• wake up early to go to dentist
• try to check email. Mail server dead.
• go to dentist. Get fussed at. need prescription.
• can’t contact colocation site.
• go and pick up server. likely hardware problem
• load up server at work
• go to meeting
• come back, server dead again. reboot.
• go home
• get mail. have bill from College for course I am supposed to get for free
• go and get chinese food and movie
• eat food.
• start watching movie. DVD scratched. movie can’t be played
• ::sigh::

As some of you know, I have this odd habit of keeping all the spam I get; I don’t know why. But it does let me generate some neat graphs showing the sheer quantity of spam I get. The graph linked at left will show the number of spams received per day for the year 2003.

Enjoy.

This morning we had a problem at W&M. We run a piece of software called Blackboard. It is used by professors to post assignments, have discussion boards, give online tests and many other class functions. It is very widely used. We started this semester automatically enrolling students in their Blackboard classes during active semesters. Well, according to our student system, the semester ended yesterday (by semester ending they mean classes being taught, and the School of Ed had their last classes yesterday).

So everyone got un-enrolled from their courses at 12:01 am this morning.

Oops.

I got a call from a student at about 7:30am. She was a little panicky but very polite. I told her I would handle the issue and call her back as I made progress. I had the issue resolved by 8:15. Annoying, but not that big a deal.

As the morning progressed, we found in the Blackboard support email account about 5 reports of the problem. We let them know that the situation was fixed. I assumed that was all we would hear about the situation.

Then this got forwarded to me:

  From:  [name removed]
  To: <pmvolp@wm.edu>, <wssadl@wm.edu>, <tjsull@wm.edu>
  Subject: Regarding Blackboard
  Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 01:42:12 -0500
  X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627
  Importance: Normal

  I address this message to those parties I feel might be most
concerned.

  Students access to the blackboard information for classes, which we
may have yet to complete, has been removed. I put it bluntly when I
say that this is absurd. I cannot understand how such an issue would
have been regarded with so little forethought. I do not suspect that I
will suffer as a result of this, but I must deplore this action on
behalf of those students who might. Please forgive any rudeness on my
part, I am not one to generally express displeasure with such angry
words, but a very dear friend of mine, already stressed to her limits
after several consecutive exams, cried from sheer frustration when she
found this to be the case, and I cannot bear to watch others suffer.

   At best, this was an innocent mistake, perhaps one of the many
consequences of Isabel. I cannot help but think, though, that such a
thing does not happen accidentally. Perhaps the more severe
consequences of removal of access may not have been considered, in
which case, I remain curious as to how such an issue could be ignored.
However, if the consequences were considered and this was decided to
be a rational course of action, then I am shocked. Though it may be
too late, all steps to correct this should be taken. I must say, that
be it by choice or by accident, I am disappointed in this esteemed
institution.

  [name removed]

Now, let us examine who this dipshit sent the email to:

pmvolp@wm.edu - Patricia M Volp, Dean of Students

wssadl@wm.edu - Samuel Sadler, Vice President for Student Affairs

tjsull@wm.edu - Timothy J Sullivan, President

And before getting to me, it was forwarded through:

krcott@wm.edu - Karen R Cottrell, Associate Provost for Enrollment

csbogg@wm.edu - Carolyn S Boggs, University Registrar

pgfeis@wm.edu - Geoff Feiss, Provost

Now, the person you may not notice in that list is the Associate Provost for Information technology. You would think he would be the person this irate student should have contacted, or maybe even the Technology Support Center to see about getting the problem actually fixed. But no.

Let’s not forget that the message was sent at 1:42am. I’m sure President Sullivan is sitting at his computer 24 hours a day to deal with things like this. And he uses Outlook. No comment. Probably a business major; or Political Science

::sigh::

Maybe 6 months back, one of my coworkers, Roger, asked me if I wanted two NeXT Cubes he had been given several years back that were just taking up space. I of course said yes and became the owner of 2 Cube chassises, 4 system boards, two monitors, and a NeXT laser printer. I played with them a little when I first got them, but didn’t do much.

This morning I finally got to work on them.

I started with one working bootable system. Openstep has an interesting property that you can install the OS onto another hard drive as long as you have a working system, you do not need install media (although I do have the install CD). I pulled out an external 4GB SCSI drive I had and after much noodling was able to get it attached and recognized by the Cube.

Why use a new drive? Good question; I wish I had a tape recorder. The drive that is in the Cube is the newest of the three drives I got with the machines. It is a 3.5 inch half height 1GB drive (as opposed to the other 2 non-functional 300MB full height 5.25 inch drives). But even though it is “newer” it is still old and the bearings sound like they have sand in them and can be heard half the house away. I doubt that drive has much life left in it.

Once I had the system installed on the new drive, I detached the old drive and began to play. So far I am attached to my network, and am able to browse the web.

