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!!)