I guess the change in my pocket wasn't enough...

[posted to Xanga 9/7/10]

...or, Why Freed-Hardeman's iKnow Program is Crap part 2.

In a nutshell? We have the worst internet connection EVER.
Around half the people in our dorm, Bradfield, regularly get only two or three bars of wifi, if they're lucky. The rest are apparently positioned closer to a router/bridge. I'm told that it is much the same in the other dorms. Even in Bradfield's lobby the wifi is terrible. The wifi in the cafeteria is even worse. I have to toggle my AirPort card on and off every few minutes to get internet in here. The student center under the cafeteria is similarly bad. Yes, I've tried sitting all over the rooms to see if there are any better spots, and there aren't. We get varying degrees of wifi in classrooms; you have roughly a 50-50 chance that you'll get decent wifi when you go to class. Maybe higher in Brown-Kopel, because that's where the IT department is located, and it's the only place in the school that I can think of right now with consistently decent wifi.
And that's not the half of it.
I'm one of few students in the school in possession of an ethernet cable and the requisite knowledge to use it. (I think one other person on my hall has ethernet, unless she moved out.) Every time I go to my room, I plug in. I'm in one of the rooms that usually has fairly decent wifi in terms of bars, but even so, when Skype lags and gets pixelly and slow and awful, it inevitably improves the moment I plug in the ethernet (even if it's only a little). The fastest I've ever seen anything download on campus over an http/ftp connection is 1 mbps, and I've done my fair share of downloading huge files, as it is rather necessary to do so when trying out new VirtualBox virtual machines.
It gets worse.
Every day, the internet goes down at least once. Completely down. Generally the network goes down with it, but not always. During the worst episodes, I can't even get an IP from the server--"self-assigned IP" is something I'm very used to seeing in my Network Settings. What's worse, generally these outages are not in the middle of the night, as you might think maintenance outages would be, but during waking hours, during the afternoon and evening. Most days it goes down multiple times.
Freed, this is unacceptable. We pay you a steep technology fee every single semester. You are a college; by ANY standards you should have decent internet access. And what's more, you give us homework on Blackboard. Not every class does, but quite a few of them do, and if it's not Blackboard it's internet-requiring research. And the much-vaunted iKnow program, one of the main tools Freed uses to market itself, is all about CONNECTIVITY.
Oh, and when we do have internet it's filtered and controlled. Not that I'd expect aught else from Freed.
Just another reason I'll be glad to turn my back on this place.

Why Freed-Hardeman's iKnow program is crap

[Posted to Xanga 9/2/10]


I started working for the IT helpdesk when this semester started. I'm taking Web Design, Programming II, Visual Application Design, and Statistics. But I like the helpdesk better than any of my classes. I like my job. I work from 8-9:30 and 1:30-3 MWF, and then I stay behind till 5 on most days because I've nothing better to do and we're understaffed for the beginning of the year. All of the freshmen are coming in telling us their iPods and iPhones won't sync because they apparently don't know how to run Software Update. So we run it for them and send them away happy.

I like working with MacBooks. They're well-made and they're pretty. But...

It has come to my attention that whether or not I think they're pretty, the iKnow program is a Bad Thing. Did you know that starting next year, everyone at Freed is REQUIRED (you cannot opt out, ever; I work for IT and I know) to receive a MacBook and an iPod Touch or iPhone from the school? And of course you have to pay for it. And you have to either pay it off fully when you leave or give it back and receive no refund for it. (This year, everyone except seniors is required to participate. Yesterday afternoon a transfer student came in and wanted to opt out because she didn't think she'd be here longer than a couple of semesters. They made her get a MacBook along with the rest of us.)

Yes, Apple is pretty, but why should an entire college campus be required to use their computers or required to pay extra to get one even if they don't use it? Apple is probably the most expensive choice they could have made. And I would have zero objection if it weren't mandatory, but it is. Half the people I know had a computer sufficient for college purposes when they left Walton. I certainly did, although it was a desktop.

The iPod thing is worse. Almost everyone I know had an mp3 player already when they came into college, generally one that was either on a par or almost on a par with the iPod Touch. I had a 30 GB Zune when I came in. That's TWICE as big as the iPods. Oh, and you know how your MacBook and iPod will inevitably depreciate as college goes on? Freed's still going to make you keep paying the full purchase price and more.

The worst is that they insist we need the iPod or iPhone in class to participate. And we don't. I have never seen a teacher, to this day, use the system we have on our iPods in class. I've been taught about it in University Foundations, but there's been no mention of it since.

So, you force us to buy expensive products from you (you can't even buy it straight from Apple yourself, you have to go through Freed, and it remains their property until you pay it off) and then you don't even use the system you set in place, thereby making the iPods and iPhones totally unnecessary?

Not cool.

Also, my opinion on Apple stuff has been gradually developing over the past few months. I've come to the conclusion that while I like their products, while I find them aesthetically gorgeous and very usable, while their operating system has been unrelentingly stable for me, I hate their company. They charge through the nose for their stuff, and they try to entrap their users (I'm talking to you, App Store). Since I have no choice but to receive a MacBook and an iPod, I might as well enjoy them and admire the aesthetic that went into making them. But because I won't stand for the company's nonsense...I have jailbroken my iPod (it's legal now, wooo, I can admit it without caring if Freed notices!) and my MacBook dualboots Ubuntu. Take that, Freed and Apple. Those of you who have a particular dislike of Apple might be amused that they and Freed-Hardeman are in league to squeeze money out of a bunch of college students. Control freaks teaming up with control freaks, right?

In other news, at work yesterday, I was called out to an office to fix a computer that wasn't turning on. The computer in question belonged to a grad teacher (she taught education I think) who had left the office. Her colleague took me to the machine. I brought a loaner with me and began to swap out the hard drives, but the screws on the teacher's computer were being ornery, so I held down the power button as a form of diagnosis, trying to figure out whether it was a video problem only or whether it couldn't get power at all. Guess what? The MacBook booted normally. I told the colleague to tell the grad teacher to hold the button down until the chime. So much fail.

I'm not alone 'cause the TV's on, yeah...

[Posted to Xanga 8/8/10]


I’m not crazy cause I take the right pills…

So Laura finally gave me something to make me gain weight and sleep that is not trazodone. It’s mirtazapine (Remeron), another antidepressant prescribed for its helpful side effects. I haven’t felt any hungrier than I usually do, nor any more inclined to eat, but it sure as heck knocked me out. About an hour after taking it I was dying for some sleep. I don’t remember what happened after my head hit the pillow. Nothing else that I can remember has knocked me out that thoroughly except for anaesthesia.

I didn’t have a hangover in the morning, but I was miserable for no discernable reason and cried and sat on the floor and was pathetic. It gradually went away as the day went on. It was moving day, and the crying really didn’t help the moving at all. I managed to be packed by 3 PM and started moving stuff over after dinner. Unfortunately, the heat index gets up over 100 most days here in August. I started being thirsty in a way that water wasn’t fixing. So I dragged myself to the grocery store, grabbed a bunch of Powerade bottles, and dragged myself back to my room. Slept for about four hours. When I woke up it was past curfew and I wasn't even half done with the moving. So now I’m finishing my moving, long after the deadline. No one’s moving into my old room and I have the key to the new one, so I don’t think I much care if they complain about me being late. This is what happens when a weak ADHD 17-year-old girl has to move by herself in 100-degree weather, and they can deal with it.

On the other hand…duct tape has proved very, very helpful.

(The above is my dorm card, taped to my hand. There are doors between me and the room I'm moving into that have to be opened with a card.)