Schinckel.net

I think I can say that, since I used to be one.

I guess having been a teacher means I know how to spot when one isn’t really prepared, or doing their job properly, or just plain incapable.

I’ve got some teachers, both lecturers and tutors, who I don’t really have much time for.

There are a few things I really dislike. The first is obnoxiousness. I have one lecturer who is not only obnoxious, but also boring. He can spend a whole lecture teaching a tiny amount of content, and perhaps this is why he is so boring. He is also dry, and does not use examples to elaborate particularly well. His worst trait is probably the questions he asks. It is never clear whether a particular question is a rhetorical question or not. Finally, he seems to think that it is acceptable to just discard all negative feedback that he receives, as it is “probably invalid”, or the person “just has a grudge”. Never mind that you are just a crap teacher.

The next thing I dislike is when someone is teaching something they don’t really know that well. This is definitely a place I have been, having to teach stuff I didn’t really know about. I have one tutor who as much as said several times there were things he didn’t understand. I’m paying good money to go to Uni, I don’t want to waste that, or my time. At one stage, when I knew I was right about something, and he wasn’t really listening to what I was saying, I basically gave up and let him continue. I know (that with a ternary relationship total participation isn’t automatically implied), and I think now that the rest of the class thinks that it is.

My third annoyance is to do with general organisation. I hated being poorly organised when teaching, and did my best to overcome this issue. I know at times I didn’t and it really embarrassed me to be the one who was at fault. Not having work prepared ahead of schedule, not being on time, these are all things that turn off the good students, perhaps more so than the bad students!

My final gripe is about… I’ve forgotten what I was going to write next.

Last night, after Uni, I went to the supermarket to buy a few things. BBQ chicken is always worth a couple of meals, so I thought I’d grab one of those. There was a short-ish line for the deli, so I used the whizz-bang new touchscreen system to place an order for a small BBQ chicken. It printed out a little voucher, which promised me a coffee on the day of printing only, and which I could also use to collect my goods.

There was a counter that I assumed was where you go to wait for the express-style ordering, so I went over there. A couple of minutes passed before someone asked me if I was waiting for something. I pleasantly said yes, I had ordered a BBQ chicken, and dutifully gave her the number on my voucher.

The next (fat, but that’s immaterial) girl took one look at me, and just said “we don’t have any.”

I said “Super. Does your feeder know you have gone out.” No, I really said “Well, that’s pretty silly. Your automated system should have told me there weren’t any left.”

She haughtily replied, “Yeah well, the system doesn’t work properly.”

This raises lots of questions in my mind. The system in question stands to really improve a shopping experience - it means you have to deal less with people (and let’s face it, people are dumb). It also should make things quicker, and less hassle free. Instead, I walk away vowing not only to not use the system again, but to abuse it. (Can anyone say, I just printed out 30 BBQ chicken orders, and used the vouchers to get 30 coffees I threw away out of spite?)

I hate statements that are unqualified, and therefore meaningless, with regard to statistics.

On Sunrise this morning, in the local news, they trotted out the chestnut:

“12% of people charged with drink-driving in the last two years were P-platers.”

This is totally meaningless without an indication of what percentage of the driving population are P-platers. What if it is higher than 12%? Then P-platers are actually more responsible than the rest of us…

Bah.

I don’t like doing technical support. It is just not something that I find enjoyable at all. I don’t mind fixing the occasional computer - I had a mate’s PowerBook G4 for a few days the other day, and even got a bit miffed by how frustrating that was. Long story short - it seemed like the hard drive was buggered, but after replacing that (which was very hard), I by chance removed and reinserted the RAM, which doesn’t require a complete disassembly, and it booted fine. I then spent 40 minutes fixing my sister’s laptop’s internet. Which again I didn’t mind, as I was the one who had left it set up to use a static IP address when i was working on getting an ad-hoc WiFi network going. It took 40 mins to fix something that if I had the machine in front of me (or even VNC), I probably could have fixed in 4.

One thing I will be doing at my job is some technical support for a specialist software package. I’ve listened to my boss (still sounds weird calling him that, since he’s a mate of way back) and I really don’t think it will be fun. I can already parrot a heap of the phrases he uses several times a day, and I’ll be heading out with him to do some site visits late this week or next.

Well, I’m not the person to tell that sometimes you have to do stuff you don’t really like, just to keep the money rolling in. How many years was I a teacher for again?

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Whilst trying to tag this post, I realised that I don’t have as much to rant and rave about since I am not a teacher. I’m not the angry young man I was. Still, this is as close to a rant as I am getting, so it’s going in that pile…

Short Answer: Very.

Yesterday was the first time I really got to use Vista properly. And the whole OS is crap. Stuff is not consistent across contexts, which means it is really hard to figure out what to do when. Trying to find data is troublesome, trying to find applications is even worse. It is like the whole operating system is conspiring to just leave your data all over the place so you can’t find it when you need it.

So, I had a few jobs to do for my Father-In-Law, after he had bought his new Acer laptop. I should have just refused to provide support since he didn’t buy a Mac, but I’ll let that slide. The things he needed to do were set up his HP printer/fax/scanner, which can be connected to a network wirelessly or via ethernet in addition to being USB connectable; and get his TV tuner card working properly.

