jms429

I can't read the last book. Growing up, I was always 6 months to a year away from another Terry Pratchett book. I don't want to live in a world where there is no more of his books left for me to read.

I'm going to say it: I loved clippy.

I loved it so much that in 2005 for my CompSci final project I created a search assistant, using the agent builder tool, C# and the Google API.

I think it should come back as a personal AI agent.

Burn out. Teaching is a job that is never "done", and expectations from management and parents are constantly set higher and higher. Especially around IT. I lost count of the number of times I asked for help from management and got told "but you are so good at computers".

Tried the startup thing, my product crashed and burned, work for a charity now.

As a former computing teacher, I loved Scratch. I remember reading about it on a Thursday evening on Slashdot, maybe spring of '08, or 09.

I had a free lesson first thing the next day, so I installed it on the network then had a class of 10 year olds give it a whirl. Had a full scheme of work written by the Monday, and was demoing it to other schools by the summer.

Loved it, loved the scratch board addon hardware, loved the complimentary "makey makey" project, and the cards, and the books and on and on.

incredible project.

At the time, MS educational licensing was cheap as hell, we paid a set price per teacher and that then included windows & office for everyone.p, including free licenses for the kids to download office at home. I’m sure it’s changed now.

I was an IT manager in a school (not any more), and was asked by a parent why I wasn’t using Linux everywhere.

Our Microsoft licensing cost £1000 per year, and our MSP cost about £10,000 for remote support and a weekly onsite.

Using Linux, our licensing cost would have gone, and maybe we’d have gotten another year or two from desktop hardware, but our support costs would have increased massively - I couldn’t find a local msp who’d do desktop Linux support the same way we were getting. not to mention all the training for teachers, and the nightmare of finding replacements for things like smart notebook, custom assessment software, and windows only curriculum software.

Biggest headache would have been the teachers. Some of them found windows 10 too difficult to use, and pushing them onto Linux would have needed a full time techie on hand.

linux is better is not always the case.

I use the bullet journal technique (1), I keep it simple and don’t go in for all the decoration that you see online. I also don’t do any fancy life tracking; it’s for recording tasks, making notes for meetings and notes around any work ongoing. I sometimes stick in examples of anything creative that I’ve done that I might want to reference at some point. Glued into the front cover is a picture of my dog.

I use a leuchtturm1917 A5, dotted paper. (2) Paper quality can vary, if you use a proper pen you’ll want to go for the thicker paper. You can get better journals on Amazon (cheaper and more pages), but I am lazy and can’t be bothered to number the pages myself. I also attach two pen loops, for a pen and a mechanical pencil.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_journal 2. https://www.leuchtturm1917.co.uk/edition-120g.html

Oswinproject.org.uk

I've hired a number through upwork, and once from someone who advertised on here.

Through upwork it can be hit and miss, I found the best method was to set a couple of questions in the description of the task for people to answer ie "start you response with the phrase gosling was off his rocker" & something like "explain the tech you would use to build mvp and why". That tended to weed out the people who were mass bidding on tasks without reading, you want someone who's read your task and thought about it a little.

For bigger tasks, I've had success with posting the full job details but then setting a small task, like wireframes or some design work for say $50 to a couple of upworkers, then picking one to carry on the rest of the work. That worked really well, and spending $200 on selecting a freelancer when spending $5000 felt like a good payoff.

The person on here I hired after he posted an offer to make an mvp for a fixed price, and it worked out really well, delightful Chap, good work.

I've tried fiverr, but that seems better for smaller tasks.

Have emailed, interesting idea!