Tenure Sucks

Or “Why there should be a mandatory retirement age for college professors, especially when they have a blatant disdain for teaching and/or students”

I got my grades for Spring 2011 today and I would put my overall satisfaction level at an 8/10, with 0 being murderous rage and 10 being this:

In summary, I figured I had a solid A in my C Programming course, but I got an A-.  Precalc was a solid A, as expected.  For digital design, I expected anything between a B and C and somehow pulled an A-.  I can say with complete confidence that the digital design course was taught by the worst professor I have ever had the displeasure of being subjected to.  He has an incredible knack for doing things that are technically permissible by the academic policies of PSU, yet are total dick moves.

Here, in no particular order are some reasons to support that claim:

• “No partial credit”: In his words “You don’t get partial credit in the real world, so you don’t get it in this class, either.”  First of all: No. That’s simply wrong.  You totally get partial credit in the real world.  If your company misses a deadline, you fly someone out to meet with the client, buy them a steak dinner, and tell them you need more time.  At that point, I really doubt that many clients go out and establish a relationship with a new company and lose all the work that has gone into their project.  Furthermore, the entire idea of a grade itself revolves around the idea of partial credit— otherwise only students who got every point possible could pass the course.  Second, all homework assignments were 2 to 5 questions long.  If that didn’t immediately piss you off, then consider this:  missing one question, for any reason, results in a grade of a C or lower.  In the case of the two-question homework, if you miss anything, you fail. Now, call me crazy, but I don’t think that a simple arithmetic error (and doing everything else perfectly) holds the same value as not turning in an assignment at all.  But under that superbly well thought-out policy, they do!
• Asinine scheduling: First, who schedules a class at 6:30-8:30 on Thursday/Friday?  Someone who despises the young, that’s who.  Second, he schedules his office hours during the lab for his class (which is mandatory to attend).  So you can only visit the office hours if you want to take a permanent hit to your grade by missing a lab, or you finish superbly early.  But never fear, because…
• He’s never in his office, even during his office hours! Pretty self-explanatory; the only time I found him during his office hours, he was in a completely different part of the building than he was supposed to be and acted all upset like I was interrupting him.
• Completely random homework:  Nowhere on the syllabus does it say how many assignments there are, what they are worth, or when they are due.  Sometimes they are posted on the course webpage; sometimes they are emailed out at the last second, less than a day before they are due.  So you can’t plan anything.  Did I mention that if you cross one wire or make a simple arithmetic error, you will likely fail the entire assignment?
• Hates talking to students:  Nothing bothers this man more than conversing with students.  When people ask questions during lecture, rarely did he respond with more than a terse “yes” or “no”.  After class, it was a different story… usually there were a few students with miscellaneous questions.  He would frequently get so defensive and irate at even the most trivial questions that he would storm out of the room without even speaking with the rest of the students.  Not that he actually provided any tangible assistance if you could actually speak to him without sending him into a furious retreat… his responses were all variations on “What are you, stupid? This is easy”

Of course, I said all of this and more on my review.  It was pretty scathing, and I wrapped it all up saying that this class was an embarrassment to the department and college alike.  But nothing will change, because he has tenure.  Does that really seem fair?  If only there was a “no partial credit” policy for professor quality…

But all things considered I can live with a 3.8

Deleting partition: 5 seconds remaining…

 or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Cloud (for some things)
 

This picture should make sense in a few paragraphs


 I’m in the process of installing Windows 7 and Ubuntu onto my aging MacBook so I don’t have to go to the engineering building every time I need to use Windows.  I backed up my operating system onto one external drive and my music and photos to another.  That way, once I was done I could delete the copy of the OS but retain a backup of the music and pictures. 

Everything was going well:  The computer was running quickly, I had all my DropBox  stuff back (more on that later…), and I was waiting on updates to download.  I had the disk utility running because I was planning out how I wanted to divide up the external once everything was done.  Normally, you must confirm that you want to continue before anything happens.  Which is good.  However, apparently deleting a partition requires no confirmation.  Which is very bad because first of all that’s just inconsistent, and second the partition that was deleted roughly 5 seconds later housed all of my music and every picture I have taken in about 5 years.

It was shocking how quickly it happened.  I knew enough to immediately stop all reading and writing to the drive, since this could ruin my chances of getting anything back.  Fun fact:  deleting a file (or a section of your hard drive) is a lot like burning a map.  The destination still (presumably) exists but you can’t necessarily find your way there anymore.  However, the computer then considers the space that that file was occupying to be empty and therefore it might write over it with new data.

To summarize the next few days (which honestly involved huge amounts of waiting around) I bought some expensive software and got nearly everything back and I learned a lot about data recovery. The music was a cinch (had it on my iPod) but the photos all needed to be sorted, which took forever.

Of course my email and other online accounts were all untouched, but I also didn’t have to worry about my school work, resumes, code I had written, and a few other important odds and ends.  That stuff was all on DropBox: safe and sound the entire time.  And after all of this, I think I am going to be using them even more.  It’s extremely convenient, and this marks the second time it has essentially saved my life.  Hard drives die.  People make mistakes.  Computers (and especially flash drives) get stolen.  Sometimes you overwrite the wrong file.  There are countless ways to lose everything on your computer.

I’m not too paranoid about cloud storage but that’s because I don’t keep anything too sensitive there.  If someone got into my photos or homework, they wouldn’t have too much of my personal information.  Sure, I’m not going to put my tax returns on DropBox, but for anything that isn’t confidential, it’s great.   So if you haven’t checked it out, maybe you should.  2Gb isn’t TONS of space, but it is free and they have lots of ways to increase that amount without paying anything.  For example, if you use this link, you’ll start out at 2.5Gb instead.

Moral of the story:  back up your data. Somehow.  Storage is cheap:  I saw a 500Gb drive for sale the other day for $45, and I am sure there are better deals than that.  There is excellent free backup software available. But more importantly, once you have both of those, you have to actually do it.  I have all the tools, and I still don’t backup nearly as frequently as I should because it’s kind of a pain in the ass.  That’s another selling point for DropBox: Everything you put in your DropBox folder on your computer is automatically backed up for you and you don’t have to mess with cables or remember to do anything.  Just back it all up somehow, because you might not be as lucky as I was.