Woohoo! Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is absolutely, definitely and finally my favourite film of 2003, possibly of a few years before and after also! I'm not a nail-biter, but was an edge-of-the-seater at a few points (and I have read the books so did know what was happening ... mostly) and didn't have any of the time-dragging-on feelings some long films inspired. Emotional too! Sod the moviemistakes nerds, I loved it and so did the three people I went with (we were hyped afterwards and required serious food and alcohol to stop the inane jabber!) Now the long wait for the eagerly-anticipated DVD extended edition <GRIN>

phpMyAdmin - Mysql DB administration tool - www.phpmyadmin.net

phpMyAdmin - Mysql DB administration tool - www.phpmyadmin.net

University network is down

Maths' Christmas lunch on Thursday. When I returned to the University afterwards, intent on returning home (I missed the post-lunch piss-up or the 1^st time in 5 years! because of my grandfather's funeral the day after -- RIP Charlie Price, 1911-2003) there was a fire alarm in progress with 3 fire engines in attendance. Usually these are false-alarms, especially during exam periods when students mistakenly believe that a fire alarm will void the exam (what usually happens is the exam is rescheduled and rewritten, often tougher!) Today (2 days later) the University web site, learning management system and my Sun box (Maths web server) are unavailable so I guess it was serious after-all! Have the tech. support people pragmatically decided to leave repairs until after Christmas (New Year even?) If-so it reduces the efficacy of my extension for the web technologies class -- no network means no resources for the students :-(

Cascading Style Sheets: CSS Browser Support

Cascading Style Sheets: CSS Browser Support

Once bitten, twice shy? Not if you're a manager at this University!

Last year a part-time lecturer who'd agreed to teach a Database module for us dropped-out, giving a month's notice, so his duties got lumbered on someone else at (relatively-speaking) the last minute. So we said "Never again will we offer this man teaching!" ... until we needed the same module covering this year (because of someone leaving) and lo! the exact same things has happened, except that this time the person getting lumbered at the last minute is me! Ho-hum...

We had a CBT today (Ohmigod what a disaster ... Bb6 wreaked havoc!) but what I really wanted to mention was the one student who turned-up late for his allocated session with booze on his breath! Durrrr ... Talk about bad 1st impressions!

Excuses

Once again, this time from the 2^nd year cohort (who were 1^st years last time), I'm getting a list of excuses from students for missing lectures and/or assignment deadlines. Many of these may well be genuine (I'm no lie-detector!) so pity the poor students for whom luck seems in short supply:

• Jury service.
• Driving test.
• Got married.
• Infected foot.
• Dead uncle (3).
• Dental surgery.
• Flu (no sick note).
• Dead grandmother.
• Court appearance.
• Parent had a stroke.
• Hospital appointment.
• Doctor's appointment (2).
• Playing in a football match.
• Father ill and in Los Angeles.
• Aunt died after a prolonged ilness.
• Eye problems following a car accident.
• Ill (unspecified & I don't want to know!)
• Pre-booked holiday in the last fortnight of term ... an honest student!
• Head injuries and follow-up Hospital appointments following a car accident.
• Car accident followed by time-consuming physiotherapy from both insurers!
• Flu this week, car accident & whiplash last week and a household burglary the week before.
• Mystery virus since November. Flu-like symptoms severe enough to prevent work for 2 months (?!)
• Car accident & mugging last year and another accident this year leading to a series of hospital appointments.

Smoking

Why do students insist on smoking a cigarette immediately before coming to see me? (Am I so scary that they need a quick one to settle their nerves?!) I don't smoke, I don't want to smoke and I don't like the smell! (And if you smoke but don't think you stink of smoke after smoking a cigarette, then think again!)

Eddie Izzard

Went to see Eddie Izzard (stand-up comedian, film actor, action transvestite and all-round impressive person!) in Brighton over the weekend -- Sexie tour is fabulous!!! (as ever...) Almost suffocated laughing too much -- don't talk to me about Neanderthal man and pits of excrement <GRIN>. Thoroughly recommended (although the venue left a little to be desired.) And, for the record Eddie, chocolate is toxic to dogs so well-done for mentioning it! (I was there with a veterinary friend...)

