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!