Friday, January 19, 2007

Pattern switch

I promised myself that I'd update the blog on Monday when the outcome was decided, but the internship in the IT office, alas, has been cut short. The reason was that online courses were beginning on 16 January and instructors would be demanding work at specific dates thereafter. Now all that's left to do is summarise the last of the internship and the way the courses are flowing.

On Wednesday, Tim introduced me to Look@Lan and Remote Desktop Control. This was set up to watch over the workstations in the IT room (the one with the Macintosh computers; they just recently got more widescreens), on which, the instructor noted, students were goofing off. We watched the students work on Flash projects and stayed to capture anyone who delineated from the task. After a few minutes, we caught up with one of the students, who had been viewing a forum; Tim stepped in, took over the computer on which the forums were shown, closed the browser, and typed a message on Notepad to deter the student from doing it again. It took a few more interventions and Mike finally blacklisting the site before he gave up.

Then, at the end of the day, Nick was confronted by a girl in the class who had found another one of seemingly countless ways to circumvent ESS to access MySpace. We finally got the name of the site down when the circumvention occurred on one of the control screens and blacklisted it; as a result, she created a notice in Paint — a red background for the desktop on which were the words IF U CAN C THIS, LOSER. Another student joined in, writing DORK on his custom wallpaper. Thank God for Clean Slate. And an image we were doing for the IT instructor who ran the room which would prevent further circumvention of task.

On Friday, I was all alone in the office, save for Dot and Mike, so I ended up labelling a few envelopes before I decided to finish another image.

On Tuesday, however, I got the course books and was informed that my internship was to stop abruptly for the reasons I've already given. On the first day I was not able to access any of the WebCT courses due to the fact that my details had not been given to the database. I had trouble with CourseCompass as well, but when a counselor gathered a required access code, I was onto that immediately.

But the trouble didn't end there. On Wednesday I pulled the trial version of Visual Studio that came with my textbook out of the sleeve and installed it. However, when it installed .NET Framework 2.0, it fell silent. After a few attempts over the next two days, I decided to get another laptop. When that and moving to the library failed, I took the newer laptop up to Mike, who discovered that no prior version had been installed, making installation impossible. Today he had installed the prior version and installed everything from the disc, so I completed the week's course in about an hour. Everything's due on Monday now, it appears....

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