Blackboard Learning Management System

We have an "Educational Technology Unit" responsible (together with our "Information and Computing Technology" department) for running a Blackboard system. Bb5 was running reasonably well last academic year so we upgraded to Bb6 over the summer ... typically without "full load" testing it appears. As reported all over the world where Bb is deployed Bb6 was originally unable to correctly delete idle sessions so tends to slow down and eventually fall-over as sessions are used up. A patch from Bb was installed here 5 weeks ago (a 30 minute interval garbage collection script with consequent performance issues) and a "solution" upgrade installed last week. This seems to have helped prevent periodic crashes but the system remains unstable (slow response times are the norm.)

The shocking thing for a supposedly secure system is that SSL was disabled in the original install, reinstated (after 3 months) last week and removed again this week! WTF is going-on?! Am I just naïve to expect a secure system? It's certain that the "upgrade" has introduced a few genuinely useful features but at a terrific performance cost & a disturbing loss of security ... Rather ironically & inaccurately the Blackboard site currently leads with Blackboard offers the mission critical applications for building today's digital campus.

Deadline extensions #3 & student stupidity

Further to the deadline debacle earlier this week two students have embarassingly (for them!) come to see me requesting an extension as "they were ill" on Tuesday ... yet their signature (or something like it...) appears on my register. I guess that illustrates that many of the sugnatures might not be valid :-( A headcount suggested approximately 140-150 students were actually there in the class 153 signatures were recorded so it's not too bad! (Just bad for the two students caught-out!)

Deadline extensions #2

Second lecture discussing the deadlines -- this week 2/3 of the class turned-up, so as an incentive/reward I've given a 5 week (over Christmas) extension to those who turned-up (which received my 1^st ever round of applause <grin>). Actually this is a rather "soft" rule as I'm happy to give the extension to anyone who asks for it -- they have to actually show-up (the 1/3 that weren't here today probably never come in!) -- and it gives me a chance to warn them about plagiarism & my intention to treat seriously any cases this year (last year in this module we were soft as the admin required to "convict" 50 students was deemed to be too great. There's more discussion of this problem in this post from June 2003.)

Deadline extensions

A problem with assessment deadlines for complex pieces of work is that you can never tell in advance exactly how long the students will need to digest the material necessary to do the work. My case: A group work assignment (to build a Breakout game in JavaScript!) is taking the majority of my 200-student class longer than I estimated (I broke the game down into 6 stages for 8 teaching weeks + they had a mid-term "study week"). My original deadline is looming and I feel they would benefit from an extension over Christmas. However I said on Monday "Come to the Tuesday lecture and we'll talk about it." 22% of the class showed-up -- reasons for poor attendance were either Eid (a major Moslem festival) or (perhaps more likely!) a tough Java assignment deadline at 9PM that night. So I point-blank refused to give an extension (pique, mainly!) and postponed the decision until the following Tuesday's lecture ... It's aggravating! I don't like giving extensions as it feels like weakness (& a lot of large-group teaching is "front") and encourages students to expect an extension so they need not start working until the last minute. I also worry that giving an extension covering a holiday period will encourage plagiarism: "No lecturer support, so who else do I turn to? My buds!" We'll see what happens next week...

Is Powerpoint evil?

I'm a "professional Powerpoint user" <shudder> in that I use it everyday for presenting slides during lectures. I don't think Powerpoint is evil per se (although it can obviously be put to "evil" [stupid, pointless, inappropriate, misleading] purposes!) I can sympathise with the tone of Jeremy Zawodny's recent post about Powerpoint and agree with many of the comments but I disagree with 2 of his points: Zawodny says it's among mankind's worst inventions, which seems to leave out a lot of truly heinous things (religion? other ways of abrogating personal responsibility? UK fast food?) and as for the largest single source of useless crap within companies admittedly I've worked for just one "real" company (hearsay suggests it's similar in many other corporations) but there I felt that the useless crap tended to come from management, totally divorced from the everyday running of the company (oh so true Dilbert!)

