A eighteen-year-old in Kentucky has been jailed for writing a story about a high-school over-run by zombies. Says he,

It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran [sic] by zombies … It didn’t mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn’t mention [George Rogers Clark High School], didn’t mention no principal or cops, nothing. Half the people at high school know me. They know I’m not that stupid, that crazy.

Obviously, I’m not informed enough to make a proper judgement, since I’m missing a key piece of evidence here — the story itself. Nevertheless, taking this all at face value, there’s a couple important things to consider.

It Was An Act Of Creativity

It would have perfectly valid, under this jurisdiction, for him to consume zombie-themed entertainment in the form of movies. or video games, neither of which are as intellectually stimulating as writing a short story.

With the political power that the gaming and movie industries represent, these things will never disappear. And neither should they; that’s a basic free-speech/free-expression issue. But to attack some kid over it seems rather low.

He Seems Pretty Normal

Perhaps the story was hideous. Maybe it was shocking to the point of being grotesque, with a complete absence of redeeming moral qualities. After all, his grandparents turned it in to the authorities. But were these shocking things that ended up in the story really part of a psychopathic nature that was leading to the next Columbine? What if he just gleaned them from the aforementioned movies and games?

Teenages Do And Say Dumb Things

And I’ll be the first to step up and admit it. It sounds like he didn’t even intend these writings to have ever left his journal. Having a private journal is helpful, because later on it can be a humbling influence. (”Wow, I felt so justified then, just like now. But it turned out then that I was just being a petulant child.”)

But even if he did intend to publish the story, and assuming it was somehow improper to the point that it needed additional correction, I’m not sure jailing him is the correct way to deal with it. Yeah, maybe they could get a shrink or whatever to check him over, if they’re really worried, but the thought of being jailed for mere words on paper is a scary thought. Especially when you’re just eighteen.

I Can Only Partly Empathise…

… Because I don’t really get the whole zombie thing, nor really the larger genre of horror. It’s just not something that I enjoy as entertainment. But if Mr. Poole is using it as material to flex the creative muscle, that’s something to be praised, not arrested over.

Mike

I’ve always felt that the burden of ‘making a subject interesting’ should be on the instructor. As a student, it’s impossible to raise this without sounding pompous and ungrateful. But it’s a fact that a learner will perform poorly when they’re bored by a topic. Some, obviously, are beyond help. But for the rest, it’s part of the teacher’s job to make a subject exciting.

As a co-op student at a local highschool last year, I had a chance to try this philosophy out.

Teaching Computer Science

Admittedly, computer science is a more exciting subject than say, English, but nevertheless, it was a good exercise. And for me, it paid off. Why struggle against the students, cramming pointers and linked lists down their throats, when you can spend two weeks teaching animation and graphics, and then introduce linked lists as a good structure for managing sprites and particles? Why not help out the Math teachers by demonstrating that arctangent, sine, and cosine are the mechanisms for switching between angle-velocity and x-vel, y-vel movement systems?

Of course, many history teachers will demonstrate that the subjects that fascinate a professor are not always of interest to the students. But it’s still a valid starting point, and is much better than trying to bring one’s elevated intellectual status down to the lowest possible denominator and use that caricature to determine how to ‘reach’ the students.

Psychology

I recently encountered a fervent believer in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom describes six levels from which is made up the learning process: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Of all the sciences, psychology is the one that I become skeptical of the most quickly. I suppose this statement alone may slot me into a negative personality type, but it’s important to see the danger of over-applying a theory like this, as correct as it is in its analysis: In the wrong hands it completely loses sight of its students.

In a zealous attempt to see that the bases of Knowledge and Comprehension are covered, it’s possible to delay reaching Analysis so long that students have lost interest by the time it arrives. And after all, nothing cements an understanding of something better than to discuss it (Analysis) and actually use it for something (Application).

The view that the method is more important than the students moves the burden of ‘interest’ from the teacher to the students. Since the teacher is seeing that the correct method is followed, it’s up to the students to do supplemental work in order to motivate themselves.

What Method to Use?

Both, really. Although my students in Grade 12 were excited for their topic, it’s definitely the case that for some of them, the jump from knowledge (my lectures) to application (their assignments) was too sudden. Were they able to catch up? Yes. Were there some that required special tutoring afterwards? Yes also.

A teacher is like a performer balancing spinning plates. The most important plate is the motivation one. Forget carrots and sticks. Just make them want to learn it.

If you feel so inclined today, I’d appreciate if you could pray or rub crystals together or do whatever it is you do to plead with the Powers That Be on behalf of another human. I need a healthy dose of level-headedness with a side-order of professionalism.

So… what is PDEng? If you’re curious, the best place to read it is right from the source. I won’t try to explain, in this space, what it is.

