Interesting, my employer is listed

Interesting, my employer is listed as second in the US News & World Report ranking of Midwestern public universities granting Master's degrees. See, if you get specific enough, you too can be in the top 5! For instance, I'm the number 1 search result on Google for "Seth Bokelman", what are the odds? Actually, there is another Seth Bokelman in the world, believe it or not, but he lives in West Virginia, and I think he's in high school still, but I digress. Why UNI is second, I don't know. I can certainly think of several dozen other schools in the Midwest I'd attend before UNI. In the state of Iowa, here are the valid reasons to attend UNI, in my opinion:

1. You're majoring in Music, Education, or Business. 2. You got a free ride scholarship. 3. Your mommy wouldn't let you leave the Cedar Falls/Waterloo area, so you're living at home. 4. You went to ISU or the U of Iowa for a year, but couldn't hack it, because the profs didn't babysit you, or you couldn't make friends, even with 25,000-30,000 fellow students to pick from. 5. You couldn't even get in to ISU or the U of Iowa.

And that's pretty much it. UNI is not a research school, the focus is on undergraduate education here (not that there's anything wrong with that). UNI doesn't seem to focus on being a leader in anything, however, and I've jokingly proposed several times that our school motto should be "Good Enough" as that's the prevailing attitude here. That's not to say I'm not grateful to work here, it just means I wouldn't encourage others to attend this school, given the other two excellent schools in our system, unless one of the above 5 conditions are met.

But still, the students come, though I don't know why. For instance, UNI has a Biology program, but the U of Iowa is a medical school, with a teaching hospital, and ISU is one of the best agricultural schools in the nation. Given that tuition costs for the schools are within 2-3% of each other, why would you choose UNI?

Well, all the college students

Well, all the college students are returning to campus in Iowa, which means our network connectivity blows. They're all plugging in their computers, which aren't properly patched, so they're getting hit with the Blaster worm and its ilk almost immediately. It's not affecting our computers here on the proper campus network, as we've got those ports blocked between the dorms and the rest of campus, but I know they lack that setup at ISU. Unfortunately, all three of the state universities share the ICN, our statewide fiber-optic network, and the ICN has been suffering under the massive load caused by all this garbage. It was so bad this morning, I couldn't get much work done, because our internet connections constantly timed out as the ICN routers were stressed to the point of failure. Fortunately, I found a workaround, I'm VPN'ed into my home network, which works well, as I can route around the ICN. I can do this, because Cedar Falls Utilities is my ISP at home, and they have a 100Mbit bridge between their network and UNI, so my traffic between work and home all flows down that pipe, rather than through the beleaguered ICN. I'm limited to 1.5Mbits of bandwidth (my upload speed cap at home) but at least it's stable! Update: I see Gary shares my pain with the ICN.

That's one of the blurbs

That's one of the blurbs over at The Onion, and it made me laugh, because I wasn't all that impressed by the blackout. During the Great Halloween Ice Storm of '91, our farm was without power for five days, so those sissy city boys with their 24 hour blackout don't impress me much. Did I mention it got down into the 30s, inside our house during that week? After 3 days, when we could actually make it to town, and back to school, I had to go in early to shower in the locker room, since we didn't have power or heat at home. We finally resorted to lighting numerous candles at home, to keep the pipes from freezing, as there wasn't a kerosene heater or generator to be bought for hundreds of miles in every direction at that point. Being without power for 12-24 hours, unless you're stuck in an elevator or an iron lung, doesn't really impress me all that much, sorry. :)

I also learned that

I also learned that I suck at authoring web pages in CSS. Unless you're reading this via the RSS feed, you've probably noticed the weblog has a new look to it. I've been slowly customizing it, but I'm a total newbie with CSS, and I tend to break it a lot. I'm catching on now, I think, it's just all seems so odd and ambiguous...

I learned something new today

I learned something new today at work. Namely, how to use software for the blind and visually impaired. Probably a good thing that I learned it, given the prescription for my glasses. I got to install and mess with two of the most popular software packages, Jaws and WindowEyes. I've gotta say I like Jaws better, it's a lot more polished, though my faculty member said he prefers WindowsEyes to use. The stuff isn't cheap, at nearly $1,000/copy individually, but if you're blind, what are you going to do? It works in a way that I didn't expect too, the software reads the words that are under your mouse cursor, so the blind actually have a good grasp of what the UI for an application looks like to the rest of us. It was kind of neat to watch my user navigating that way, though the software merely spits gibberish when I use it, because I move so quickly. People who can see just fine say I do things too quickly in Windows, so I'm not surprised that the robotic computer voice can't keep up. It helped a lot that this user was very proficient with computers as well, which I think is a requirement for using this kind of software, he had a better knowledge of the keyboard shortcuts for Windows than I did, which sort of freaked me out.

While setting up his new computer, I looked at his old one, which he had just moved, and had been unable to get working since the move. A quick glance showed me what was wrong, he had swapped the PS/2 cables for mouse and keyboard around (they use the same types of plugins) as well as plugged the audio cable into the wrong hole (line out instead of speakers). I've always thought they should have made those interfaces different, especially for the mouse/keyboard. Both the keyboard/mouse and the audio inputs/outputs are color coded, but that doesn't do a damned bit of good when you're blind. He was very happy to learn his new system came with USB peripherals, as you can't get those wrong.