Charles Eicher's old post on the subject is nearer my view -- Powerpoint is too limited to present complex ideas on its own (it is the speaker's comments that provide the detail.) Fortunately my students are also (in the main) too limited to understand complex ideas without the repetition that Powerpoint makes easy (OK, some of 'em are like that -- the majority don't turn up for class [duh] & a majority of the minority who do turn up are more switched-on than that sentence gives 'em credit for.) Links to other entertaining Powerpoint commentaries include the very interesting Avoiding Powerpoint suckage, Are we wasting $250M/day? (Humour: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Address).

As for Powerpoint online NO! I really loathe Powerpoint's exported slideshows! I do publish PDF versions of my slides online. My PDF slides are in two forms: One for students to print out and use in the lecture (6 slides to a page) and the other (1 slide to a page) for me & they to use for reference. We have a "Learning Management System" (Blackboard) on which the majority of material safely resides away from the wider web but it's painful to link to slides on Bb; having slides at a more static URL on a public web server is much more useful.

MathWorld News: Perfect Magic Cube of Order 5 Discovered

Perfect Magic Cube of Order 5 Discovered -- I thinks it's excellent to use math expertise to direct this kind of search for existence proof.

Group work

Since it's uppermost in my mind these days (my Web Technologies module is approaching fever-pitch as students begin to seriously work and worry about their Group Project assignment) I've added a few words on the subject to my Stupid Questions blog and also started a fictitous but (maybe) educational blog from a student's perspective...

PhD viva success

Congratulations and serious kudos to my colleague Gordon (now Dr Gordon!) who passed his PhD viva yesterday . Well done!

Whoopeee?! After 5 years of happily struggling with Microsoft Office 97 we're having Office 2003 imposed upon us -- no consultation, AFAIK no user-testing beyond the IT people but we will (apparently) be given a chance to try it out before all our lecture notes etc... stop working in January 2004! Sounds like a typical top-level imposed decision... (I'm sure there's an appropriate Dilbert somewhere <grin>) According to vnunet.com IT Managers feel railroaded into deploying untested applications -- dunno who's pressurising our lot but it's not the lecturing staff! It seems such a short time ago that we were forced to upgrade from Windows 3 to Windows 95 (summer 1998 -- a good upgrade with many advantages), Windows NT (mostly during 2002/3) and finally to Windows XP this year (summer 2003 -- a goodie from my POV but roundly criticised for the rushed rollout, lack of consultation etc ... sound familiar?)

Alien and poor website design

Went to see Alien: The director's cut last night -- excellent movie, stands the test of time very well (I was just 9 years old when it first came out <grin>). Going to our local Odeon always reminds me that their website is an annoying mess of nonstandard IE crap. No functionality at all in DOM1-compliant browsers like Mozilla Firebird (my current fave) and I doubt they've ever hear of web accesibility. Ho hum...
21st Nov: Bloody hell, why did "Alien Resurrection" have to have such a crap ending! It's a pretty good adventure romp up until the Alien womb debacle! Such a shame...
23rd Nov: I thought Dr Fun was dead but I was wrong <grin>!

God must love idiots -- he makes so many of 'em! (Garfield does, anyway!)There's an assignment deadline approaching and today I received the following email:Doubt itz all rite bro but do wat u can wit it. Suggest u change the layout of it or somethin fella so it dont look identical.
Later,
     Mr Brain (NHBCTPTS) This was obviously intended for the 3 student recipients and, eventually, Mr Brain was supposed to submit the assignment by email, but he had added my name to the address list! The email text suggests Mr Brain and his 3 friends were "collaborating" (read: copying) on the assignment and he accidentally copied it to me prematurely?! The level of stupidity beggars belief! Attached to this email was a spreadsheet, nicely laid-out with godawfully-poor calculations (the assignment was modelling the weight of growing yeast yet their results were negative numbers) -- style over content.

