The Grey Literature – Page 21 – The Grey Literature

Important people I saw at Québec City

While I was in Québec City, my path crossed two important people. The first and most important was of course Bonhomme de Neige himself. I nearly missed him, but I happened to arrive just as he was leaving, so that I could snap about a dozen shots of him, paparazzi-style.

Later that day, while I was walking along a road between the Plains of Abraham and the Carnaval, I saw a big SUV drive past me, and I noticed that it had a blue flag with a royal symbol on it.

I remarked that I thought that it was a royal standard on the car that passed, but my friend told me that we would have heard if the Queen was coming. After the first car came a couple other RCMP cars.

The Governor General of Canada, David Johnston

When the car stopped, out jumped David Johnston, the Governor General of Canada. Apparently he had come to visit Québec City. And he passed within two metres of me!

So, I ran up and took a half dozen photos of him, paparazzi-style, since that seemed to be the thing to do that day.

Carnaval d’Hiver!

This weekend, I went to Québec City to see the Carnaval d’Hiver, starring Bonhomme. I have a lot of photos and things to talk about, so I’m spacing it out over the next few days. To start off with, I’m going to post a bunch of photos of sculptures and things I saw.

The lights in the carousel tent changed all the time, so it was very difficult to get any good photos, but I’m reasonably happy with the way this one turned out. The whole tent was full of ice sculptures of different games—chess, monopoly, etc. I wonder if it’s harder to sculpt in snow or in ice. I imagine that it would be easier to make a silly mistake in the snow, but that ice is less forgiving.

By the way, carousels are creepy.

These are just a few of my favourite things that I saw at the Carnaval d’Hiver. There were lots of other really good ones, but these turned out to be the most photogenic.

The creepy spider is wonderful. I love the eyes on the front, and the way that the light comes from behind it.

I wonder where these people get their ideas for what they will make out of their chunk of snow, and by what means the chunk of snow is delivered there.

The apple with the mouth won the prize for everything, I think. Seriously. There were about a half dozen awards at that one.

It’s really quite well done. I wonder if it’s supposed to represent anything besides just an apple with a mouth. I have no idea how a person would sculpt the inside of the mouth like that. Maybe they did the top of the mouth first so that they could sit on what would become the tongue, and then later went back to fix it. The snow must be very well-packed for it to allow for this sort of thing.

I also liked the hooded girl with dragon. Good details on the dragon. Unfortunately, the very night that I took these photos, it snowed, and many of the finer details were covered up forever.

This sculpture in particular did not fare very well through the loss of all the fine details. Look at all the scales along the tail, the teeth and eyes. The little girl in a hood is delightful as well.

I overheard a bunch of French-speakers refer to the girl as “Little Red Riding Hood,” I thought, but I don’t remember a dragon in the English version of that story, at least.

Apparently, there were teams of snow-sculptors from all over the world who came to participate. I’ve attached the South Korean contribution. It’s a person with a fish.

I also have photos of the Koreans working on this one the whole previous night. They put a lot of effort into it.

There was also a team from Morocco. I didn’t care for their sculpture as much. But then, they probably don’t get too much snow there, so I guess we can cut them some slack.

Another favourite of mine is the sharks hiding in snow. I have both a photograph and a video of that one.

As best I can make out, these are actual living sharks that were imported and then covered in snow. They’re just waiting for the right moment before they start eating the unprepared visitors to the Carnaval d’Hiver.

Harvest time for the snow ploughman

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to describe this as “snowmageddon,” but this evening around 19h10 at Jean-Talon and Décarie, I saw about a million snow ploughs go by. Just when you think that’s gonna be the last one, whoosh, there’s another.

Backing up, backing up, backing up, backing up

What do you use for backing up your computer files? I’ve had a number of close calls in my academic career, and so I compulsively back everything up. Here’s how I do it:

First, I keep multiple revisions of my thesis in folders on my own personal computer. So I have the first revision of my thesis in a folder marked with the date I started it, and then when I make changes to it, I just copy the whole thesis folder and change the date. That way, if I really mess it up somehow and then push “save” by accident, the previous version is there, at least.

The next level of backing up is my periodic Time Machine backups. At the risk of sounding like an Apple commercial, I do actually like the way that my computer backs up my files. I just plug in the hard disc, and click on the little clock in my menu, and then it backs up all the files on my computer. This particular piece of software has saved me a number of times that I can think of. It is, in fact, one of the top five reasons why I would be reluctant to switch to Linux as my main computer of choice—there just isn’t any really comparable backup software that I could find.