It’s unfortunate that I’m one of the very few first-year Engineering students still in town this term, and it’s fallen to me to have a meeting with the directors of PDEng to discuss the collective concerns of a small body of students from my class.

I’m just compiling notes now, printing emails, surfing the old discussion threads, discarding the worthless gripes and harvesting the meaningful suggestions for improvement. Some of it is just people coming off a PDEng Module and venting, and that’s always the most amusing to read. It would never fly as an argument, and most is too lurid to be pasted into this space, but some little gems are terrific:

I mean honestly, learning style quizzes and reading journals of kids who can neither formulate grammatically error-free sentences, nor distinguish fantasy from reality? Come on! I mean, imagination is great, everyone should have one, but what person writes their ACTUAL logs like a spaceship commander?

This is with reference to the journals such as this one from which ethical dilemmas are the source of a number of essay questions throughout the course. (UW: If the picture is a violation of intellectual property, contact me and I’ll remove it)

Anyhow, if you’re a student in the program with suggestions, the best place to send them is your Assigned Mentor within the program itself. Failing that, contact the director or assistent director. If you’re not a student, but you have questions, you could email the Director, or you could join the public area of our class forum and ask the students.

Mike

Followup to yesterday’s piece.

So I got home from work and, whoops, my DSL still isn’t hooked up. On the phone, the unphased techs assure me that my hookup date is the following Tuesday. Hmm… I could sworn it was supposed to be yesterday. Whoops.

I politely ask the tech what the charge will be to me if I cancel with Bell and order Rogers at this point — not because I really intend to, but because saying such things makes me feel delightfully spiteful. He doesn’t know, and transfers me to Sales, where they say that I’ll be fully refunded.

On a whim, I call Rogers, and bam! they’ve got a service opening this evening, because there was a cancellation. So I go for that, and even get persuaded to buy a Roger’s cell so I don’t have to pay for my useless land line (so much for VoIP, oops). There was some kind of promotion and I’m getting the spiffy new Motorola V220. I don’t really need or want a camera phone, but hey, technology interests me, so what the heck. He was able to waive the $150 cable installation fee, so I was feeling magnanimous.

Anyhow, I call back the Bell Sales department and let them know that I’d like to cancel everything as soon as possible. No, I’m not interested in just ’suspending’ my account, yes, I’m aware that Roger’s is charging me slightly more. No, that’s quite alright.

I had to get my bike chain fixed this morning, so I was out in town, and I stopped at a tiny little cafe for breakfast. The kind of place that doesn’t add a ‘gratuity’ to your bill, because they know that there prices are modest enough and the service and food is good enough that you’ll tip them anyways. Delightful.

Good service is priceless.

Mike

ps– I’m going with the guys from work this afternoon to see the Cannes Advertising Festival at Princess. Looks like it’ll be a blast.

I won’t frequently use this space for tirades against products and corporations that have mistreated me, but my recent frustrations with Bell warrant it in this instance.

I had mentioned below that it shocked me how difficult and expensive it was to acquire even a basic highspeed internet connection in this town: Bell forces you to buy a phone line also (which can be had online with VoIP for pennies, by comparison), and Rogers charges a crippling installation cost, since their records showed that this house never had Cable installed to it.

It seems amazing to me that ’student housing’ doesn’t automatically imply ‘internet available’, but it’s even more so that these companies aren’t tripping over themselves to win impressionable students as lifetime customers. Special 4-month student packages should be offered that give you the best of everything for a quarter of the cost. I’m not saying this just because I want it — it’s a sound long-term business strategy. But then, so is all-around good, prompt service.

Bell could have offered me something like that, and taken a chance that I’d convert. As it is, after this term, I will be permanently a cable customer. Rogers, at my previous house, was always fast and reliable, and when I called a serviceman to the house for something that turned out to be my fault (lousy router), he arrived in 48 hours and diagnosed the problem for me.

Given a second chance, I’d have swallowed the installation fee and gone with Rogers.

So Sympatico should have been installed today. They shipped the package yesterday, so I’ve now been plugged-in and ready to go for over 24 hours. I’ve called support several times, getting the various opinions of the different drones there, and the consensus seemed to be that, “since it was to be hooked up today, I should call back after midnight if it’s still not working.”

Ludicrous. In what world does ‘installed Thursday’ mean ‘installed in the wee hours of Friday morning, if that’?

I mean, delays are understandable, but shouldn’t the technical support representatives report a delay as a delay rather than end their calls with the moronic suggestion to call back once their shift is ended? To be fair, the support people were very nice and attentive, but when enabling the service is, I imagine, the flick of a switch at their end, being instructed to call back at 12:01 is not reassuring.

