3.959 dead Macs, comfy offices, and nothingcangowrong (74)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Thu, 25 Jan 90 22:19:32 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 959. Thursday, 25 Jan 1990.
(1) Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 15:37:00 EST (37 lines)
From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@OAC.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: Re: 3.955 support: dead Mac reborn! (36)
(2) Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 12:23:45 EST (17 lines)
From: DS001451@VM1.NoDak.EDU
Subject: Re: 3.955 support: dead Mac reborn! (36)
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 15:37:00 EST
From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@OAC.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: Re: 3.955 support: dead Mac reborn! (36)
[in reply to John Slatin's "dead Mac" saga]
Your emergency work is wonderful, and fully professional. However, to
be cynical, if you had cancelled all the classes on the spot, as unable
to be conducted, perhaps they would have found those pitiful few dollars
you need. They are exploiting you. When there was no money at all at
UCLA, during the crisis ten years ago, or before or about the time of
Proposition 13, they were lining their offices in the Admin building
with new carpeting and installing comforts like air conditioning and all
that, while there wasnt even, and still is not, a typewrter avaialble
to type a letter of recommendation on. Let alone a computer to word
process today, and you should see the millions that have recently gone
into re-doing the Admin building! Those people know how to spend
money on creature comforts and how to pad the rolls of the
administratively employed. the U of Cal has had a perhaps 10,000%
increase in adminsitrative staff, I mean thousands, over the last 25
years, of vice chancellors and assistant vc's and assistnats to them,
and as for teaching staff? ...it is all support and no education, in pro
portion. We all see it and run around doing beyond and above the call
fo even professional duty, and they know it and laugh at us...and
professors who become administrators are often full of contempt, a bad
emotion, for their former colleagues, even in well-run places like the
UC system, more or less well run, judging by the horrors in so many
other places....one hears of, that is. Slatin, a streetwise fellow
(not me) might say, wise up, or whatever the word is today. I say all
this to amuse you, not appall you. I am myself appalled at the amenities
that have appeared over the decade in Admin...and no computers, no Macs
avaialble except if the Apple wants to dump. And they have the nerve
to offer grants here in finding wasy to assist teaching with computers!
Without a computer to play with and and see what can be done? It is
really preposterous, which is alt in for arsyversy or as-backwards, you
know. Kessler at UCLA
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------26----
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 12:23:45 EST
From: DS001451@VM1.NoDak.EDU
Subject: Re: 3.955 support: dead Mac reborn! (36)
I've been enjoying the raveling Slatin saga, chuckling with my colleagues
about it at tea. But the truth of the matter is that it's much funnier
from my perspective than his. In my limited attempts to incorporate the
new technologies into my teaching, I've run into all manner of
nightmarish hardware and software problems. I've even found myself
shaking with trepidation as I entered a lab full of excited students. I
mutter beneath my breath, "What in the sam hell can possibly go wrong
today?" My question is usually answered rather quickly, "All kinds of
things." Given our size and location, we have reasonably good
facilities and equipment here--much better, in fact, than many others.
But things seem to fail constantly, and when things aren't failing on
their own, students are most imaginative at creating sundry failures no
manual ever addresses. Is this the new entropy?