There are freethinkers frolicking over at Daniel Morgan's place.
If you've been wondering where the heck I've been, it's been one of those days. I had to drive #2 Son to Minneapolis to catch his bus back to Madison—it's the end of his spring break—and then I had to wrestle with that ugly bloatware called WebCT Vista to take care of stuff my students find important (grades, that kind of thing) for my class. I'm feeling surly and tired, but have no fear: I'll bounce back soon.
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My life isn't easing up just yet as we wend our way to the imminent end of the term. I'm going to be flitting about over the next few days.
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Monday, Wednesday,…
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It's the end of another teaching week. My mom has left town. My head is filled with mucous. And my motivation to do anything substantive has entirely left the building. It's taking a huge amount of effort just to write this blog post. I blame the cold, but I also blame being burnt out by the pace…
I feel your WebCT pain. For students AND teachers, it's a poorly written piece of crap with a user interface that must have been developed by a bunch of sadists with poor eyesight.
And this new "Vista" upgrade...jebus. It's horrible, cluttered, confusing.
All I want it for is as a secure place to post student grades. Wading through piles of small fonts and annoying pop-up windows and "checks" just irritates the heck out of me.
Why I don't know, but the phrase "... drive #2 Son to Minneapolis ..." conjured up visions of an old west cattle drive with #2 Son standing in for the cattle.
I'm now trying to suppress flashbacks from Blazing Saddles.
I guess the winter's been way too long here in the Great White North.
Something that I'm encountering quite a bit is that pop-up blockers are really hurting applications which make use of pop-ups. I spent an hour wrestling with a remote file access application in Firefox, only to find out that it worked in IE. The application was presenting things in pop-up windows. Firefox blocked them, and gave no indication; IE blocked them, but gave an indicator, and allowed the manual option of downloading the files.
It was chiefly strange for the fact that Firefox didn't perform as well as IE; but it was a real PITA.
That's odd, Firefox always notifies me when it suppresses a popup (and I can right-click the notice for various options, including allowing that popup, allowing all popups from the site, and "Don't show this notice anymore").
Maybe a configuration issue?
I was looking for an open thread, but this one will do. If the freethinkers are frolicking, perhaps they'd like to order some takeout food? The most normal thing on this menu is the roasted squid: fractured English in Chinese menu. (The comments range from "this is racist" to explanations of how the mis-translations came about.) And I thought it was funny to find a plastic bag labelled "Keep away from babies and chicken."