The depressing corollary of this is: In a class of over 200, these 4 collaborators were sufficiently stupid (charitably: unlucky) to catch themselves out -- how many other groups of happy plagiarists are there? <gloom>

Cool collection of CSS tips from Zeldman: CSS Smorgasbord and the new ALA Sliding Doors CSS tabs is also excellent. At last decent browser support for CSS prompts designers to begin using 'advanced' (hardly!) features like descendant selectors.

Now this has to be a useful resource for anyone developing 'serious' JavaScript applications: Mozilla.org's Venkman JavaScript Debugger - Development Page. Yet another reason for adopting Firebird/Mozilla browsers instead of going for the easy, pre-installed but increasingly unsatisfactory Micro$oft Internet Exploder.

An oldie but goodie: Conall's Blog: Nerd Humour

So what's with this usage of the word "safe" to mean "thanks" etc? As in "Safe for that" meaning "Thanks for that".

The funniest Shockwave game I've seen in a while: BigIdeaFUN.com - Penguins - Arcade - Spaced Penguin! (well I did do a Maths with Astrophysics degree!)

Graduation Day today -- kinda uplifting to see students so happy to receive their degrees (or is it just relief that it's all over?!) My congratulations to everyone who got their degree today, but especially to Tom & Leeanne -- I tried to find you afterwards but to no avail (pointless taking my camera, really!) Good luck in your careers, everyone...

Groan ... Gave my first in-class CBT today for 200 students over 5 rooms. Organisational headache, plagued by slow system responses & I definitely need more helpers -- when a problem arises in a room (a) they need to look for me and (b) I need to be able to leave my room to help! Overall we had 2 system errors leading to failed submission, 6 failed logins doing their test on paper and a dozen students showing-up at the last minute claiming they didn't know their allocated time slot and these had to be squeezed-in at the end. This amounts (in my reckoning) to a technological success! Then (afterwards) I discover that I have accidentally flipped a true/false answer so have to manualy correct the tests :-( Now that's a costly error!

See the first post on my "Stupid questions not to ask a lecturer!" blog: As it turns out the Chair of the Faculty's committee responsible for student progression will allow a failing 1^st year student to take 9 modules instead of the normal 8 in their second year to "catch up" with the failed module ... does anyone else think this is suspect? Certainly it's the thin end of the wedge when we come to assessing student progression next year.

Daylight Saving Time

Now I need never forget again! (This year we had a party on Saturday and hang-overs were not improved by getting up an hour earlier than necessary!)

Professional discourtesy

Telling students that a couple of colleagues who are loosely involved in a module will be marking their assignments without even asking said colleagues first! The first I found out was when I noticed my name on the assignment sheet as being down to mark (I guess) 1/3 of a 300-student module's computing assignment :-(

Yurg ... excellent Chris Brasher Memorial Lecture today on "Is Science Dangerous" (Prof Lewis Wolpert CBE) -- good value for money! Unfortunately due to the usual "unjoined-up thinking" in my Faculty it clashed heinously with "my" seminar (the School's seminars are arranged by me) even though mine was booked first (the CB arranger is notoriously egocentric). So my invited speaker sat through the CB (turns out they knew each-other) and then gave his talk to a much reduced audience (bummer ... all lectured-out!) My Faculty needs better internal communication!

<groan> Started tonight's lecture with an argument with a student who was not even supposed to be in the class (transpired he was waiting for a lift from a friend who is supposed to be there) ... I chose (in my usual fashion) not to be aggressive & persuaded him to wait for his friend outside. Is that too "non-confrontational"? I don't think so. At least one member of the class [1/180!] agreed & she's an ex-schoolteacher. Are we moving ever-towards the "school teacher" mode and away from being lecturers, pure'n'simple? (It's the new mode of promoting/facilitating learning as opposed to simply teaching.)

Woo hoo! The School got its first MSc by Research student through today <GRIN> ... shame his supervisor left us for pastures greener (Reading University) it's great to know there is research/supervision that can be done in an ex-Poly "New University" -- well done Andy & Mike (and thanks to Steve, the External Examiner!)

