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CIS 1055 is mercifully ending and today groups had to pitch sales to get people to buy specific computer configurations based on pre-defined criteria.  After hearing the following
Picasa pronounced “piss-casa (Spanish for urine house)”, protege pronounced as “poor-teej” and people talking about bigger megahertz and one group actually using the word “interweb” I did my presentation.  My client needed something portable that he could do office functions on that would be able to take numerous plane trips.  I sold them a GRiD Compass from 1982.  I highlighted it’s portability as it weighed a mere 11 lbs, had a whopping 384 k of RAM, a high res 320 x 200 CGA monitor which displayed a stunning 16 colors and the optional 1200 baud modem was fast enough to see the text race across the screen.

I pointed out how it interfaced well with their TRS-80 at home and absolutely smoked the Altair 8800 in benchmarks.  Also, as an added bonus the Ni-Cad batteries were much safer than the exploding lithium-ion batteries of today.  Finally, it’s ruggedness was proven by it having flown on the Space Shuttle Discovery.  All this for less than $10,000.  I can’t wait to see how the class voted.

I can’t weight to

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I purchased a Yoohoo today and saw a new label on it “99% caffeine free”.  If this implies that it’s 1% caffeine that’s 4.5 mL of caffeine or 5500 mg of caffeine or the equivalent of 68 Red Bulls or 27 caffeine tablets, in other words just enough to kill an adult.  Should this bear fruit, Yoohoo may become my poison of choice.

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I regained my faith in the youth of America today.  That happens every two months or so, but this day’s was particularly refreshing.  Today was the case competition for all graduating seniors and as we watched 3 crappy presentations and one stellar one the listlessness in the audience became palpable.  The judges left, and we were guaranteed a quick return as the presentations had already run over and then the trouble began.

The BA coordinator, herself having no reasonable business skills, opened the floor to questions.  The first was could graduation fees be rolled into admission fees?  The answer, yes it was part of the next “fee upgrade”.  The student fired back that the fee upgrade was several hundred dollars a semester to which he was met with silence.

Question 2- Integrated Experience
Student: The financial ratios section of the course was hard.  Is there any idea to remove that for non-finance majors?
Proctor: Yes.  We’re thinking of dropping that.
Another student: Then what’s the point of making it an integrated experience between courses if you leave out large portions of them?
Proctor: We’re going to add a simulations course as a pre-requisite to take care of that.  Financial math doesn’t represent the main focus of the business world.  (at this point, she made an enemy of every econometrics, forecasting, finance and actuarial science student in the audience)
That other student: You’re adding a pre-requisite to cover finance?  Since it’s a capstone, aren’t all the courses pre-requisites, including the finance ones we have to take anyway?
*silence*

Question 3- Common Experience
Student:  A lot of us feel that there was an unequal experience between people taking this course.  Some classes got to hand in essentially fluff.
Proctor: There’s a common syllabus for instructors to follow.
Me: But, CIS 1055 (basic computing) is regulated to within an inch of its life, you’re telling us that basic computing should be subject to more academic rigor than the capstone for all business majors?
Proctor: Next question

Question 4 – Ethics
Me:  It’s great that business ethics was added as a requirement, but what does it teach when we’re chided for filesharing as a generation while at the same time you show copyrighted films in the large session that I’m sure Temple doesn’t have re-broadcast licenses for.
Proctor: Educational institutions have a different standard, we’re using it for educational purposes.
Me: By that logic, we can photocopy text books as they’re for educational purposes, but students have gotten expelled for that.

At this point there was much loud talking and the questions got more derisive from here until it ended with the Dean herself being attacked.

Dean: we believe that your degree is a share in Temple University and we want that share to gain value and…
Student shouting from audience: How do I sell my share!
Another student shouting from audience: What firms require stockholders to pay the dividends? (I’m assuming referring to tuition)

My heart lept.  How many places have you seen a dean get heckled?

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Max is dead… Well, at least the first one. He’s still in a shrink-wrapped cardboard box above the defunct fireplace in the pool room along with his collar. When we got Max II, we got him a new collar as well, the other one was being employed en memoriam.

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Well, Max II lost his collar and besides looking naked, he was both silent and sad as I imagine the collar is the dog hybrid of a wallet and wardrobe.   Max I’s collar has been pressed into service and I wonder if Max II minds.  He can probably smell other dog on it along with the slight smell of macabre leather and mold.  We had to let out the collar a little as Max II was either larger or thicker necked and I’m still getting used to the different tintinnabulations of the 1994 rabies shot and the tags from UPenn when Max I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  I feel kinda bad about the whole thing, when we reused the dog bowls that’s like heirloom china, but reusing the collar seems like I’m trying to get runs out of a headstone.

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This was the last time I could lord my superiority with computers over my classmates, sigh. I still salvaged these two incidents:

  1. We were given floppy disks to save our excel spreadsheets. Someone asked what they were. I responded “1.44 megabyte thumb drives”. Stunned, the person then asked when floppy drives would become widely available.
  2. A question on the test asked for the common page that pops up when you load a student web page. They wanted index.html, although my answer of “404 Page Not Found” was better.
  3. I got bored, so I stirred up trouble by creating a data sheet full of randomly generated numbers increasing the file size to about 480 megs. I raised my hand stupidly complaining about the fact that the file wouldn’t transfer so he smartly emailed the file to himself. Temple has a 500 meg inbox limit. I hope he had some stuff already in there. tee hee hee

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This was the last time I could lord my superiority with computers over my classmates, sigh. I still salvaged these two incidents:

  1. We were given floppy disks to save our excel spreadsheets. Someone asked what they were. I responded “1.44 megabyte thumb drives”. Stunned, the person then asked when floppy drives would become widely available.
  2. A question on the test asked for the common page that pops up when you load a student web page. They wanted index.html, although my answer of “404 Page Not Found” was better.
  3. I got bored, so I stirred up trouble by creating a data sheet full of randomly generated numbers increasing the file size to about 480 megs. I raised my hand stupidly complaining about the fact that the file wouldn’t transfer so he smartly emailed the file to himself. Temple has a 500 meg inbox limit. I hope he had some stuff already in there. tee hee hee