Continuum: I’ve been typing this mostly while on-hold with various reps, and I finally made it to a Tier 2 Tech (’Nathan’) who said that there’s some kind of major snafu at the main interchange and the boys may take 72 hours to get me online. He also mentioned that he’d dealt with a lot of 519 area-code numbers this evening… hmm…

He was very honest and polite. But I’m still not impressed.

Mike

One of the guys in my class at Waterloo had an amusing anecdote about dialup internet: For the eighteen years of his life that he lived in Calgary, he was on dialup, begging his parents to get some kind of broadband. When he left to come to school, he bought his parents a webcam so they could engage in videochat with him.

Well, within a week of his having left home, they realised what a laggy experience videochat was on dialup, so they promptly ordered Highspeed.

My parents did no such thing, so my ability to update this site and participate on the class forum has been slightly hindered.

Ah well, it’s a good excuse to do some reading. I blitzed through The Code Book, recommended me by a classmate and which I now wholeheartedly recommend.

Mike

What is Jobmine? Jobmine is the online matching system that the University provides for Co-op students. It turns out that Googling the word Jobmine and jumping a few pages in is an oddly easy way of locating UW student blogs than the more obvious search terms, since it seems that many of them have weighed in with an opinion.

Under the cover of anonymity, some are just plain cruel. Others are more tactful, although still expressing their displeasure. Still more use an image to make their statement.

However people feel about it, one of the biggest challenges of Jobmine for most is that you must submit a resume… in HTML format. For those having never used HTML before, this is a daunting task, but some of us are like fish in water. I just thought I’d share a few tips for creating a really great CSS/XHTML resume. The example above is my own with the content and some of the extraneous flair stripped out. I’ve tested it, and it displays in IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5, IE6, and Firefox. Features to draw your attention to:

• Print Media Rules. For clients that support print-media stylesheets, the typeface is switched from a sans-serif to Times New Roman. To see this and the effect below, select File->Print Preview.
• Link Expansion. When printed, the ‘link’ in the document has a second part, the actual URL, which is revealed. Onscreen, this is hidden, but in print, it appears.
• Horizontal Lists. The three columns of traits is an attractive presentation, and one easily acheived with a table. However, doing it with a horizontal list is advantageous because you can’t always predict what will happen to your resume if it’s sent as an attachment in HTML-email, and then forwarded as text-email. A table would break all over the place, but the nested lists downgrade graciously.

So there you have it. Obviously, there’s a lot more tricks to be done with CSS to create interesting and visually appealing text-only layouts, but I just created this as a basic example of what can be done.

Mike

Dealing with technical support representatives over the years has taught me to be cynical, suspicious, and untrusting of their knowledge and skill.

However, I had an experience in the past month that was like something from a prior generation.

It started with one of my 18th birthday presents — a Westinghouse Digital Convection Toaster Oven. Now, just because it has ‘digital’ in the name doesn’t automatically spirit it from the realm of ‘kitchen appliance’ into ‘awesome birthday present’, but I was mildly intrigued. I have since discovered what an indispensible piece of food-preparation equipment it is — far more so than the microwave — but back in June, I was not so enlightened or excited.

It sat in its box in my closet until September, when I moved to Waterloo and began actually cooking. I realised then that there was something seriously wrong with my Westinghouse Digital Convection Toaster Oven. Sometimes it would cease to respond to the buttons. At others, the display would ‘crash’ halfway through a bake, causing the heat to remain on until I pulled the plug. Obviously, this behaviour was unacceptable.

After poking around online, it became apparent that the model number of my product did not infact exist — anywhere. It seems that Westinghouse was in some way affiliated with a larger company called Salton, in spite of being not listed on Salton’s own brand registry.

So I called Salton with my defective oven, and they said that it was under warranty and would be completely covered, I just had to ship it to them.

Uh oh, shipping a huge, bulky toaster oven to the US was not going to be pretty. But wait, as part of the warranty agreement, they pay shipping both ways. So I had to mail them my receipt for the $22 it cost me to send it to them, and they mailed a brand new one back.

It works perfectly, and I’m thrilled with it.

But here’s the funny bit: They sent me a cheque for $22 in US funds. Now that’s service.

Mike

A fellow from ISCF at my high school MSNed me like last night about it. I’m normally not too thrilled about going to random people’s youth groups midweek… but Frannie and I decided to go anyways.

It really was fantastic. It was being hosted by the youth group of a Korean church in Northern Toronto, but the event itself was run by a group from Philadelphia that does some training in New Jersey and then brings their people up to Canadian cities to run services at different churches.

The speaker and worship were very… I dunno… spirit-filled, I guess. Sometimes these sort of events can get way too tied up in how loud the amps are and how many obscure Bible connections can be made, but these guys just seemed very very honest.

The group is called SOR, but it seems their fantastic-looking website badly wants an update. Anyhow, if you hear of them doing anything at a local church, definitely give it a look.

Mike