April 2005 - Posts

A case of the sniffles

Posted Wednesday, April 13, 2005 7:59 PM by acarpenter
I seem to have come down with a cold.. or as some men would call it.. flu (or chicken flu, SARS, or just plain old traditional "oh my god, I think I'm dying").  So my nose is all bunged up and my throat is sore.  In a warm room, the gunk inside my head melts and starts to dribble down my face.  Sleeping is interesting, I'm sure you've all had a cold at some point so you can appreciate the game of snot-chase.  You lay on one side, you feel it all drain into one side of your head.. then you roll over and feel it draining into the other side.  OK, I think I've sufficiently grossed out most of my readers now!  Sorry.
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A quiet start to the week

Posted Wednesday, April 13, 2005 7:58 PM by acarpenter

The first few days of the students being back has been mostly uneventful.  We sacrificed one already completely broken laptop to fix as many of the keyboards as we could, so we're back up to (almost) a full compliment of classroom laptops now.

There's now begun a big push at work to try and get lecturers to actually take responsibility for the equipment being used during their classes.  They are being encouraged at the end of the last class of the day to take the time to shut machines down, turn off projectors and air conditioning, close windows if open, draw the blinds, turn out the lights, and lock the door.  Today is only Wednesday and I can say there's been a small improvement in the four classrooms near to my office.  There's still a few staff members who need some extra encouragement, but hopefully management will be taking care of that.

Tutors borrowing the laptops for use in a classroom will now be required to sign each one out to the students, check it for damage before use, and again at the end of the class when it is returned by the student.  Hopefully we will see an improvement in discipline during these times, and that the tutors will realise that ultimately the responsibility is theirs.

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Get into the groove

Posted Friday, April 01, 2005 12:10 PM by acarpenter

We've discovered three more broken DVDROM drives, in the same room.  We were attempting to install some software from CD onto one of them, and it was working.  However, there was some noise and vibration from the drive, but we thought nothing of it.  After a while, the disc would no longer read.

After ejecting the disk, we saw why.

There's a deep groove been carved into the surface of the disc.  I haven't yet looked at the drive to see why this happened (or how they did it) but I'll be posting a picture into the Gallery shortly, if I can get a good shot.

We've ordered some more drives.

Edit: The image is now uploaded, and can be viewed by clicking below:
http://msmvps.com/azc/gallery/image/336.aspx

Edit again:  I've now used the paperclip method to open the drive, and can see what caused the groove.  I'm not sure how, but part of the tray has been sheared away, causing sharp barbs to protrude.  It could have been done with a knife, it wouldn't surprise me.  Anyway, I took a picture and put it in the gallery.  http://msmvps.com/azc/gallery/image/337.aspx

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