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.)