HACkers blog

Changing the World being the preserve of the youth - well, those who can muster the rare combination of idealism and energy required - it would seem appropriate that special attention is paid to student media.

While locally Varsity - currently offline only - has attracted attention to issues such as rape on Campus, and galvanised some action in response, internationally the trend has been mixed - as reported in The Guardian.

But it's not only student newspapers attracting attention: recently the local version of The Globalist glittered into the light of day, and on this very blogspot, disappointed cult followers of some of our very own student blogs are mourning the quiet patch over the vac when no new postings are appearing on The Mouthpiece or Blogball.

Libraries can be very scary places, and librarians can be very scary people. This is one of the myths that the Secret Guild of Librarians seeks to perpetuate by scaring young children at an impressionable age for having the effrontery to want to take a pristine book off a neatly-ordered shelf and peruse it with their daydream-clouded eyes, stuffing the words like marshmallows into over-full imaginations to come tumbling out again as chaos and creativity. Libraries, they want us to believe, are for the Dewey Decimalled, strictly alphabetised among us, humourless as hymnals, solemn as spreadsheets.

But it's all a ploy, really. Librarians just want to keep the Library for themselves - to be first at the newly arrived Harry Potter, to meander through the unbroken order of the shelves, to put on Sherlock Holmes hats and track down obscure references or fleeting facts or the latest tool from Google in PEACE AND QUIET without some sticky first year asking them about the sociolgy assignment that was due last week.

More than anything else - the Mountain, the redwings, Winnie's coffee - it's been the Library that stops me leaving UCT. And, so long as the secret is kept and word doesn't get out that libraries are fun places, really, it's the ideal refuge from overdue budgets and ringing phones and unceasing email. In amongst the ordered shelves, there's still plenty of space to hide.

This must be one of the few places in the universe with rain gutters inside a building. We've stopped short of issuing staff with umbrellas for use inside their offices - still too many negative associations with such things, perhaps.

The internal rain gutters exist thanks to the HEQC. You might wonder what rain gutters have to do with Quality Assurance, and indeed those that notice them, do. But were it not for the HEQC's Accreditation visit to the School of Education having been scheduled during monsoon season, staff in the Humanities Graduate School Building would still be coming to work with aqualungs and wetsuits. Since the installation of the gutters, goggles and snorkel suffice.

It's not that the leaks are new. They date back to... oh, before The Outsourcing, when we still had Building Supervisors to report and follow up on such matters, and a Maintenance Department to collect the pink forms and file them somewhere.

But they're probably not as old as the water features in the Arts Block. Luckily students seem to be increasingly dissuaded from studying languages, which would allow us to remove the electronics from the Language Lab and allow it to turn itself into a large indoor pool. In fact, as an income generating activity, plans were being considered to turn it into a jacuzzi, before the power outages pulled the plug on heating on Campus.

The Beattie Building too has its share of perennial leaks, and Leslie is as soggy as a sponge. But somewhere, unseen, hiding away, must be a dry, leak-proof building within the University holdings.

We suspect it's Bremner....

Public faith in the justice system is not always as robust as it should be, as reaction to the verdicts in the trials of OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson or Wouter Basson would suggest. However, all this is set to change, given the credibility boost the justice system is set to get with the decision by a US judge to settle a dispute with a game of scissors, paper, stone....

According to The Guardian, Google is considering changing its mind on its highly controversial practice of censoring content on its Google.cn search engine. A step forward, perhaps, but merely to recover some of the ground lost with its giant leap backward.

Meantime, Amnesty International and The Observer have launched a campaign to promote freedom on the internet, in protest against the monitoring and suppression of information. Sign the petition, help publish the suppressed fragments and do your bit to make sure that freedom rules on the internet.