Posts in category Other funny things

The story of yesterday had a happy end after all: my computer was pronounced clean, and I was admitted to internet. Perhaps I was overreacting as usual. I am sorry. Anyway you recognize I’m afraid of dentists…

Today I was deprived from the biggest and most fundamental priveledge of modern man: internet at working place. Another click lead me to an internal TU Delft web page which stated that my computer was infected with a deadly virus and has been quarantined indefinitely, at least till I clear it up and produce convincing proof that it has been indeed cleared. This given the fact that the TU computer administration runs a real-lime virus protection program at my computer, prophetically called F*-secure, that I cannot stop, that swallows 30 % of CPU power and has so far found two adwares for time period of four years.

So the day was ruined. Thinking back, there was something on Friday afternoon that could justify the warning. My comp has been doing strange things. I had to opt for an inspection where I’ve found a trojan and removed it with SpyBot. Was not the fist time for these years.

So today I’ve checked all over again, produce clean scan reports and submitted to the authorities hoping to have internet again. Guess what? I was kindly proposed to have my hard drives wiped and sys reinstalled… Looks like it was the only TU Delft ICT solution to supposingly identified rootkits.

Imagine a dentist who works as follows. He hears from an informer about your light tooth pain. He lures you to his practice, locks you in his working room and suggests you to solve the problem yourself. Since he is very insisting, you do your best and upon his return proudly demonstrate an unrooted bloody tooth. No, he doubts your pain is over. He produces a machete to chop your head off.

I wish to be wrong, yet so far I am not able to provide a better description of TU Delft ICT services.

Do not write much to the blog during January: a sign of “busy inactivity” state where activities are directed to things not needed and accomlishments remain to be completed. A part of non-needed activities was devoted to sweet art of scheduling.

While I has been dreaming of writting regular daily notes and making things done in a scheduled way since my early childhood, I did prefer the dreams to reality for most of my life. It is a slow intellectual degradation that came with age that lead me to an important discovery: the scheduling itself is an occupation worth the time spend, the occupation a way more pleasant and rewarding than the occupations to be scheduled. It gives a thrill of knowing and mastering the future, living life on full thrust, and immediate sense of accomplishment. It is about four years that I got mad about electronic agendas.

I’ve tried out several dozens of various PIM software titles that left me unsatisfied for one or another reason, mostly reason of taste. Most soft treats you as an idiot not able to customize the prog neither aware of advantages of such customization. They would suit if you are in jail, or feel like being there. Few softs really offering customization do offer too much of it, you tend to constanly change the colors of your appointments and end up missing them all. I was only satisfied with a wiki-style prog that I made functional with a dozen of home-brewed python scripts.

The crisis came when standart electronic agendas become wide-spread to the degree of being compulsory. It is already a year I feel a pressure to use TU central agenda, to synchronize my activities with those of society. I decided to give up this month. It gave me a head-ache of solving the compatibility problems between my custom things and — could not belive this — Microsoft Outlook. I have solved them today, it was interesting and gave me some programming fun, yet what a waist of time…
that could be devoted to proper scheduling.

I’m rather fed up with the publication I mentioned and fuss around, yet since I’ve started the topic I have to go on.

Our MP’s read newspapers as well. To understand the read better, they’ve formulated several questions to the minister (in our time of deep saving measures, she’s not only minister of education, she also runs culture, science and public-paid television). The questions vary from innocent: have you read the article? to provocative: do you think it is fair that the university uses public budget money to pay lawsuits against the government and fines imposed on the top-brass?

I’d be interested to learn her answer.

is the title of the bad publication that has (yet with a week of (optionally repentant) delay-time) appeared in NRC Handelsblad last Saturday. Translated from poetic-bureaucratic Dutch, it just means “Enterprising university in trouble”(that’s our TU Delft). A muckraker obviously got hands on some old internal financial accounting reports as well as on some accounts of the confindential meetings our beloved top-brass. Very well, he’s made his job: with few playing cards in hand, he maganed to draw an astonishing and hardly attractive picture of our University. Quite expectedly, illustrated with a photograph of a fire that destroyed one of our buildings four years ago. Funny they haven’t added the portraits of students tortured in course of their initiation to student societies.

That felt pretty nostalgic to me. Chernukha, a russian word rooted in ‘black’. Though could be translated as ‘muckraking’ it surpasses the latter by scale, like ‘Black square’ of magnificient Malevich surpasses any painting ever. Chernukha is a genre of journalism that differs from libel in such a way that each statement taken apart is rather innocent and can not cause a lawsuit, while their skifull combination should make the reader depressed, remorse any possible association with organisation/subject/topic under consideration, and finally fountain-vomit. Chernukha is much stronger than libel: it’s contibuted quite a bit to the fall of Soviet state… Thus encouraged, I’ve carefully checked the text for missing articles, occurencres of double negation and traces of declensional inflections: nothing, no sign of my wonderful mothertong, the author must be close to native Dutch.

What surprised me beyond any measure is an overwhelmingly excessive, almost hillarious reaction of our beloved top-brass. The warning about the publication was issued a week in advance. Precisely an hour before the newspaper get to subscribers one can read on the web-site of our university a point-by-point rebuttal of the article (encompassing at least a half of the points, good score!). Next day the rebuttal has been translated in English: to reach those who had no chance to comprehend the Dutch-language article. This is given by the fact that the article in question was not available freely on internet (now it is here, thanks to an anonymous road engineer). In fact, the article was reliably buried in the forty-pages saturday edition. I read it by my friends who subscribe. It took us 5 minutes to find the article in this paper heap. From this, I would estimate the potential audience by 100 persons. The relentless efforts of the top-brass have probably brough the audience to ten thousand. Wonder if in addition to the sins listed somebody has also a secret share in Handelsblad distribution…