The printer turned out to be a bit of an issue - the driver that it came with didn’t work with Vista, so we had to download a 160MB file, which shouldn’t be too much of a concern, but 3’s “7Mb/s” connection is closer to around dialup speeds. And I’m not talking 56k, either. We had to wait over 3 hours for this file to download. After that, it looked to be pretty easy. Except that because the 3 USB thingy was the default network route, I had to disconnect it to then get the PC to even look on the Wireless network (802.11g) to find the printer. After it was connected once it seems to work fine, although just in case I gave the printer a static IP address (or more correctly, a reserved dynamic IP address).

Getting Windows Media Centre to display TV guide data was a bit more hard work. For starters, they have totally fucked up the interface - it is really trying to do too much, and the interface just isn’t logical at all. It is “designed” so it can be used with a remote, apparently, but can still be controlled with a mouse. Except the buttons sometimes act strangely. There is a “back” button, and just next to it is one with the windows logo. But the operation of this button varies according to context. So sometimes that loads the menu up, other times it appears to work similar to the back button. And sometimes the menu that appears takes up the full screen, other times it doesn’t. Fucking crazy. Sometimes you need to double-click on a menu item to activate it, other times a single click does the trick. There are so many options on each of the menu items that you can’t see them all until you scroll through them, but when you hover over one, clicking it doesn’t activate it, it moves it to the active position, where you must click it again to activate it. Which means, using the mouse, you then need to move back and click. And sometimes there is a “more” arrow that appears over the item, and you accidentally click that instead…

If you are using a scroll mouse, things are even worse. If you use the scroller, then it scrolls, but if you then move the mouse even just a little bit, it selects the stuff under the pointer. Meaning it jumps around and makes it very hard to scroll through a large list. Scrolling also sometimes selects items outside of the active widget. For instance, I had the channel list being scanned, and if you scroll with the pointer over this, you can scroll outside of the list, and choose the buttons above and below the list box. But once you are out of it, you can’t just scroll back into the list box. Another trick I use is to scroll hard to the “end” of a list box if I know I need to choose the last item. You can’t do this, as it jumps out of the box. And then can’t get back it. And it resets the list box to display the top items anyway!

So the interface is fairly fucked. The logic of the layout also doesn’t make sense. Why should you go into “Guide” to change the channels. And I’m not talking about which guide is attached to which channel, I’m talking about which channels are active. And attempting to do anything often required going into a menu three layers deep, then going back, then going down through three other menus, and so on. Very frustrating.

The most annoying thing is that it will not use the program guide data that is broadcast with the DVB signal. You have to use an external EPG system in order to see what is on. Every station in Australia broadcasts some guide data, or will in the very near future. I use IceTV with my eyeTV, but I’m hoping at some stage not to have to any longer. $13/month is just crazy. I can buy the newspaper for $2/week with the TV guide in a less useful form. I should be able to access this data for free - it adds value to the TV signal. But Windows Media Centre will not access the broadcast signal at all. Which means if you are away from the internet for any period of time, you might not be able to see what is on TV. I love the internet and all, but having the internet shouldn’t be a requirement to be able to watch TV effectively.

I’m not saying eyeTV is perfect, but it certainly shits all over WMC. Even if it only plays TV programs.

I’ve ranted about this type of thing before, but one thing that really pisses me off is when people attempt to compress already compressed files. I love the BBC program Spooks, but because they are still showing a series that is about 3 years old in my country, I’ve been forced to download the series via slightly shady means.

So, I’ve just grabbed the first few episodes of series 6. And the joker who made the first episode decided to rar th avi file. And split it into 15MB chunks. Why would you do this? At best, it is just slightly annoying (you have to unrar the file before you can use it), at worst it means you can’t access the file. If I were unable to snarf the entire torrent, then I would not be able to unrar the file, meaning I could not view any of the video. To put that in perspective, when I grabbed a Grand Designs episode I had missed on local TV, I only got 99.3% of the file. But I can still watch it in a viewer, and I can’t even see where the data is missing. I would not be able to do this with the Spooks episode.

Luckily, the whole thing downloaded, so it isn’t a big issue. Not this time.

Well, I’ve had my last Year 10, 11 and 12 classes. That was a nice thing to have finished.

Even better was the last lot of school reports. Ever.

Now it is time to rant and rave about the reporting process(es) in schools. Or maybe that will be after I’ve finished…

Trying to read an article at school today, I was blocked by the foolish filter:

That’s right. This site is blocked because it is a Personal Page. What sort of shit is that?

Don’t ever, ever, pop up a dialog box notifying that the update server could not be reached on an automatic update.

Perian decoders, when installed, keep trying every couple of minutes (if the pref is selected) to reach the update server and see if the version that is running is the current one. Now, I am without ’net at the moment, since I’ve gone over quota at work, and I keep getting dialog boxes saying that the update server cannot be reached.

Now, I wouldn’t mind having automatic updates, but since I am not always connected to the ’net, I can’t have them on. As the repeated dialog boxes are driving me mental.

I used to be a big fan of “the right protocol for the right job” - meaning that HTTP was just right for Hypertext documents, and FTP is what you need for transferring files. That’s what they are designed for, right.

Well, that was before I was behind a draconian firewall that only allows out HTTP and HTTPS.

So now, I can’t download a driver for a C2100 Fuji Xerox DocuPrint printer, which I need to use for work, because they only offer the file over FTP. And because it is a system-wide block, I can’t even get my local sysadmin to allow the transfer.

Stupid management.