HACkers blog

The recent debacle over changing the governance structure at Oxford has prompted the inevitable question “Why fix what isn’t broken?” It’s really refreshing to note that here at UCT we have quite a different approach – perhaps best summarised as “Why fix what is broken?”

And so, every winter the Language Lab in the basement of the Arts Block is transformed into an indoor swimming pool, each February They find new ways to increase the pain of Reg Week, and the half-life of a parking bay is now estimated at five minutes.

And we now have a Substantive Agreement ending a wage dispute which starts off endorsing exactly that which is broken and led to the dispute in the first place, and a new email system that is even flakier than the last.

Still, it's reassuring for many that all this neoliberal discourse of efficiency and sustainability is just talk, and that things remain comfortably the same in fundamental ways.

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That glimmer of a free press that flickers across our radar from time to time, Varsity, recently carried a a report on the dismissal of a staff member.

Now, it's not every day that staff members get dismissed, and one can understand that that makes it newsworthy enough to headline the front page of Varsity - which it no doubt would have done, had the strike not stolen that honour. But in an environment in which incompetence is widely held to lead to promotion rather than dismissal, enquiring minds were keen to establish quite what the grounds were which led to this outcome.

The staff member in question had been the subject of many allegations in the past - none of which had resulted in dismissal, the steps between "allegation" and dismissal obviously being many and confidential - and so it was great interest that greeted news of his dismissal.

The grounds, according to the report, were "abusing his position of trust and the misappropriation of funds" - accusations which are now the subject of a CCMA appeal.

Other people have in the past been dismissed for misappropriating funds - otherwise known as stealing, fraud, or being caught with fingers in the petty cash. "Misappropriating funds" by spending large amounts foolishly on white elephants apparently doesn't fall into this catgegory.

But... "abusing his position of trust"? That's a tweaky thought. It assumes, among other things, that a relationship of trust exists, and that there is use, ill use and abuse possible thereof.

Now, many staff who are employed on conditions other than academic - and even some employed on academic conditions - are at great pains to lament the absence of a relationship of trust. They feel that their comings and goings are watched and noted, their lives under constant scrutiny and their output measured - even when this is cognitively ridiculous - reducing them to little more than assembly line workers. How does one abuse such a "position of trust"?

There has long been a suspicion that disability is underreported among staff at UCT. During recent strike action, this was proven to be the case. The purple car of a certain Executive Director was found parked in a Disabled Bay outside the Bremner Building (and not very well parked, at that!).

And while staff are very pleased to note the higher visibility being given to issues of disability by this "coming out", concern was mooted that the action didn't quite go as far as it could have. People are waiting on some clarification as to the nature of the ED's disability, in the hope that it will serve as a positive role model for others with similar disabilities.

Meantime, speculation is rife. Top contenders for the disability in question are severe short-sightedness, total paralysis and chronic mental health problems... though it's noted that if the latter, there may be a sudden rush on Disabled Bay stickers by some other members of the SLG too.

I appreciate the need for spin, to recover from a strike, honestly I do. I understand that loss of face needs to be obfuscated and dignity scraped back together, and a smiling face presented to the outside world, so as not to frighten the children unduly.

But the substantive agreement between the UCTEU and UCT Management truly boggled what's left of my mind.

Way back in my undergraduate days I took a course in Philosophy, and was duly taught that one criticises an argument, or a philosophy, based not on whether or not one likes it, but in terms of its own logical consistency or otherwise. Most arguments contain the seeds of their own collapse through internal contradictions, and the Recognition Agreement (see below) is a wonderful illustration.

Exposure to Philosophy as an undergraduate has scarred me for life. I am incorrigibly pedantic, and insistent on such trivia as moral integrity and logical consistency. This latter character flaw obliged me to separate my emotional from my cognitive responses to the strike, resulting in my resignation from the Union.

I'm relieved to see that deep within the warrens of Bremner, there are some with no such qualms.

