Wed 11th and Thu 12th June - London 1 and 2

After the green and leafy surroundings of the Maidstone venue (no, really), it was off into the sweaty, smokey surroundings of Laahndaahn for three days in total and two of the more hectic days on the round. We've been using the Holiday Inn Kensington Forum (read: "bloody great big tower") for a while, and no matter what time we try to arrive in the loading bay to get all our kit into the goods lift, we always seem to coincide exactly with the pickup time for the hotel's laundry service. This means us trying to drag tonnes of flight cases in between hundreds of tonnes of trolleys of bedsheets, and a very large and intimidating-looking gentleman who manages the loading bay. We did manage to get everything up, but not without some scarring...

On the way in we spotted something interesting. As you might expect for a central London hotel, the underground car park tends to be full of very expensive motors (with the exception of our hire cars, of course - can't see wealthy Americans driving round in a VW estate somehow). Tucked away in the corner was a matt black Lamborghini, which we toddled over to gawp at, only to find that the cool matt black was completely ruined with everything (and I mean everything) in the interior being finished in pink leather. Picture below just to prove I'm not making this up...

These two days really were a blur for me, as my body is in something of "Migraine Mode" at the moment, unfortunately hitting on the night between the two seminars, meaning I was more than a little spaced out on Day 2. Despite this, the events went really well, helped by the standard of the cakes etc. in the afternoon tea break!

Rather than techie tools being recommended, I ended up with one practical tip and one interesting question...

London 1 - Tip of the Day

This is from Marek, who suggests using cable ties to properly attach mice and keyboards machines - their problem is not so much with vandalism and theft, just with users swapping them round when the allocated mouse/kbd "isn't right". This way round, they actually get informed when there are hardware failures, rather than a room with 20 working pairs among 24 machines. The 'bonus tip' here is to avoid the tediosity (is that a word?) of the job by getting those in detention to do it...

London 2 - Question of the Day

After the "Kaleidoscope" learning platform session, I had an interesting conversation with Mike Sixsmith from The Oratory School. They are about to roll out the LP portal to all parents, and have yet decide upon an appropriate answer to this question, so I thought this was an ideal one to blog and throw open to you for suggestions: When regular users forget their passwords (seemingly on an hourly basis), it's easy to verify they're who they say they are, since they're standing in front of you, but what do you do when it's a parent on the other end of the phone? What is a relatively convenient but reliably way of authenticating their identity without issuing them all with RSA Tags? Having spoken to some RM staff, I know our LP support line set up a banking style "security question" with parent users, then challenge them with "What's the nth letter of your answer?" whenever they call. That's one possible solution - do those of you out there with parent LP users have an alternative? I'd be very interested to find out!

Here are the end-of-day pics for London 1 and 2, with the latter definitely putting in a massive push for Biggest Wave of the Round - it's up to Cambridge or Exeter to better that one :)