Nature's Way...

Today I had to reboot Vista. Not something I do very often, or by choice, but I'd just installed some new software and it needed a reboot, so off we went.

On the way back it did a checkdisk. Something about broken chains somewhere. I'd not seen this message before, but I figured out it might be nature's way of saying it was time to take a backup. I fired up the Backup and Restore centre in Vista and two clicks and two hours later I'm the proud possessor of a bunch of files on my network storage device which will probably allow me to reconstruct my life should my laptop disk decide to tip over. The next thing I'm going to do, of course, is pick a file or two at random and try to restore them from the backup. When this works I can relax.

I remember a horror story from the back in the mists of time where a system manager (not me) had a hard disk crash. He was feeling quite relaxed about this, as he loaded up his backup tapes. Ten minutes later he was feeling less relaxed, when he found that his backup command saved the directory structure, but not the files. He hadn't thought to check that he could actually get anything off the tapes that he had been carefully creating and saving for years.....

Blossom

I love this time of year. The blossom is out down our street.

Vanilla?

Strawberry?

So Many Questions....

I'm trying out something new with the First Year students. I hope they don't mind. Around this time of year thoughts turn to examinations, and I usually set up some quizzes to help the revision process.

This year I'm doing things a little differently. Rather than a set of complicated questions that take ages to work out and answer, I'm setting around 50 or so snappy "true or false" ones. The idea is that you don't have to figure out which is the odd one out, or what the question is gunning for, you just have to agree or disagree with the statement.

I'm going to send out the marked papers after the weekend and invite everyone to have a look at their answers and the right ones, and then at the end of next week I'll run a revision lecture to follow up on the whole thing.

It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

In one ear....

Put your headphones on and listen to this.

Amazing.

Games and Wires

Today we had a meeting where we are setting up a pilot project to let our students run a games server on campus. Previously this has been a fraught business, with concern about bandwidth use and system management from all sides. However, after an enlightened decision from the university Computer Users Group we are now opening up some bandwidth monitored ports onto the student cluster in freeside.

This could be fun...