Day: November 20, 2008

The Circle Is Now Complete — Antinous Is the Master

Antinous, one of the moderators of the comment threads over at Boing! Boing! has finally surpassed Teresa Nielsen Hayden in his moderation skills. I am in awe after running across an exchange between Antinous and a user going by the handle “Harveyboing.”

Good old Harvey made the mistake of posting a comment critical of a CNN piece claiming George W. Bush had been snubbed at the G20 summitt. Harvey made the mistake of opening his post by saying, “Hey, give me a break” which Antinous righteously transformed to “h, gv m brk” before disemvoweling other parts of the post.

Harvey found this a bit hypocritical and the following exchange ensued,

#24 posted by HarveyBoing , November 20, 2008 2:22 PM

Let’s see:

“i hate bush”

“Dumber than YouTube”

“Bush is the weird pale kid who lives with his grandmother, eats liverwurst sandwiches for lunch every day, and that no one pays any attention to at all”

“an alcoholic, middle aged man desperately looking for approval one last time”

“bush is one of the shittiest leaders we ever had”

But, asking for a break, and making a factual statement about the pro-left bias in this particular CNN report, and I get disemvoweled?

Hey, Antinous…inconsistent much?

Take a look at this

#25 posted by Antinous , November 20, 2008 2:27 PM

Harvey,

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I doubt that you ever will.

Antinous is right, some of us will never get it. And, frankly, I hope I never become the sort of person who does.

Stands for Justice League Unlimited/DC Universe Classics Figures

Mattel’s collector-oriented webstore, MattyCollector.com, is currently selling action figure stands for Justice League Unlimited and DC Universe Classics figures. Those JLU figures are especially a pain in the ass to display, so this is a nice addition. Both are available in 25-packs for $12 plus shipping.

Boston College Drops Student E-mail Accounts

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Boston College has decided to stop offering students e-mail accounts beginning next year. Instead they have set up an e-mail forwarding system, so each student is assigned a Boston College alias that then forwards to whatever personal e-mail system the students are using.

Some of the comments reflect what seems to be the prevailing IT view in academia about university-provided e-mail accounts: if they don’t use the e-mail account we give them, we can’t be sure any e-mails our faculty/administrators send actually reach them.

Which is certainly true. Just as it is true that unless we assign all students on-campus mailboxes that they must check, we can’t be certain any snail mail we send them actually reaches them. And unless assign students to a university-provided voice mail system that they must check on a regular basis, we cannot be certain any phone calls we make to students will actually reach them.

I’ve never understood the rationale for treating e-mail communications any different in this regard from voice/physical mail accounts. Most students would find having to manage a university voice mail/physical mailbox system a major headache, and clearly a lot of students find it annoying to have universities assign them yet another e-mail account they need to check.

Given the budget crunch that many universities seem to be facing, why are they in the student e-mail business at all?