Thus we have, in para 2.1, a sycophantic genuflection at the altar of the Council Ratified Remuneration Principles.

And in para 2.2, a complete undermining of them.

I'm glad someone in Bremner is happy to live with this, because it allowed the agreement to be reached. But I just wish that they wouldn't pretend that the rest of us are too stupid to notice the glaring contradiction. Or perhaps, they think, too dazzled by the dizzying success of the strike to care?

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The nice thing about the strike, outcomes aside, was its educational value.

As an educational institution, teaching and learning is our stock in trade, so it's really pleasing to see educational by-products from what could have been quite a nasty business.

* Some people learned to toyi-toyi. For age, class, or colour reasons, this wasn't a skill distributed evenly throughout the staff body before the strike.

* Some people learned about appropriate dressing. Even Trinny and Susannah couldn't have advised on sensible dressing for sun, wind and camera-angles. Particularly if bridges are involved.

*Some people learned to read. In the absence of anyone on hand to explain things to them, they actually had to read what was printed out and pasted up on the notice board. And in the absence of anyone to object to, they had to comply with the instructions. It was just a pity that, because of the strike, there wasn't anyone around to record those moments for posterity.

And most importantly, I think,

* Some people learned what their staff actually do. Some HODs and managers found themselves face-to-face with the students, colleagues and logistical demands that their staff face every day, and had to deal with it. How on earth do you appraise someone's performance if you haven't a clue what it is they actually do? Well, that's one less thing to worry about, because many people have now gotten a glimpse of that.

Just as well, as it's That Time Of Year when those appraisals are going to be needed...

MySpace has won the case, having been sued by the family of a 13 year old girl allegedly sexually assaulted by a 19 year old she met on MySpace. The girl's family allege that MySpace should somehow have protected the girl by verifying the age of the boy who allegedly sexually assaulted her.

I'm not sure why they stopped at suing MySpace. Why not the manufacturer of the PC she used too, the manufacturer of the Operating System it ran and the chipset it contained - and why not, too, the provider of the telephony / broadband service which connected her to the internet, and their ISP? And, while they're at it, the electricity supplier, the bank with whom their bond is lodged for supplying the premises, and - hey, why not - God for creating the weather that day that enabled her to go online without being carted off to the land of Oz by a tornado to dance with Munchkins?

Surely someone, somewhere, advised her family that the providers of a service can't be responsible for the use someone makes of that service? If I use an electric carving knife to slit my throat, can my family sue Eskom for providing the electricity? Why should ICTs be different?

Do parents really feel so disempowered by technology that they ascribe it deistic power over themselves, their children, the moral universe - or are they just too lazy to spend the time with their kids, giving them the kind of life skills that equip them to make sensible decisions about the way to lead their lives - in whatever situation, with or without a computer present?

At least the judge had the sense to rule as s/he did....

Comments are switched off on Metablog, so let me use this space for a grovelling apology. Never, never, ever again will I call Stephen Marquard an unromantic thing, for interrupting Valentine's blogging endeavours.

(Is that OK, Stephen? You really don't need to break the whole MySQL database next time, to prove the point.... )

:p

But on a more sublime note - why have the two most important people on Campus not received so much as a single flower, a chocolate or a card? Winnie and Chantelle double-handedly (well, OK, they have four hands between the two of them) keep the morale on Campus at functional levels through the steady supply of caffeine (and horse mufffins for certain ICTS types) and _no one_ has plundered the Fuller Gardens, or stripped the strelitzias from Bremner, or even beaten a chocolate out of the machines to acknowledge them!

Sad, sad, sad.

So Romance really is dead....

Perhaps anyone who's working on Campus after 8pm on a Friday deserves it, but the outage was nonetheless irritating.

And the fact that the mag locks on emergency exits remained open all weekend afterward raised questions about how observant the security patrols are. If we still have those.

