I am continuing to be a KF-slave, and loving it all. Did a bunch of work, it's early AM, and I am loving the project. Also finished the IRC rules page.I keep wanting to do more, but this seems to be more than enough (and a pretty constant job). Between this and the ASAP project, I've had my little database hands full. A few days ago, I had planned to talk with my boss at the tutoring center about the mag stripe readers, and what kinds of methods I came up with for identifying students. I don't care how simple "modifying 3 records is"...you just can't expect the front desk, hired for secretarial skills, to make the changes to the database. No amount of front end programming will solve this. The solution then, is to clearly shift the "stupidity responsibility" to the user, so that it is their own problem / fault if they don't do it right. When I wanted to talk to Marc, I was already stressed out, and had a lot I needed to get done that day. I got a smart-ass remark, and promptly decided my temper wasn't best for discussing an old topic. I offered instead to e-mail.
Still haven't written that e-mail.
It isn't that I am bitter about it, hurt, etc. I just have very little desire to discuss the matter right now. How we get a student to enter a unique number is something I could care less about. We don't want to use SSN and that's fine. Then we need to assign numbers ourselves. You can't use the "first class ID" since there is no established policy for that, and you can't use a "library bar code" because not everyone has one. You simply have to either assign your own number, or extract theirs from their card. There is no two ways about it. If neither of those can be a solution, then the student must simply type their SSN. I refuse to implement a system that is not standardized at a university level, the policies and associations of which are not defined, nor obtainable for the database administrator. End of discussion, not even open for debate. That is, unless you want to have students typing in an ID like: JaHeus34854 in order to make sure it is unique enough to hold against a 4,000 person database. Enough of that though, as I can't do much about it right now.
Tutoring has expanded to three 8 hour days now. That's a lot of money to be paying a full tutoring staff just for training. Word has it most of the stuff is certification stuff. I could have sworn they kept saying only level 1 is required. So how much "training" have I had? An entire semester of a 1 hour class, training sessions at the start of every fall and spring semester, training meetings and subject-specific training at the start of every fall and spring semester, and development of training materials throughout the academic year. Just in case that wasn't enough training, there is another 24 hours this year for the entire staff. I'm sorry, but I don't care how interesting you make it. When you slap on another 4-8 hours of subject specific training, you will bore everyone to tears. You will probably really bore everyone who has sat through this training (or variations of) 5 times so far. I don't mean this in a bad way, but I can see why some tutors aren't coming back. Even when I get back down to Monterey, I am looking for a possible replacement job. With all the budget cuts, there is no possible way for me to get the hours I would need. And 24 hours training for a 10 hour a week job is a waste of my time and their money. Since the CSU's all have to slash their budgets another 17%, we can't possibly have funding to spare.
Enough ranting though. It is just making me annoyed at my place of work. Let's move on to something much happier.
Episode 110 of One Piece was some of the funniest stuff I have seen in a long time. It's the start of the Luffy / Crocodile fight, but that isn't the funny part. They (the group that made it) managed to make an episode even worse than the HK subs. They had a drop shadow on their outlined subtitles...color coded for people. Add to that translation that is okay (but clearly not edited by anyone who knows the rules of English), a bad encode to begin with, etc... you can see where the suck clearly is. I was constantly reminded of GokuDLuffy's HK/KF parody. "You are lie!"
It's raining outside now. I think I will do what I did last time and lay out on my grass in the rain. That felt good.
In response to "How much I love you behind of you":