Hmmm ... suspiciously from the back of the class last night a laser pointer was being misused in the class ... is it a sign of weakness to persuade the offender to stop using it rather than attempting to confiscate it? Definitely a judgement-call!

Last night a student in my class duped me briefly by pretending to work for a security firm investigating email porn ;-} Moral: Don't take everything they say at face value ... methinks that's the lesson I'm learning the most slowly! (Naïve?)

Woohoo! My feed is back <grin> ... http://king-maths.kingston.ac.uk/seminars/rss.php

Doom, gloom -- I'm lacking inspiration today! I've read three journal papers and accidentally seem to have deleted a PHP file that took 3 hours to create on Friday [setting-up an RSS feed from the programme of seminars I manage] Definitely an Eeyore-moment :-(

Bloody hell! Why do we have prerequisites for modules if course directors don't insist on applying them? My 2^nd/3^rd year "Web Technologies" module (glorified title for "Dynamic HTML and a brief XML introduction") requires 1^st year HTML (Obv: You need to know HTML as a basis for many web technologies!) Yet I have a dozen students who have no HTML prior knowledge for whom (poor suckers!) I have to arrange extra tuition for them to have a hope of getting anything out of the module :-(

Note I'm not complaining about the other dozen who have expressed an interest in extra HTML because they've "forgotten" it in the 6-18 months since finishing the module -- AFAIC you revise your prerequisite modules before embarking on new and interesting stuff that builds on prior modules. If you can't be bothered to do-so then so much the worse for you...

This Higher Education thing should involve effort on both sides of the lectern -- I put in the effort to "teach", students should put in the effort to "learn". If I don't do my job then fine! Complain -- you've every right to. If students don't do their job, to whom can we complain? No-one! Bring-on "learning contracts" and student accountability, I say!

Some never-to-be-sufficiently cursed, expletive-deleted student stole my laser pointer during my first lecture! Moral: When dishing-out course documents don't leave anything lying around that's small enough to stick in a pocket! (I'd probably have noticed if they nicked my textbook...)

Fri Oct 10: Lo! and Behold! Don't judge all students by the scummy minority!! A generous student has replaced my pointer (his dad apparently gets loads of freebies from company rep's...)

Administration: Part of a lecturer's duties are a certain amount of course admin. This varies between Universities & mine seem to be one of the worst (compared to the experience of a small sample of colleagues) as lecturers are expected to

• Prepare (i.e. photocopy) duplicate copies of resit exam papers for every student,
• Man the subject-specific "clearing hotlines" in mid-August,
• Advise students of programme routes they can take based on their module failure (surely an automatable task!),

As I've moaned here before -- the Faculty's Admin Manager earns twice what I do yet admin support for lecturing staff is minimal ... as a co-worker said yesterday: We're cheaper therefore we get to do the rubbishy jobs.

Gratuitous plug -- my new module web page: Web Technologies

Musings on "viva voce": So what kind of car would a Vauxhall Viva-voce be? You're terrified of driving it, the first time you get in the journey lasts an indeterminate amount of time and the radio is stuck on one of those aggressive talk-radio programmes, shouting questions at you.

If you're lucky you reach your destination and never drive the car again. If you're unlucky the car breaks down, you have to make expensive repairs and then have to do the same journey again. For a time afterwards the car stays shiny & new but, after a while, begins to look really dated. Inexplicably you still hang on to it...

Bloody hellfire: Two (false) fire alarms yesterday! Nothing to do but hang around the car park, chatting! Note to students: Setting of the fire alarm is not a cool way to avoid lectures or exams! We still have to cover/examine the same material so it'll get squeezed in some time...

Whoop-de-doo ... 2 weeks until teaching starts and we finally get our teaching schedules (i.e. find out what new material we'll be teaching this term!) No criticism intended of the beleaguered chap in charge of timetabling (exacerbated this year by losing one good lecturer and gaining 2 unknowns), I'd have to lay that one at the door of "admin" (my hobby horse, obv.) Quicker processing of student numbers & streamlined timetabling would all help! (Oh please³ don't ever give me the timetabling job!)

