A selfish request

There’s currently a petition on the 10 Downing Street site requesting that school science technicians should be given pay more in keeping with their responsibilities. If you're a UK resident and happen to feel like signing it, there’s just a tiny possibility that it might have some impact. Please note you do have to give a genuine name, UK address, and email or the vote doesn't count.

"Initiatives in the pipeline to increase the number of pupils taking separate Sciences will have a considerable knock on effect on the workload of Technicians. Technicians are already recognised by professional bodies as the "expert" in the Science Department on practical Science issues, often training teachers in practical techniques and advising on safety, yet we earn less than £10 per hour. This state of affairs needs to remedied quickly if Science Education is to be at the forefront of government policy."

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Technicians/

Deadline is 6th March

Please copy to anyone you might know who's interested in the future of science / science education in the UK.

I doubt very much this will do me any good, I'll probably be retired before changes are made, but it really does need to be done if we want to go on teaching practical science properly.

Latest press release on the Haiti fundraiser

This was sent to me via an email digest which has stripped out some non-ASCII characters and replaced them with question marks etc. I've xxxed out a couple of email addresses and phone numbers, but can supply them if anyone needs them.

( Drivethru's Press Release )

CD printing

I'm thinking of switching over from CDs with separately-printed adhesive labels to inkjet-printable CDs; there's very little difference in the price of the media, and I'm always a little worried that someone might get a damaged drive as a result of a label coming loose.

There are snags, of course. I can print labels relatively cheaper on the laser, can't print CDs that way; I'd need to buy an inkjet, and inkjet ink is much more expensive. Also, I can load a stack of labels and print them without supervision; that isn't true of CDs unless I spend a fortune on a dedicated stack-loading printer, which definitely isn't going to happen. The printer is going to be a bottleneck.

So - given all of the above, is there any relatively inexpensive inkjet which can print CDs fairly fast and fairly cheaply? Don't need particularly high resolution, or any other frills.