "Johnson" and the files for the Johnson account would all appear. Some times it even works.

Re: "Are you liking our app?"

This is El reg. Out in the Real World (tm) people feel a terrible compulsion to complete these surveys and unless the product is truly grim, to err on the side of a positive review..

Re: You laugh

I guess if you live in a part of a country where decent sized houses can be built for that kind of figure you can have enough spare space to fit two dishwashers. Sadly this is not a universal option.

Re: All part of gullability testing

Sadly, not a new fad. Some 15 years ago it was built into the (then) National Professional Qualification for Headteachers and equivalent for Advisory teachers. And underlying it is a degree of management consultant pseudo-science that would take an entire industrial sized compost bin just to store the surface layers.

Re: Bad, Bad, Very Bad, Not Good

And the ultimate user, the company owner, had made a deliberate choice to direct the commission of software theft.

Not even £10. £10 tax deductible for the company.

Re: Lots of files with the same name

If it's desktop/start menu short cut icons you can still do this. It's in properties.

Funnily enough in my amateur way that's been my thought for a long time.

Either file extension names are irrelevant or they need to be visible. And since some programmes save files with their own extensions/formats rather than a standard one, I find this essential. Photoshop ( Elements) defaults to a proprietary format. Which is fine until I need it in .JPG to organise or share. So I need to see which is which. My old camcorder used to save files with its own extension - which then had to be renamed to the normal one for that format before I could edit them. The format was standard, they just used a different extension in the machine!!!

IOW For me they are useful to see what kind of file I'm messing with - so why does Windows hide them from me?

Re: Winning a popularity contest does not make you an expert

It's not, to be frank, even their own popularity in most cases- in fact when it is in the UK they're often pretty good MPs too. - It's often just blind partisan factionalism. Places where a Tory will always/never get in, for example. And even a chimp wearing the right rosette would get elected.

Or where a far left Champagne Socialist will always get elected - possibly even if an ordinary member of the party might not.

Re: The State changed its tune

Yes, this is often forgotten. The Pilgrims are usually portrayed as leaving for America to seek religious freedom. They were actually seeking the religious freedom to curtail other people's religious freedom.

Re: The State changed its tune

This does sound like a another extension of "What I want to believe must be true because I want to believe it". Otherwise known as "My Truth".

It seems prevalent in almost every public discourse

Re: If Only ...

See all the responses to that idea and then tell me that this year is the one that Linux will finally replace Microsoft Windows.