My "Web Technologies" class last year had ~120 students. This year it's (LOL - estimated!) to be more than 200. Ho-hum. Last year one or more pieces of weekly work from ~50% of the class had, shall we say, suspicious similarities? This year I need to redesign the exercises to (a) make it easier to assess (2 weeks solid marking with 120 scales up to 3 weeks this year if I'm not careful! Helluva way to spend Christmas ;-}  ) and (b) help the darlin's avoid the temptation of working too closely together <grin>

Nice Blog from a Norwegian lecturer: jill/txt -- her educational category makes for interesting reading!

Chaos today! A resit CBT was scheduled to run in a lab with 56 seats -- no worries, I thought, only ~40 students will be taking it. Booking the room through official channels seemed like a good way to ensure the room is available (natch?) but , oh no, that would be too easy! The room is being refurbished (no-one was told) and the largest available room seats 36, with 2 broken PCs (34 working seats). 38 students turn up so one starts off doing the test on paper whilst standing up! And another wants to come back 30 minutes later for a free PC ... meaning I'll be there for longer than anticipated just because there is no "joined-up thinking" in the University admin. :-(

Further admin-derived chaos: The letters telling 13 students they had to do a CBT and a coursework didn't go out complete ... they tell me the day before the test that the coursework was OK, the test notices never went out! So I have to waste time phoning these poor souls, some of whom had heard through various channels that there was a test, to cancel the test so as not to disadvantage any of them! Not to mention the hours I spent designing the damn CBT in the first place!

Irony: The Faculty Admin Manager earns £50k+ (a bit less then double a lecturer's salary) and was "promoted from within" ... which is the usual fate for management-types who can't seem to cope in lesser positions in this University! Moral: Don't have standards, be crap at your job, rubber-stamp the students through as the University will do its damnedest to make assessing them correctly bloody difficult!

Email from a student this morning (NHBCTPTG):

Title: hey sir
Body Hey i think you have forgotten to give the password for the resit material. I was wondering it email me the password. You email me on <hotmail address>

My reply was measured and politely suggested that the student was a rude, thoughtless idiot for committing this offence against the primary tongue of this country ;-)

Moral: Email is a very convenient communication tool but it's easy to come across as a thoughtless idiot who couldn't be bothered to put any effort into the message! Put some effort in and you're much more likely to get some effort out.

In case you don't understand how to write a decent email or even can't see what the problem is, here are some links to pages discussing "netiquette": our-kids.org, From Kass Johns -- scroll down a bit!, George Dillon and a Google search.

Argh!

Student

I don't like programming. Can I change from my COBM degree to the BIT course?

Lecturer

Check the course description -- BIT contains more formal programming than COBM and you don't like programming! (D'oh!)

Moral

Look up relevant information before wasting lecturer's time asking stupid questions!

(This student phoned me after failing to pass his level 1 modules!)

Gotta get me one of these <grin> Mangonel LART!

It's not an urban legend ... someone really did blow up a whale!

Aha! A good idea wwww.kingstonexchange.co.uk -- a site for buying/selling stuff (e.g. text books!) in the Kingston area ... something I'd thought of setting up before but Never Got Round To™ -- watch that page to see if it gets off the ground (it's just an Apache default server at present!)

Beginning of the silly season: Undergraduate results came out 3 weeks ago so you can guarantee that these days the students who come asking "What are my results?" are not the bright bunnies who cared sufficiently about their results to not take holiday during this critical period! Of course, now that the "bright bunny rush" is over, all the people whose responsibility it is to give out results have taken leave!! So the "not-so-bright bunnies" are left wandering the corridoors, howling mournfully at the empty offices and asking dumb questions of those of us (dumb enough?) not to be on holiday!!!

However it doesn't help that despite the lecturers being asked to submit resit coursework/exam scripts last week the students won't receive their letters from the University until 2 weeks later (and don't get me started on why it's necessary for lecturers to photocopy the scripts for each and every resitting student! Grrrr....)

