Personalisation

LadiesMan sent me a photo from my old school today, a sorry tale of what happens when 100+ students are let loose with identical laptops. Basically, they find any way they can to set their apart.

The sixth form buy in to a student laptop scheme. Since the hardware is owned by the students (or at least their parents), they tend to like to personalise them. Last year they had Dell Latitude laptops. We saw Dells with Apple stickers on, Dells with the entire lid covered with stickers, Dells with gold touchpads… you get the idea.

This year, they got Samsung NC10s.

Update: Unfortunately, so did the science department and library, which meant that the school now had 100+ students who were experts in bastardising the same equipment the school had, and this was the result:

Oh dear.

Milk

It is a sad fact that the easiest, and probably most common, method of destroying a laptop is to spill a drink on it. The fact that I’ve avoided this fate myself is really only down to the fact that I tend to only drink water the vast majority of the time, and water spills are relatively easy to rescue equipment from if acted upon early. In the office, I operate a strict ‘closed container only’ policy.

A few years ago I was alerted by email to a spillage onto a laptop that was not so simple. Worse still, the user had waited several days before contacting me. They had vainly attempted to drain the laptop by simply lying it keyboard-down on a towel, and only sought help when that failed.

The beverage in question was a mug of Baileys and hot chocolate. A large mug. The entirety of a large mug.

I didn’t hold out much hope.

Recovering from a laptop spillage is a relatively simple procedure involving four steps:

1. Stripping the laptop down to its component parts.
2. Thoroughly drying said components.
3. Re-assembling.
4. Praying really hard.

The first thing that struck me when I began dismantling the laptop in question was the stench of rotten milk the moment I lifted the keyboard, a vicious assault on the nostrils the likes of which I had been unprepared. Even if the hot chocolate had been black, connoisseurs of Baileys liqueur will know that it contains cream. It also contains sugar (both in pure and caramelised form) and alcohol, none of which are particularly healthy for electronics. It took me an hour and a half to painstakingly clean the sugar/milk residue from the inside of the laptop, but the damage was done. It never booted again. The laptop was expensive, less than 6 months old, and the purchaser had declined insurance against spillage.

Remember, dear friends; alcohol is hazardous to your laptop’s health. Please compute responsibly.

Skivers

I was returning a computer to our language lab last week, fresh from having one of its fans replaced, when I was informed of a new problem by one of the languages teachers. One the of the computers was “not working”.

I quickly discovered the root cause. It was turned off.

“Oh, trust the boys to not have thought of that!” came the bemused reply from the teacher.

Ignoring the fact that she had herself failed to think of it, I pointed out that the students almost certainly did think of that, but if they had tried turning it on they would not have been able to avoid work by pretending the computer was broken.

Samsung NC-10: just not tough enough for school

So far, we have 40 Samsung NC-10 netbooks deployed in the school; some running Vista, and some running the Windows 7 RC. They’ve all been upgraded to 2GB of RAM and are joined to the domain. They are running pretty well, but in the last week we’ve been finding some problems.

Basically, these machines are just not bloody tough enough. We’ve previously used nothing but Dell laptops, and despite our relatively well-behaved students, they do take a bit of a bashing. After only a month, the Samsungs are not faring well, and 3 are already out of action.

Hypocrite

Over the weekend we had a support request come in from a student who was having problems accessing our VLE website from home. I sent him some instructions and asked him to get back to me so I knew if they’d worked or not.

Today, I got a response that the instructions had worked, but were “too late for me to access the revision materials I needed”.

I responded to his initial query in under 4 hours. On a Saturday. He took 4 days to reply (or even follow my instructions, so it would seem), and had the cheek to imply that I was the one who was too slow.

This, I put it to you, is the very definition of an utter hypocrite.

The Case of the Deleted Incriminating Evidence

When I first started my current job, I also had some minor responsibilities in the schools Design Technology department. This involved very little, apart from keeping track of the digital cameras they used for photographing project work.

One day, a teacher lent one of the cameras to a student so he could take some photos of work he’d been doing at home. He was instructed to bring the camera back by the end of the week.

After more than two weeks, and several stern talkings-to by various members of staff, the camera eventually returned.

I then learned that this student had a history of being a delinquent little turd. When the camera finally found its way back to us, the student’s Head of Year immediately asked to see the photos of the work he had supposedly been doing at home, and asked me if it was possible to see exactly when the photos were taken. When we checked, we found a few photos taken two weeks previous, then a large gap in the file sequence numbers, then a few more photos taken the day before.

The student was in the room at the time, and claimed the gap was down to him deleting some that ‘weren’t very good’. The Head of Year was unsurprisingly suspicious, especially given the photos he did have were just as bad. Once the student left, I told the teacher it may be possible to recover the deleted files. He was extremely interested.

Digital cameras almost exclusively use the quite simple FAT format for their memory cards. FAT is very good at leaving deleted data hanging around for undelete programs to recover, and it didn’t take me long to find out what the missing photos were actually of.

The photos were of the student and his friends taking illegal drugs at a party.

The response of the Head of Year when I presented him with the files was that curious mixture of fury and glee that you see on a teacher’s face when they realise that they can finally nail the kid that’s been a thorn in their side for too long. I’m told you could hear the subsequent dressing-down from two rooms away.

And the student? He got off with a brief suspension in the end; the evidence was not conclusive enough for the police to press charges. He later went on to attempt to frame another student for defacing the school’s Wikipedia entry to question the Headmaster’s sexuality, and was finally expelled after beating another student while his friends held the victim down. It’s rare for teachers to actually cheer when students are ‘permanently excluded’, but it did actually happen on this occasion. In a final twist, some students actually tried to petition the government via the No. 10 website to overturn his explusion; it was rejected on the grounds that “it was outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government”.

Things not to keep on your school file server #4

Any combination of non-school files that total around 14GB.

If a student uploads 14GB in a day (a bunch of ripped DVDs and personal photos, for example),  I’ll notice first thing the next morning after the nightly audit.

Bond, on the other hand, will notice almost immediately when he gets an email from the storage server because it has just tipped over to the ‘warning’ level on free space.

He will then call me and relay his anger, shortly after which he will accidentally disable the student’s account.

Promotion

Two years ago I learned that my nickname amongst the sixth form was “The Angry Man”. It eventually inspired the name of this blog.

Today, I learned that I have been promoted. Apparently, I am now known amongst the sixth form as “Captain Angry”.

Easter Zen

The students are gone.

The staff are all but gone.

The school breaks are not typically filled with anger. While busy, they offer a repose from the annoyances and interruptions that are a feature of a normal day, and lengthy projects can finally be worked on in peace.

Your daily doses of anger will resume on 20^th April.

Things not to keep on your school file server #3

An hour long video of hardcore pornography.

This is an extremely stupid thing for a student to keep under their account on the school file server. This is the sort of thing that, when I go to talk to management, causes them to exclaim that the student is “a knobhead”. This is the sort of thing that leads to a student’s parents having to come in to discuss why the student is being suspended.