Pretty cool for a computer nearly 14 years old.

During my nighttime contemplation time (2-4am), a realization occurred to me. My neighbors must be afraid of the dark. Or maybe bizarre initiates in the church of illuminating the night. A strange sect that embraces the modern technology of 200 watt halogen lamps to drive away the heathen demons of the night.

I on the other hand am being persecuted for my belief that it should be dark at night. Lighting the dark when performing task is perfectly acceptable, but I seriously doubt the 5 houses around ours all had people performing yard-work at 3am. So I sat in bed and looked angrily at the shadows that are being cast all through the room from my dark-fearing neighbors contemplating how likely I would be to hit the bulbs if I owned a bb gun.

Bah.

I read Slashdot, as do most of you, but the comments on the system rarely rise above the general 13 year old geek “my blip is bigger than your blip.”

But Occasionally you come accross a great comment. This is from an article on Apple selling a million songs from the iTunes Music Store in 3.5 days.

The good publicity Apple’s sure to get from this would almost make it worth their while to buy those songs themselves…

…hmm… wait a minute…

No, sorry, my bad. It wasn’t Apple. It was me. I admit it. I was the one who bought those songs. I just wanted to see if their servers could withstand a vicious one-man slashdotting…

It can - apparently the iTunes server’s not running Windows. But I’ll try again tonight, this time with my friend Chris buying the same songs simultaneously. Then I’ll get Greg and Dave to help me buy whole albums at a time, and pretty soon, Steve Jobs will crumble in terror and BEG us to stop our vicious assault on their site!

Steve Jobs, I warned you - I’ve got my VISA, and I’m ready to take. you. down.

You didn’t care when I started buying iPod after iPod in an attempt to exhaust your assembly line workers in a one-man iPod Slashdotting. Well this is different. This time, I’m serious and I’ve upped my VISA limits. Your site is toast. Get ready to rumble!

I am now on the train somewhere above Ashland. I am connected to the internet at a blazing 14.4K. I am posting to my blog. I love technology. I have not been ablr to connect to any wireless networks yet, but I am trying. Why? because I can.

September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Arrr!

So I mentioned yesterday that we had a drawing for 2 iPods for the OAs as part of the Fall Startup process. I forgot to mention that we also had 2 iPods that were being drawn for staff who volunteered to work the weekend as well. Basically, the earlier you volunteered, the more tickets you got.

We held the drawing earlier this week. The 2 iPods went to students. In addition, 3 of the 5 gift certificates went to student workers as well.

This morning, I got an IM letting me know that one of the students who won one of the iPods felt he didn’t deserve to get it as he only worked 3 hours on one of the two days. Don’t ever say that William and Mary doesn’t have honorable students. So an impromptu redrawing was held with the staff names.

I won. :)

P.S. No, I was not present at the drawing, and no, I didn’t pay off the student or anyone who participated in the drawing.

Really, I’m not. The last month has just been very busy. I will try to give a brief roundup. My birthday and associated presents was great. I got lots of cool music and books (and some yummy candy). In addition to the ones I mentioned in a previous post, I got a new copy of 1984, Invisible Frontiers, Altered Carbon, Ambient, What Einstein told his Cook, and Stop Making Sense. I am probably half way through reading things at this point. I also bought myself Thievery Corporation’s The Richest Man in Babylon. which is the group that played on the final night at the ACLU membership conference. Good stuff.

On the work front, the students are back. A coworker and I were in charge of running this years Fall Startup project. This involves organizing the process by which we get all of the freshman connected to the network. William and Mary has never done this twice the same, but I think we ran a system this year that will be the model for future years. We had wonderful cooperation from all of the OAs and things went quite smoothly. IT set up appointments with each team of OAs over the weekend following the friday of freshman move-in. At the appointed time, the OA would make sure all of their students were in their hall, and a team of IT folks would show up (in their stylish black t-shirts designed by moi) and make sure everyone was set up. The best part was we gave the OAs information on how to get their students connected prior to when we showed up and many of the halls had greater than 90% of their students hooked up before we even showed up. And to give them a small incentive, the more students they had hooked up, the greater their chances were to win 1 of 2 Apple iPods. Everyone was happy (and tired).

And with the arrival of the students is the start of classes. I am taking another graduate CS class, Network Systems and Design. It has been interesting, if not exactly educational yet. The professor is 3 years older than I am, which adds an odd dynamic to his perspective. I was looking forward to having the class be a combined undergraduate/graduate course, but with the exception of one undergrad I know, I no longer have that opinion. The undergraduates are generally annoying and I would much have preferred just having myself and the other 8 grad students than have 8 graduate students plus 40 undergrads.

The shelves! They are getting closer to completion. We are putting the finish coats of paint on now. It is a nice gloss white. All of the woodworking has been completed. But the painting is a slow process.

That is all I can think of for now.