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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 17 March 2005 (Day View)

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17.03.2005 – Thursday 17 March – Managers Suck Day

• Today is CSSE3004 day, which, as a rough translation, says today is bad. I was there ready to argue with the lecturers, and even sat down the front for that purpose, but they managed to temporarily disarm me by anonymously reading out an mail, as an example of how not to write, and presumably to send a clear warning to others that we should “write professionally”. Darren read the entire email, emphasising spelling and grammatical mistakes – basically ridiculing the author, who I happen to know. I’d be seriously complaining to the faculty if it were I, because while it may have been read anonymously, it was still a public humiliation to the person in question, and I, for one, knew who it was. After this, they read parts of my email, and answered the questions I’d asked for the rest of the class, which nearly made up for the brusque way they’d replied to it earlier. I, and a few others, then asked several questions, and got answers for them (although I had to ask the same question twice and even had to ask two of them three times, and one a fourth time during the tutorial, before I got an answer that made sense – these people really are that bad). Since they’d answered my questions, I figured that perhaps they weren’t as bad as I’d originally thought, although I’d suspect that reading out the initial email in the way they did would be grounds for dismissal, or at least a public apology, if the author made enough of an issue out of it.
  Once I got to the tutorial, however, I was reminded of why I dislike these people – the tutorial answers are not available online, and we are prohibited from copying them in any form other than off the overhead projector by pencil, which is going to make it hard for people like myself to study tutorial answers prior to exams. I went and saw Ken and complained, but he said he wouldn’t consider changing that policy at this time, and that the idea is to force people to study the tutorials before the tute. While I can understand the logic, I would rather study the correct and official answers for my exam, rather than my quite possibly faulty interpretation. The tutorials aren’t assessable, so there’s nothing I can actually validly complain about, as there’s no policy governing the provision of non-assessable material – but I am back to disliking this crew again.

Night

• I visited Clint for a short while after work, before heading home, where I didn’t arrive until after midnight due to St. Patrick’s Day and the hordes of insane that use this as an excuse to get drunk and do things they’ll regret come tomorrow. Once home I discovered that my journal has problems if an update is done without sufficient disk space to contain the update, truncating output files. This shouldn’t normally be a problem, but the XSLT processor that reads the output XML has a heart attack when it finds invalid mark-up and dies, so I spent half the night messing around adding better error handlers.

Comment by joseph – Sunday 20 March 2005, 6:33 PM

  hey bro,
  i was in that lecture too. what questions did you ask 3 times? i know one was asked three times, but i cant remember what it was ...
  ta mate ... as you can probably guess ... im currently writing mmy business case now ...
  cheers

Comment by Ned – Sunday 20 March 2005, 8:14 PM

  I don’t remember, but I asked some personally during the middle of the two-hour lecture, and again during the following tutorial.