branchandroot | This year is fired

So far, this academic year is _ridiculous_.

We start out the term with a security breach so severe that the only solution is to _air-gap the entire campus_, resulting in a first week with no network, no way to communicate if you're on campus, everything from projectors to door locks down, basically a colossal mess. But fine, fine, we get through it.

Week two, one of our instructors gets flagged in the new security app for running torrent software on his work computer, and it turns out that he's also running emulated Windows 2000 (illegal downloaded copy) in order to open a disk-image of a CD-ROM (almost certainly illegal downloaded copy) of the Kidai Shouran scroll that no longer opens on anything else, which he insists he needs for Teaching and Research, AND WAS TRYING TO GET HIS STUDENTS TO INSTALL ON THEIR PERSONAL MACHINES TOO. So, while Desktop is tearing their hair over impounding his security-nightmare machine and getting him another, I get to go talk to the State Museum of Berlin (custodian of the scroll) and eventually find out that, actually, they have a web-accessible edition that's perfectly equivalent except for the pre-packaged "viewpoint tours" AND ALSO make publicly available their archival-quality images of the scroll. That was a lot of hours I'm not getting back just because one instructor didn't want to write up viewpoint narratives himself.

Week three features _yet another_ major network down. The until-then perfectly smooth process of replacing Juniper network switches with Cisco switches hit 46 switches and revealed an exciting new Juniper bug that crashed everything still on Juniper hardware, which was about two thirds of the central campus buildings. But fine, fine, everyone screams a little and there are a lot of thousand-yard stares going on in IT, but fine, we get through it.

Week four, and I figure I'm maybe going to finally get a little caught up, maybe even sit in on interviews for a new team member, but HA HA, NO. It turns out that our beloved writing center has been directing our instructors to do multiple rounds of peer-review on each paper, with the same anon reviewer, which is very pedagogically sound but which our LMS does not actually _do_. So, instead of coming and asking for a tool that does do it, they've been loopholing the LMS by having students delete drafts and re-upload revisions to the same single peer-review assignment. PREDICTABLY this frequently breaks the LMS, and then they complain that the LMS is breaking and the company isn't fixing this bug. Because, you know, it's not actually a bug, it's that they're telling the company to completely re-create their peer-review tool. So now I'm doing a light-speed evaluation and pilot of peer review tools!

So yeah, this academic year is extremely fired. Preferably into the sun. If week five tries to go one better, I'm gonna have to kill someone.