So feel sorry for the unfortunate "not-completely-dumb bunny" cohort -- those students who failed, took holiday and now are desperate to find out whether or not they have to revise over the summer will have to wait for their letters detailing their resit tasks, which they'll receive barely 3 weeks before the resit exams are due to be held! Not a fun summer for those that fail their modules...

(And why, you may ask, is it just the beginning? Because the A-Level results come out in less than 3 weeks and then it'll be "all hands on deck!" to man the "clearing hotlines" (aka the dredgelines because "it's student numbers, not quality, that counts"!)

This'll give you a headache!

Ah joy! A student I offered a simple programming/web design task to do over the summer for cash has finally made up his mind, dropped-out due to a lack of confidence in his abilities and decided to get a 'real' job ... perhaps we should have a module on "Self belief" for final year students?! Now I have to find another person to do the work as the University will not allow me to spend the money on either buying myself out of some teaching or employing anyone other than someone at the University! Weird...

Criminy! what a fascinating page <grin>

What's an ignoranus?!

Each year the Washington Post's Style Invitational asks readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing only one letter and supply a new definition. Here are the 2002 winners:

Intaxication

Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

Reintarnation

Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Foreploy

Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

Giraffiti

Vandalism painted very, very high.

Sarchasm

The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

Inoculatte

To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Hipatitis

Terminal coolness.

Osteopornosis

A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit).

Karmageddon

It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

Glibido

All talk and no action.

Dopeer Effect

The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

And, the winner ... Ignoranus

A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Fun: Analogy of the Day (AOTD).

Another support "EMWIDL":

Ever since we were SQL Slammered our central computing support service has been planning to implement a firewall that blocks everything by default. First raised in March, its implementation slipped so much that we began to ignore it ... until last Thursday when, with no warning, the wall was raised and (surprise!) many things that used to work, ceased.

That's only to be expected, you might think ... however they left the task of determining who was responsible for updating the firewall (opening the odd necessary port here and there...) until a meeting a week later! So our MSc student is sans web access from the server on which his web crawler was supposedly running, our school web server was inaccessible from outside, video-conferencing does not work, etc...

Oh yes, and yesterday (before the meeting that should have happened 2 weeks ago) they began advertising for a Business Project Manager whose job it will be to manage these processes ... Talk about building the stable after the horse has been sold for dog meat!

Student stupidity or lack of respect for lecturer's abilities? Scenario: Student A claims he submitted his work by email. Shows evidence of email to wrong lecturer ... OK, given benefit of the doubt we look for the work and lo! buried within an otherwise inoccuous piece of Java, littered as it should be with Student A's ID number, is the ID of a different student! Student A's response "Yeah we worked together but it's my own work really!" <groan>

The real problem is that in a fit of litigation-driven paranoia the University rules on plagiarism are so beurocratic and proscriptive that it takes a significant amount of effort on the part of several (senior) members of staff to penalise just one student -- they're (obviously?!) reluctant to do this for (a) 1st years [Unofficial policy: Keep them here! Don't fail them!] (b) 'minor' offences [such as plagiarising some Java programming worth 45% of a whole module?!]

Moral: It's not just the students who lack respect for lecturer's talents -- it's the University too!

Our "Computing Support" (EMWIDL) did some server maintenance last night and lo! this morning the home servers for staff and students are broken ... no login, no email, just web access (yay!) So, does anyone else think that the end of term, when all the years' results are being compiled and serious research is being attempted, is not the best time of year to be doing maintenance that might result in almost total system failure?! Hmmm...
Update: It turns out that the problems were an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances -- faulty network cabling (supposedly "tested" post-install) and a surprising number of dead "backup" switches! All-in-all the support people did well fixing the problems in less than 4 hours ;-)
[To the tune of the "Hornpipe" / "Drunken sailor"]

What shall we do with a working system?

What shall we do with a happy network?

What shall we do to support the users

... early in the morning?

 

Move the filesystems:

No-one'll notice!

Shift around the servers:

Nothing'll happen!

Plug in the fibre:

Nothing's working!

