Tech Genius

March 2013

With the advent of the start of the second semester of my children’s School down here in Peru, the high school that my eldest attends has implemented a new policy. The School’s administration highly, highly, highly encouraged that every student bring a laptop to school. The School can’t mandate that every family shell out $$$ to purchase a laptop, but the head pooh-bahs of the School made it clear that any child sans a portable PC would probably suffer in their educational pursuits.

I had my reservations about letting high schoolers loose at school with computers hooked up to the Wild Wild West of the Internet. Yes, the School IT Wizards assured me that the educational facility had appropriate filters set up on their firewalls which was probably as useless against tech-savvy teens as this fence was.

I had my reservations about letting high schoolers loose at school with unlimited access to Facebook and Twitter. If you thought that passing notes was a distraction at school, I can only imagine that allowing high schoolers unfettered access to social media would be as distracting as a room full of laser pointers to a cat.

However, I had my reservations turned around as I was shown the utility of having the kids in classrooms be equipped with laptops. On a particular day in March, my eldest stayed home from school because he wasn’t feeling well. As it happened, on this day, his Social Studies teacher was giving an important lecture about an upcoming assignment. Now my son knew when his class was so he fired up his laptop, started up Skype, called one of his classmates, and my eldest was able to videoconference into the class and hear and see the whole lecture.

Genius, I dare say…genius.

Educate Like It’s 2009…or 2003

Day 385 – August 10, 2012

In a previous life, I worked as a software tester. My basic job description was to find errors and discrepancies in software applications that other people had worked on. My employment raison d’etre was that I (and others like me) would find the bugs before the actual users of the system would. With that as my background, I am always tickled when discrepancies make it through a company’s quality assurance process and wind up in front of the users.

This predisposition of mine predates my employment in the information technology world as – way back when in 1983 – I wrote a letter to NBC News explaining to them that their globe in the opening credits of the nightly news program was spinning the wrong way. I received a lovely response (sadly, not from Tom Brokaw himself) from the folks at 30 Rockefeller Center saying they knew what they were doing and that their globe rotation was a version of artistic license.

Their response was bogus as they did change the graphic in 1984.

Back to this century and I could not help but laugh when I saw the student planners both of my boys came home with after their first days of school. These planners, provided by the School, are books and they are wonderful tools to help the kids organize their homework. However, there was a slight issue with the dates in the planner.

Monday, August 17, 2012?

Thursday, October 22, 2012?

If you take a moment at look at your calendar for 2012, you will notice that the second Monday in August is the 13th, not the 17th. August 17, 2012, lands on a Friday. Likewise, October 22, 2012, falls on a Monday, not on a Thursday.

It appears that the School accidentally took the format from a 2009 calendar and pasted 2012 where the year would go.

Oops!

It becomes even stranger because for the month of September, one page looks like this…

September 8, 2012?

The eighth of the ninth month in 2012 is on Saturday, not Monday. The last time 9/8 was on a Monday was in 2003.

So it now appears that the School took two different calendar year formats and mashed them into a 2012 calendar.

Someone over at the publishing company’s quality assurance department was asleep at the switch, which perhaps is a perfect opportunity for me to seek employment there.

The end to this story is that the School requested that the kids return their planners so they can be fixed. I’m curious to see what the remedy will be and will it be easier or harder than making the globe turn the other way.