Good News & Grades

Oh wow! I actu­al­ly got a $100 check from Rent.com for telling our apart­ment com­plex we found them via their site! Woo hoo! It’s dat­ed June 17-now I wish I’d checked the mail a few days ago. But what a nice surprise!

So the oral pre­sen­ta­tion went extreme­ly well, accord­ing to the feed­back I’ve had so far. (I guess I’m the only one who knew that my skirt was in dan­ger of falling off. I wor­ried about the out­fit being too small, as I haven’t worn it in a year or two-but in my waist, at least, I am appar­ent­ly small­er than I was then. It did lead to self-con­scious­ness. Of course, I could­n’t locate a safe­ty pin while rush­ing about this morning)

The writ­ten pre­sen­ta­tion is due tomor­row. I should receive the feed­back forms from my class­mates then, as well. 

I got an A- on the tech­ni­cal man­u­al for the group project. The oth­er two peo­ple got a B+ but had said that I should get extra cred­it so I got a high­er score. 

The pro­fes­sor came up with a new rule, which is why we did­n’t all get an A-he does­n’t want more than one graph­ic per page. Great-so by fol­low­ing this rule he pulled out of his butt, the man­u­al would have been near­ly twice as long as it was (48 pages total) due to all the screen­shots! He said he was real­ly impressed with the screen­shots and thought they were great, while also not­ing that the man­u­al was much longer than it had to be. Con­tra­dic­to­ry, much?

He also did­n’t rec­og­nize the cus­tom bul­let sym­bol as a bul­let and said we should have used bul­lets. Clue: Bul­lets don’t just come as filled cir­cles! Why, just with­in the stan­dard instal­la­tion of MS Word, you can choose filled or open cir­cles, filled or open squares, check­marks, box­es for check­marks, open arrows, some­thing that looks like a cus­tomized >, and a lit­tle four-point­ed dia­mond-type thing-in fact, you can use absolute­ly any char­ac­ter from any font you hap­pen to have. The Wingding font is used by default.

Then he stat­ed that select­ing the instal­la­tion direc­to­ry isn’t a step, because it does­n’t require any action from the user. Well, yes, it does-it requires a deci­sion. As the text not­ed, the user needs to decide whether or not she wish­es to install the soft­ware into the default direc­to­ry (which we did) or place it elsewhere.

He thought the cen­tered text for each cau­tion­ary note was a mis­take. Um, no-it’s set that way for empha­sis. Like we also used a dif­fer­ent font and a yel­low back­ground for those cau­tions? Per­haps the fact that every sin­gle one was done the same way might have been a clue that it was­n’t just a series of 7 or 8 for­mat­ting errors? If he did­n’t LIKE the for­mat­ting, that’s one thing-but say­ing it was done in error is a dif­fer­ent thing.

He also con­sid­ered it an “error” that I did­n’t tell peo­ple to write down their PGP passphras­es but to remem­ber them. If you write some­thing down, it isn’t secure. Your mem­o­ry, one pre­sumes, is secure. I do not ever tell any­one to write down pass­words or ATM pin num­bers or any­thing else. I’m cer­tain­ly not about to start with a PGP passphrase. 

On page 27, there’s a para­graph telling the user to copy mes­sage text to the Win­dows clip­board. Instruc­tions for doing so are giv­en in paren­the­ses, in case the user has for­got­ten this very basic skill. In the left mar­gin, the pro­fes­sor says “Not a step” and states that this para­graph should­n’t have been num­bered with the oth­er steps in the task. In the right mar­gin, he said “Treat as mul­ti­ple steps.” But if it isn’t even ONE step, why would I treat it as mul­ti­ple steps?

Why isn’t enter­ing your passphrase a step? You can’t PGP-sign a mes­sage with­out doing so. And past­ing the signed mes­sage back into the email mes­sage win­dow isn’t a step, either. Oh no-we just signed that text to do it. We don’t actu­al­ly want to SEND it to anyone!

Nei­ther is select­ing the PGP keys to which a mes­sage will be encrypt­ed a step. Or select­ing the keys one wish­es to import from a keyserver. 

Oh-I get it! We’re obvi­ous­ly using the word “step” dif­fer­ent­ly! I just can’t fig­ure out WTF he means by it! Chacha, maybe?

The main thing I learned from this class? Avoid this pro­fes­sor at all costs! Not so easy when there are only 4 or 5 pro­fes­sors in the department 🙁