... early in the morning.

 

Oh look, the network's crashing!

Oh dear, the server's dying!

Oh no, I'm out of cables!

... early in the morning!

 

Now, what shall we do with a broken network?

What shall we do with crashing servers?

What shall we do with locked-out users?

... early in the morning.

 

Fix it bloody quick before the staff go mental!

Mend it really fast before meltdown happens!

Sort it out now or they'll send in the heavies

... early in the morning.

 

Ah well, there's no come-back!

Oh good, no-one's responsible!

Ha ha! Management don't care!

... because the buck never stops!

Frustrated ;->

Today's Garfield on Yahoo! seemed appropriate:

A new low in student respect & intelligence: via our digital submission tool a file was submitted last night 5 days after the initial deadline. 20% per day penalty was advertised, so why bother?! The file was submitted by a certain student (let's call him "Dumbo") with a typed description labeling the file as having come from him. However the file itself was named with a different student's ID number (for the sake of argument, call him "Mother"). The file contains Mother's work and is identical to the file that Mother submitted 2 weeks ago! So the questions that immediately come to mind are:

1. Is Dumbo taking the piss?
2. Or is Dumbo so worryingly stupid that he thinks this is a good way to get some easy marks?!
3. And, how did Dumbo get hold of Mother's work? I seriously doubt that Dumbo's bright enough to hack into our system but dumb enough not to rename the file!

It makes one want to ask Dumbo very politely to cross the road in front of busy traffic, just to see if he will...

Shock! Horror! Final year student plagiarises dissertation ... no, it's not a just another Sun headline, it's real and we found the plagiarised work today (following a quick Google search.) Now to find that heavy book... Ready, aim, fire:- welcome to your academic misconduct tribunal!

Update: Not one, not two, but three plagiarised projects this year -- one swiped wholesale from the Internet <sigh>

Yesterday: Started with me upgrading the memory on a Sun server (why me? because I'm the only one in the School willing to do it and IT support don't), running around like a BAF to check on the 3 postgrads running my computer-assessed in-class tests for 200 students and shepherding our School seminar speaker from another institution (again, why me? not quick enough at stepping backwards in the intial line-up!) Insufficient coffee, many students giving increasingly pathetic excuses about why they missed their tests meant it was a crap day. Excuses:

• Dead uncle
• Dead family friend
• Car broken down on the way in (two incidents thereof)
• Sprained ankle playing football the day before
• Surgery -- signed-off for 2 weeks
• Flu
• Court appearance (another two incidents ... worrying!)
• Car accident
• Mental health
• Nose bleeds (seriously! Signed-off and everything!!)

Argh! More morons: 1st year Java assignment deadline 2 weeks away (worth 45%) and still people have either not started (indicated by them asking questions on our discussion boards like "What do I need to know to do the assignment?") or cannot comprehend how to go about logically constructing a program (questions like "The substring method returns 2 parameters [wrong!] how do I use it?" -- RTFT), despite the assignment having step-by-step instructions in words of 2 syllables or less.

Ah well, at least we can fail them and force them to retake the module ... Whoops! I forgot, Government targets and QAA reviews mean we can't fail them .. it's not their fault they can't program, it's our fault (even if they have a poorer attendance record than Lord Lucan, don't complete assignments and refuse to work through the course exercises!)

For a brief laugh, why not try typing 'French Military Victories' into Google and then selecting the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button <grin>

"Educational Technology Unit" EMWIDL -- people responsible for the use (and misuse) of educational technology, such as a Virtual Learning Environment which has an online surveying/testing capability. So why, when these people want to survey students do they revert to good old-fashioned paper-based forms?!

It's Easter vacation, final year students are writing-up their dissertations (1/4 of a year's work) which are due in 2 weeks! You might think it would already be done, but that would be lacking the proper level of cynicism: Time-management is not learned, it is absorbed by a painful process of failure, resolve, failure, renewal of faith, failure, despair, failure, resignation leading to more realistic expectations, success, foolish development of optimism followed soon by yet another failure, and so-on...