Cambridge - Tuesday 17th June

Hello once again! Apologies for the slight delay - we've spent all the time since returning from the end of the round unloading everything from the lorry, followed by Everyone's Favourite Job (tm) - putting all of the kit back into its boxes and taking it back to the people who kindly supplied it to us. Top of the list for this is reboxing laptops, where serial numbers have to be matched on machine, box, power supply, etc...

But enough of my moaning - let's get back into the entries for the last two seminars of the round, starting with Cambridge.

We've visited here a couple of times now, but it still feels very odd indeed. Cambourne is clearly a newly-built town that's only been in existence for a small number of years, and it still feels strangely "too new". Somewhere between Stepford Wives and Disneyland, is the general conclusion, with the 'oddness' coming from every single building being the same age. Our lorry driver Shaun is very happy though, as he's a big fan of Morrisons and their in-shop cafes, and rates the shiny new Cambourne one among the best :)

The day of the seminar went well, with some nice weather to boot, and Jodie held up remarkably well given she arrived at setup the day before, straight from the Isle of Wight Festival. Clearly, I was distracted by the lovely weather and completely forgot to take the statutory end of day photograph. In its place, I can only offer a slightly unusual roundabout decoration we passed on our way to the venue via Milton Keynes...



And on a personal note, a word of thanks to Paul Mantripp from The Denes High School. He's the only other person I know connected with the seminars in any way who's interested in road cycling as much as me! The rest of the team have to put up with me chuntering on about obscure Belgian Classics or how Mark Cavendish will be the greatest British cyclist of all time, and do so with varying degrees of feigned interest, but it's very nice for me to have someone to actually engage in coversation :) Thanks Paul, you made me happier than Tom Boonen's defence lawyer on fee-paying day!

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 :)

Maidstone - Monday 9th June

Hello again - time to post last week's blog before I hit the road with the rest of the team for setup at Cambridge later today...


Deepest Kent started the week with some phenomenal weather and a good, busy seminar day. The venue there is an odd one, looking something like a condemned hospital building from outside, but actually pretty nice inside and unusually for a venue (and essential on such a hot day) air-conditioning that actually works. This always helps with the post-lunch sessions as less people tend to fall asleep when it's not 28 degrees in the presenting rooms...


Present here was seminar near-legend Jim Buckley. For many years now, he's diligently been sat in sessions making notes on presenters, not just content. We all have little verbal tics, and as presenters we try to minimise them as much as possible - it tends to be an endless battle, since as soon as you spot and eliminate one, another will appear to replace it. Those of us that have been through a few rounds have worked our way through the 'classics' such as "basically", "actually" and so on, but Jim is on hand to help us with the more esoteric ones. While he's in the sessions, he maintains a tally sheet of how many times we've said various tics, and will always appear at the end to inform us of this round's involuntary words. And the winners this time? A quite boring one from James - "um". This is a little disappointing after the heady days of some 70 or 80 repetitions of "If you will", but at least he's becoming more abbreviated, eh? Jim didn't come to any of my sessions this time round, but I can tell you for free that my tics for Spring 2008 are "in terms of" and "broadly speaking". In honour of years of "live editing", here's a pic of Jim in his natural element, grabbing a quick ciggie between sessions:




With it being such a lovely day weather-wise the number of people left for the end-of-day session was quite down, so it's a pretty sparse photo I'm afraid. "Nuff 'spec" to those who stayed the course...

Tiptastic round up...

OK, as promised earlier, here are all the outstanding tips and tools we've had passed to us in the round so far in one great big update...

Andrew Piper and Brian Whitty, Woodchurch High School
A useful set of tools for network analysis and monitoring from Fluke Networks (www.flukenetworks.com) - I think they fall in the category of "good but pricey"

Chris Norman
Another tool is Spotlight on Windows, a freeware monitoring tool for a machine, which looks impressively funky in some of the screenshots at http://www.quest.com/spotlight-on-windows/

Nick Walton
...also recommended Spotlight on Windows via email after Coventry, and is spot on when he describes it as 'making you desktop look like the Starship Enterprise'!

Tony Clemson
The beautifully titled "Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder", a freeware app which allows you to extract product keys from existing installations for operating systems and other apps, a useful ability with old applications for which you may have lost the original media. More info here: http://magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/

Marc Coyles
A suggestion clearly following the 'Network Ninja' idea is Samurize, a freeware app which gives system monitoring and other functionality, and by the look of the screenshots on their website (http://www.samurize.com/modules/news/), lots of people have been skinning the life out of it...

Richard Easton
Another 'Swiss army knife' type of freeware app suggested here, Spiceworks, which does asset reporting, monitoring, troubleshooting and so on. Details here: http://www.spiceworks.com/

Chris Guy
Rather than recommending a tool, Chris passed on some very useful information for those of you who have Virgin Media at home. Apparently, they are gradually rolling out an upgrade from a 10Mbit to 20Mbit service. However, having not noticed a difference, and investigated further, it transpires that if you have a Motorola Surfboard 1800 modem, this only has a 10Mbit port on it! Hence if you get the upgrade, make sure you get an upgraded modem too, otherwise you'll not "feel the benefit", as my mum used to say...

There should probably be a standard disclaimer thingy here like is pasted on the bottom of everyone's emails these days, but that's very dull, so I'll put the more accurate: since we've been on the road, none of us have had a chance to download or try out any of these tools yet. That's not to say they're not useful, just we haven't been able to check yet!

Cardiff - Wednesday 4th June

Right, I'm almost up to speed in my monster Saturday night catch-up session, so it must be time to do Cardiff! We saw a large number of people turn up at St. David's hotel, apparently including Chris Eubank and Girls Aloud, who must've heard about the seminars and been eager to learn more about educational ICT...


Clearly distracted by the presence of a great big truck with the number plate CHR111S, I didn't get the picture at the end of the day, but I did manage to catch James and Mike sneaking a crafty fag, doing their best 'catalogue poses'. Hmmm...

Coventry - Monday 2nd June

It's always a bit odd being in football grounds when there isn't a game on, and the Coventry seminar gives us this chance every six months. It's also the biggest single day on the seminar round, so always one to keep us on our toes.

It's also by a long way the oddest place to stay overnight, as there are no bedrooms per se: all the hospitality boxes at the stadium are equipped with fold-down beds so they can be converted when there's no game. It gives the strangest view when getting up in the morning:

Another nice opportunity which we couldn't resist was finding the bit of card with sponsors names on that they do post-match interviews in front of. In the absence of any real silverware, Tebs substituted the Seminars Tea Cup (a valuable trophy nonetheless, since it represented James' 100th cup of the day).

And of course, no entry would be complete without the end of day picture:

Aberdeen - Thursday 29th May

This entry is going to be a short one (for now), since I wasn't actually there. Rather than the full team, there was only a small subsection of us for an abbreviated seminar. Since James was the only presenter, er, present, he holds the responsibility for the blog entry. This is a little placeholder till I have his copy.

For now, here's another picture of a cute kitten...