Annoyances

Emerging Patterns

I cannot believe it! The &%#â?¬&%â?¬#&%â?¬#&%â?¬ web has been down since Friday. Once again proving that the technical support seems to be close to useless. Thus far in January the web has been down 20% of the time. Do we pay this people? If so – WHY? I would probably have a better level of service with blogger but what &%&#â?¬ would I do with my non-blog stuff.

Sorry about venting my frustration like this but I am incapable of understanding what the technical bods seem to be thinking about when they turn of the web before going off home for the weekend.

BAH!

Posted on by mklang

Finally online again!

The #%&â?¬ system has been down for the second time in a week. I think that any place that calls itself an IT university should be able to do much, much, much better. It’s not that I expect constant perfection but it would be nice if the level of access to our website was improved significantly.

Posted on by mklang

Travel Tales

Don’t get me wrong. It is a privilege and an adventure to be able to travel. But it is also – occasionally – a real pain. Things like lost bags, missed connections, annoying people, sad food etc have a tendency to bring even the most positive of travelers down. My trip to Belgium has been an easy and comfortable one for me but all around me there were less happy people.

It began early when disembarking I noticed a bag which had been dropped

Someone’s toothbrush will not be following them home. Despite this my bag was not lost so I moved happily along. The hotel was nice, friendly and clean but the wifi was a bit too flakey so most of the time I either had difficulties or was unable to go online.

Travel has been made even more annoying with the new rules at the security check. Actually it is not too difficult but strangely enough too many people have not yet understood that if they do not attempt to have metal items on them – it makes you wonder whether people enjoy being fondled by security.

Just after the security I saw this wonderful sign in a window. What do you think? Is it a recruitment campaign or simply a way of adding insult to the security insult of not being able to carry liquids?

I think its Belgian humor…

Posted on by mklang

Online Again

It is almost embarrassing to admit that the faculty I work for is called the IT University. Not only is this a silly name but the technical support is terrible. As you may have noticed this blog has been unavailable for three days (so was the rest of the ITU web).

Three days without internet presence is not the end of the world it may not even be important at all – even if I am annoyed. But we do pay an awful lot of money for IT support and our website tends to disappear on a regular basis. Mainly on weekends – actually it is only more visible on weekends as the technical support are off work and therefore the error remains.
Well at least you were spared the typical New Years posting…

Posted on by mklang

The Sting, or why suckers happily pay

Much of the visible focus of the Free Software vs Proprietary Software discussion revolves around products such as the browser, or the operating system. But what really gets me depressed is the fact that my own faculty has chosen to use proprietary software (the Norwegian Fronter) as their course management system. The best thing is that none of the teachers are particularly happy with this choice. But I doubt that anyone is ever happy about software.

But the fact that we have chosen proprietary software which we cannot develop (even if we wanted to) increases the sense of: â??No, no please let us pay for the privilege of being unhappy with software we cannot improve.â??

UPDATE: The system our faculty uses is the Open Source system called Fronter. The fact is that we have the legal technical ability to make changes to the system. The faculty have contributed in the past (Thank you, Aleksander!). The lack of understanding about this among the teachers (me included) can only be seen as a lack of internal communication.

Just to make sure that I maintain that unhappy feeling â?? UCLA have decided to rub salt into my wound. The UCLA have decided to adopt the Moodle as their sole course management system. Moodle is licensed under the GNU General Public License and is under active development in collaboration by universities all over the world.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.

If my own department is too dumb to see the merits of this argument then what hope is there for Free Software? People seem to want to be part of the P. T. Barnum worldview “There’s a sucker born every minute…and two to take ’em.” But why do I have to work with the ones who want to be conned and pay happily for the privilege?

The misleading title of this post may suggest that I have an answer to this question beyond human stupidity. But I don’t – or maybe I am just tired and cranky?

Posted on by mklang

RTFM

Nobody wants to read a manual. Most of them are written by people with decidedly odd senses of humor since they seem to skip over a small detail which makes most processes impossible to complete. It’s kind of like cooking recipes  which demand that you have  a tablespoon of port wine at home. Simply annoying.

My favorite kind of manuals are the ones which spend an enormous amount of space describing the blatantly obvious such as “this is the screen” or “plug in the electricity” or “insert batteries” but then when it gets to the stuff which is specific (and complex) for the new machine the instructions get very vague.

Posted on by mklang

Enough already

OK – enough already! I am a patient man but now I have had enough of rain. I no longer want to be damp after going anywhere around town. Since my main mode of transportation is my bike this is really enough. Who do I turn to to register a formal complaint?

As it’s soon Christmas some snow would be nice too…

Posted on by mklang

Worst Phisher Award

Found a phising attempt lying in my inbox – it was so bad that I almost feel like contacting them with some helpful pointers.

Käre användare

VÃ¥r bank följer regelbundet senaste prestatinerna inom kampen mot nätbedrägeri och vidtar förebyggande Ã¥tgärder i syftet att nÃ¥ det bästa möjliga kundskyddet mot nätövergrepp. FrÃ¥n och med i morgon  ska systemet av kundkontoÃ¥tkomst genomgÃ¥ till koderingen med flytande punkt. Det innebär att Ditt lösenord och användarnamn inte ska förändras, men ska skrivas annorlunda inom systemet. Det enda villkoret – Du behöver att skriva den ursprungliga nyckeln som ska generera koderingen vidare. För detta behöver Du att trycka pÃ¥ länken i det här brevet och fylla i tillgÃ¥ngskoden och ID i motsvarande fälten. EfterÃ¥t kan Du avsluta kontooperationen.

Tack för stödet, vi ser fram emot ett gynnsamt samarbete

Besides the bad spelling, grammer and vocabulary the email was dated 13 September 2002 – I mean seriously… If you are trying to behave like a bank then maybe you should try a bit harder…

Posted on by mklang

Oh, please!

On the train traveling back from Stockholm I spent the time watching the Da Vinci Code (extended version no less). I must stay this â?? what a load of bull. OK so I did not expect much but the film could have been much better. It was long and boring and contained silly representations of everything from bankers to technology, from monks to academics.

The one highlight in the film was the quote: I have to get to a library â?? fast.

This must be one of the sillier film quotes I have heard in a long time…

Posted on by mklang

Not annoyed

On Tuesday I wrote about being annoyed with a publisher. My annoyance concerned a chapter I had written for the book called Värdet av Förtroende (The Value of Trust) which has just been published. The reason for my annoyance was that I wanted to include a Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin’s father convinces Calvin that light bulbs work by magic. The point was to show that trust in authority is not always justified.

The publishers would not let me include the strip. First they stated that permission was too complicated to get. This was not a good excuse since I had already obtained permission (and payed for the privilege). Then they stated that the strip could not be published for technical reasons. This was silly but I realised that I would have to accept defeat even if my editor struggled hard on my behalf.

Today I received two copies of the book and imagine my surprise when, there on page 217 was my strip. So all that is left is for me not to be annoyed any more – how annoying!

Posted on by mklang