Today was a long day that started at 5:00. I had to enter the essay marks for the SE course and it took a while to figure out how to do that. Our university seems to be moving more and more strongly in the direction of placing all of our course information onto the WebCT (or Blackboard; it also goes by one or two other names) system. In principle I have no problem with this, but the system is slow and not too user-friendly. Which is strange, now that I think about it, because it is supposed to be running on some kind of cluster. I guess this improves the system’s performance under stress, without increasing its actual response time. Hmm.
As I was entering the marks, I realized that during the run of the course I will have read about 200 essays and more than 1400 pages. Why do I do this to myself? Well, for one thing, the essays give a true insight into how much the students understand. With a little experience it becomes easy to “fake” an essay so that it appears to be better than it perhaps really is. But I believe that it is still possible to detect the underlying comprehension of the students. At least I don’t have to do 30+ reviews for one conference, a prospect it seems poor Willem is now facing.
As I said, it was a long day. It included a 2.5 hour teaching stint. But the upside is that after tomorrow’s 8:00 class, I have a break of about 18 days before I teach again. Part of that will be spent in France at the conference, and I’ll have to do some reading (more essays and other material). But I’ll also try to sneak in at least a weekend or two of mental vegetation.
One last item on the agenda is that today also featured a little excitement: I have finally had time to unplug my 15 inch CRT monitor and set up the new 24 inch LCD. It arrived last week, but I had not had time to unpack it. I promised myself that I shall now spend more time at the office, and I intend to do that to some extent. But them, I make many promises to myself that never come to pass. Like going to bed at 21:00 sharp. At least I have not been wasting my time this evening: instead, I made a couple of illustrations for an upcoming paper that will hopefully be submitted this week. And Henri is doing well and very excited about future research, which is good news for him, but also for me. Energetic collaborators are harder to come by than one might think.