staff room antics

Lots of odd things go on in staff rooms, the politics of it all! Anyway, all staff are "expected" to pay £20 into the staff pot each year, this covers things like flowers and grapes for ill staff, Birthday cakes etc etc. Now that's fair enough.

But, what I HATE, is that whenever someone retires, or leaves, they set up ANOTHER tin for donations, separate to the £20 staff have already paid.

Now non of the teaching staff seem to complain about this, they abviously earn enough for it not to matter. But if I could afford it or not, I would not give money a second time. It's wrong to expect and ask for more money, at the end of the day this is my JOB, I shouldn't have to spend one single penny to do my job.

We have 130 staff, so at £20 each thats £2600!!! Maybe a bit less, as part time staff don't pay as much, but what the hell do they spend that kind of money on every year.

My other staff rant is the separation between staff and ICT support staff (even amongst other support staff). There is a leaving do meal this lunch time, the network manager and myself are not going. Not because we are unsociable, but because we weren't invited. All of the other support staff are going, science, reprographics, art techs etc.

The only reason I know it's going on, is because I was asked to "keep an eye" on the ICT rooms over lunch. The reprographics girl normally does this, but she's out for this lunch.

The joys of IT, at least I can doss in my office all week reading BOFH and CAD.......

Joke, I do shit loads!

XD sucks ass

I am amazed at companies that destroy themselves with proprietary formats.

Take Olympus and Fuji for example, their use of the XD picture card. It wouldn't be so bad if XD was any good, but it isn't, its terrible, the more I have thought about it recently, the worse it gets!

I have used an Olympus tough camera for about 3 years and recently upgraded to the excellent Tough-8000 model. Great for all my outdoors stuff and being clumsy I guess.

It came with an XD M+ card, which and I quote

"has built-in software to support the Panorama, 3D and Art Effect functions"

bullshit it does, the camera has the software. How can they even get away with saying this? Surely its false advertising. The card just contains a header that says what kind of memory card it is, which then tells the camera which functions to unlock.

That makes me so mad, they limit the functions of the camera according to how much you spend on their small, overpriced cards.

Luckily, Olympus have seen slight sense, as they now include a converter which allows you to use micro SD cards in the camera. I just received my 8Gb Micro SDHC card, it only cost me £18 delivered (note XD ONLY goes up to 2Gb).

Now I can fit over 1 hour of video on the card (640x480 @ 30 fps) and 1300 13 MP pictures.

What is even better is that SD is massively faster, when taking a multi shot photo on the camera, with XD the buffer fills after about 10 photos. With SD, it takes the photos until the card is full, no full buffer!

So, rant over. XD needs to be binned! Olympus should stop with the forceful tactics to make people buy their expensive cards as well. Love the camera though!