The way I’ve been procrastinating over publishing my thoughts on servers distant recently. Not to mention my recent binge on sustenance.
I’m currently in the process of reading up on Blogger’s labels, and hopefully I’ll get a working implementation of it up on the sidebar soon; this new ‘widget’ stuff that Blogger has seemed to embrace seems slightly confusing. I can only hope it’ll be by this weekend; if it persists, I may not be able to keep up with its paces. By the time I’m done, though, it’ll be much easier to sift through all of the crap that resides on my personal little space of Sitesled’s servers.
Another modification to this site which I am considering is changing the units from pixels to em units, which may seem slightly over-ambitious to some. I am, however, aware of the benefits that such a modification would bring to this site in terms of standards and usability, and I hope to be able to make the transition as smoothly and as painlessly as possible, the latter being probably impractical, in all senses of the word.
Much has happened in the world of the Intarweb since my recent extended absence; we’ll touch on that later. Right now, though, it’s school that will dominate this particular section of postage. If you’re allergic to such flavour, you may want to scroll down. Really quick.
I’ve just had a rush of four, almost non-intermittent tests for the past week, spanning all manner of academic subjects and skills. I wouldn’t be complaining about this if it weren’t for the fact that two of these tests merely proved themselves to be outstanding examples of how our educational system here has almost completely failed in its implementation of, well, education. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that one of the tests was organized by a tutor who thought that it would, somehow, be beneficial to already-overworked and sans-paid students.
I did try to study for them, really, I did. I didn’t even touch the computer for the past few days, my only contact with technology being my Sony PSP acting as a music haven of sorts, and my XDA as a communications tool. Somehow, though, it’s never enough, and in the end, remedials will ensue, something which I have managed to opt out of through last year’s results, but will probably will ensnared into again this year.
I really don’t understand the point of remedials. We stay back about 2 or 3 hours doing nothing, while waiting for the session to start. When it does, it’s basically a session to test your endurance at listening to a droning man or woman ineffectively attempt to “go through” or “debrief” a certain tutorial worksheet that you may or may not have done. Do tell; if I have indeed achieved a 100% success rate in completing said tutorial, why would I need a debrief of it? If I didn’t understand it, how the fuck did I manage to complete it? On the other hand, if I didn’t attempt the tutorial at all, what the hell is the point of going through it and leaving me to wonder about the mysteries of life?
The concept of remedials is not so much as stupid as it is shocking in my society. What a true learning session should be like, in my opinion, would involve active participation from students, and I don’t mean badgering a tutor with fucking stupid questions throughout a session; a remedial should be conducted in a way that allows everyone to understand and take in the concepts that the tutor wants to convey in the first place. A tutorial shouldn’t be a re-iteration of what you already fucking know, it should be something that you can immediately relate to, without any prior knowledge or instruction. When I view good tutorials on CSS and HTML on the web, I can immediately understand them, even if I have no prior knowledge of what CSS and HTML are. When I go over my lecture notes for hours on end, I end up concluding that it’s a complete fucking waste of time, even if I exert every last ounce of mental capacity with the sole intention of comprehending the information within. Is this a mere coincidence, attributed to my background with computers? I think not.
You can probably tell by now that I chose to opt out of a certain remedial session today.
Last.fm has recently gotten itself a spanking new update to its interface, and I must say, I pretty much like it. It’s much more streamlined now, meaning it’s easier to find songs and such and to play them immediately, without a plethora of links to navigate around with before getting to the actual stream.
In other news, Steve Jobs has publicly called for a rethinking of DRM policies, which could spell the end of this much-ridiculed and annoying protection protocol. I personally advocate the complete and utter destruction of any DRM-like protection on software/hardware of any sort, and such a development is encouraging, to say the least. Now, if only the same could be said for Trusted Computing, I’d be a happy man.
I’ve recently taken to installing all sorts of crap on my Pocket PC, which has resulted in, uh, unforeseen consequences, one of which includes a dreaded reset loop, in which my PDA continues to soft reset itself continuously until the battery dies out, and soft-resetting it manually does nothing to avail the situation. So far, I’ve been unable to determine exactly which application I installed is causing this little problem, but the problem isn’t exactly critical at the moment, since it doesn’t seem to happen with any sort of frequency, though it is worrying. I’ve found that removing and replacing the battery temporarily cuts the loop short, but short of hard-resetting the thing, I haven’t found a better way to get around this yet.
No artwork for this post, I’m afraid (I do seem to be posting at least one picture with one post for the past few entries, don’t I?), but I’m working on a couple of things at the moment, along with meeting deadlines for school-related rubbish, so I hope it’s understandable.
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