That said, if someone wants to enlighten me as to some software for Ubuntu that does what Time Machine does—backs up the computer’s entire hard disc onto an external hard disc, and gives a nice interface for restoring old files, only backs up files that have been modified and doesn’t do anything weird—then please leave a comment!

What’s nice about using the Time Machine backup is knowing that even if someone were to steal my computer while I’m at the library or something like that, I would still have a copy of it in my backup at home.

The highest level of paranoia that I reach is that every once in a while, when I remember, I compress the most recent revision of my thesis into a .zip file, and then upload that to my Google Documents account.

This way, even if my apartment were to burn down and both my computer and external hard disc were destroyed in the blaze, my thesis would be alive and well, in the cloud.

Do you back up your files? How? Four points for anyone who has a more elaborate backup scheme than me!

Car accident

I promise—not all my posts from now on are going to be about traffic flow in Montréal. I just happened to surface at Snowdon Station today after my office hours on campus, and the very moment I stepped out of the station, I heard a loud bang. Looking to my right, a car had run into a big white van marked “Incendie.”

No one got hurt, but I bet that put a damper on their Robbie Burns’ Day celebrations.

Metro adventure today

It’s getting so that you can’t trust the métro any more!

I was trapped at station Lionel-Groulx for a good long time on Wednesday. Me and a few hundred people and one yelling guy. That wasn’t too bad.

Then today, just after I finished TA-ing my first conferences of the semester, a few minutes before 14h this afternoon, I transferred to the orange line at station Lionel-Groulx, and when my metro car was between Vendôme and Place St-Henri, the lights unexpectedly went out, and the train sort of coasted to a stop between the stations.

A voice over the speaker eventually informed us that we would be evacuated.

Below are a couple of videos that I recorded on my iPod. The first is a short one of us getting off the train, and the second is a longish (30 seconds) one of us walking along the métro tunnel toward Vendôme.

When I got there, I just got in a cab and went to station Snowdon, since I didn’t know what bus to take. A nice old lady shared a cab with me, and wouldn’t let me pay for it, so it didn’t cost me a thing!

According to the STM Twitter feed, service is only just now (15h10) gradually resuming.

Isn’t there a law or something?

This weekend, I was on a highway near Montréal, and I saw something that I had never seen before, and at first I didn’t recognize. I saw two cars racing. On the highway.

Now I could be wrong about this, and maybe it was in Ontario, but wasn’t there a law recently passed about racing? One with terrible consequences for transgressors, like being shot on sight by the police or something?

Anyway, they didn’t crash and kill us all, so I guess that’s a relatively happy ending to the story, although it would have been better if justice were done upon them somehow.

In somewhat related news, I drove a car with standard transmission this weekend. It wasn’t too bad.

It’s blue Monday!

Blue Monday (today) is supposed to be the saddest day of the year.

It’s about 11 months before Christmas
It’s about the time when the bills from the last Christmas are coming due
The weather is bad
The days are short and dark
There are no holidays (save Robbie Burns’ day) in the near future
Everyone is just now failing to keep their New Year’s resolutions
It’s a Monday

However, next week is Robbie Burns’ day. Don’t forget to wear your kilt and eat a haggis or something!

A trip down memory lane

While finishing up an application for next year, I went through my “Actually useful” folder inside my “Documents” folder on my computer. I was looking for my CV at the time, but I found some amazing stuff in there.

I found a file in there named “09.05.22 UWO parting survey.txt”. I had forgotten this for years, but shortly after I graduated, UWO sent me an email, asking me for any feedback I had for them regarding my experience as a student there. Did I ever. I must have been angry when I wrote this thing. It’s in three chapters, and I quote the entire thing at length for your enjoyment.

Chapter I – the water situation

There is nowhere to get potable water in Talbot College for less than $2. One day I had a twoonie, and I was very thirsty, and the only way for me to get something to drink was to get on a bus and go to my home. It was a half-hour wait, and a 15-minute bus ride.

The water fountain in Talbot College has been broken since (at least) my first year, 2003. It has been broken so long that the custodians put a big clear plastic bag over it and a sign that says, “Temporarily out of service,” which has since been vandalised to say, “How long is temporary?” “Months,” and “I think it has to do with the $2.75 for a bottle of water in the cafeteria.”

Of some historical interest, that same cafeteria in Talbot College actually burned to the ground and was built again. And in the time it took you guys to do that, the water fountain was never fixed.

In case you were wondering why I do not just go to the tap in the bathroom, there is a gross smell in the 2nd-floor men’s bathroom in Talbot College. I’m serious. Try going there and filling up a water bottle. Tell me if you want to drink the water. You don’t. It’s nasty.

Chapter II – WebCT

I think I have complained about WebCT in every course that has used it. The following are a *few* of the problems with WebCT.

1. Basic unusability

WebCT crashes my browser. Always has, and after three revisions (WebCT, WebCT Vista and WebCT OWL), I’m reasonably convinced it always will. It would crash yours too, if you gave it half a chance. Many of the problems with WebCT flow from the fact that WebCT crashes my browser. For example, WebCT tests that crash in the middle of tests, and then won’t allow me to finish, because my session has ended or something.

To add to the basic unusability problem, every time I want to log in, there’s a certificate that I have to say I trust and a pop-up thing that I have to get rid of. Minor annoyances, I know, but it’s just two more unnecessary steps between me and my schoolwork.

2. Inability to reliably communicate course content

In my first year, I took a critical thinking course, and my prof would post notes on WebCT, and because he used logical operators, it got all messed up going from his computer to WebCT and then to my computer. WebCT continues the tradition today with professors who post their notes as .docx files, which no one can open unless they pay for a copy of Microsoft Word, which of course, I can’t afford because OSAP has started to withdraw money from my account prematurely. (See chapter III.)

Further, when profs have some documents scanned as PDF’s, they are scanned at ridiculously huge sizes. This isn’t a problem if you just print them off, because your printer will automatically scale your PDF to the size of the page, and you won’t even notice. But if you’re trying to save money, and trying to actually follow the Department of Philosophy’s guidelines on the use of paper, and you take notes on the PDF itself and read it off your computer screen, then what you’ll notice is that when a document has been scanned to a PDF at an inappropriate size, and you add a notation to the document, the notation is *tiny*, because the width of the letter M is 5cm or something. And so when a normal-sized notation is added to a page that size, it is small, and useless. I can send you an example if you don’t understand what I’m talking about.

3. A potentially infinite source of new examinable content

In some of my bigger classes, professors would make TA’s available on WebCT to answer our questions. That’s fine, but then in-class, the professor would spend half his time referring to discussions that had occurred online, and the answers that the TA’s would post immediately became examinable material. I am not exaggerating. This actually happened to me. I don’t like the fact that, by the use of WebCT there is a potentially *infinite* source of new examinable material that I have to be constantly checking.

4. Hidden “features”

WebCT has a million places for professors to hide things that I should have known about. (But they were on WebCT, so of course I knew about it, right? :| ) Did you know that WebCT has a calendar? It does. And a professor could put a test date in there, and I wouldn’t have the first clue until it was too late. Do you know what “campus bookmarks” in WebCT does? No one does. I graduated last month and I just discovered *now* (while answering this survey question) that I can receive emails through WebCT. It says that my inbox has 20 unread emails. I would have liked to know during the school year about the typo in assignment 8. And you know what? It looks like there’s a separate WebCT inbox for every single course!

What is a “learning module”? Who knows? What is the difference between “notes” and “course content”? I’ll give you $2 if you can tell me off the top of your head. I’m not asking for better education on WebCT. I’m asking for less WebCT to be educated about.

5. Classroom experience

I think what really bugs me is that if I wanted to take an online course, I would sign up for an online course. I am paying for an in-class experience. I want an in-class experience.

6. It’s difficult to administer

Professors hate WebCT as much as students. I have had some profs at Western who preferred to put their materials on their own password-protected site. Students liked those better too. Less extraneous stuff to navigate around.

Conclusion: Please do not allow professors to include mandatory WebCT evaluations or materials. The problem is not how WebCT is used. The problem is WebCT itself. Please make professors and students very happy and make it go away.

Chapter III – OSAP

I don’t know if you have the power to do anything about this, but every year, I have to go to the Registrar’s Office and tell him, “O great Registrar, please tell OSAP not to start automatically withdrawing money from my bank account again this year!” And then I fill out forms, and then if I’m lucky, the Registrar’s Office tells OSAP and then they know that I’m still a student, and I don’t have to pay back my OSAP.

This is rather minor compared to the WebCT issue, but do I seriously need to remind you guys that I’m still in school?

Variations on my name

This is something I forgot to mention while I was marking exams. Apparently my students don’t know what my name is. They were asked to write their TA’s name on their exam book, and when I received them, I got so many strange and fun variations!

A fairly standard one was “Benjamin Murphy,” which is understandable, but incorrect. “Murf” was a common, but charming mis-spelling. The most mystifying one, though, was “Ben Carsdale.”

I should have left that exam for Ben Carsdale to mark. Good grief.