One would think, though, that security doors standing open all weekend would trigger an alarm somewhere. Well, they might... if the company had worked out how to programme the move from seven digit to ten digit telephone numbers into their system. Telkom's been threatening that for more than two years, and they've still not got a solution? Well, lucky then that our thieves are even more stupid, and missed the opportunities last week presented.

But still, it seems this may soon be a thing of the past:

(thanks, JayPee)

Oh, and any rumours that Eskom has recommended that the National Anthem be replaced with "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend" lack truth. That song is, in fact, called The Sound of Silence. And judging by the screams from Fuller during Friday's outage, not very appropriate.

 

A novel strategy for solving problems has emerged from within the ranks of ICTS. Rather than fixing a problem, one asks that it be fixed, and then closes the call. Gone, vanished, problem solved.

Presumably at some point the person with the problem realises that it has yet to go away, at which point they're free to log another call, which may or may not be solved in the same way.

It's a brilliant strategy, and one can only wonder why the President hasn't made use of it before. Next time the DA whinges about crime, say, he could simply turn to one of the suits next to him, ask that the problem be dealt with, and then turn back to the DA and smilingly assure them that the problem no longer exists.

There's no end to the social problems that could be addressed in this way. Poverty, job creation, domestic violence, overcrowded prisons, fraud... The Government's call sheet could be looking really impressive with ticks everywhere.

And if people persisted in logging new calls when they felt the other ones were not adequately resolved - well, they could always opt for permanently busy telephone lines, too...

The King of Confusing Communication on packaging is undoubtedly Woolies, but the Marcel's Wild African Cream Liqueur frozen yoghurt is a serious pretender.

The flavour - as the packaging happily tells you, is Wild African Cream Liqueur, with Almond Nougat. The list of ingredients attests to the presence of almonds. Perhaps I'm botanically naive, but I'd always understood that almonds were nuts, unlike peanuts which are legumes.

Why then was there an additional warning claiming that the product may contain traces of "nuts or tree nuts"? And... nuts grow on trees. Which makes that sentence just a little redundant. A bit like claiming that a bottle of Karoo Rain bottled water may contain water or H2O. Or Cerebos table salt may contain salt or sodium chloride.

But then, the product also happily advised, the content was approximately 1% alcohol. That's just under a quarter the strength of beer. So eating a sufficiently large helping of that frozen yoghurt could obviate the need to intoxicate oneself on the bloating liquid... which might also explain the communication confusion on the packaging.

(Perhaps they should write the packaging blurb before excessive consumption of the contents? Just a thought...)

... is the theme of a recent Comment is Free posting. Predictably, as trolling posts do, it drew the battle lines sharply, and exposed the limits to sense of humour on both sides.

The main thrust of arguments can be summed up as:

Macs:

Look better

Work better

Play better

Make you a better (smarter, cooler, sexier) person

PCs:

Run more stuff

Can be tinkered with by anyone who wants - wisely or not

Had two-button mice before Macs did.

It all seems fairly arb, but generates a great deal of passion on both sides. I suppose in these post-nationalist days (well, everywhere but the US) people need some identity flag to rally behind, and religion doesn't do it for too many people any more.

In the interest of promoting better communication in these days of fallible email systems, the latest neologisms, below. (More)

Apparently the Creditors Section down at Bremner burned down last night.

Entirely coincidentally after a meeting had reported that salary negotiations for 2007 remained deadlocked, after the CCMA attempt at conciliation proved futile.

Enquiring minds want to know, however, why the Electrical Fault didn't wait until midnight tonight when the price of petrol is set to drop, to achieve a more thorough result?

Orientation week, with its bright-eyed intake that seems to get younger each year, brings with it all kinds of interesting diversions.

One is a flurry of unaccustomed politeness as the shiny new freshers still please-and-thank you, and squirm in obeisance when asking for directions to the cloakrooms, or help in solving their "treasure hunt" questions like "what does UDMS stand for?" or "what are the Library's opening hours?"

Another is the strange metamorphosis you see in students who'd been perfectly normal last year - who've suddenly been reborn as american cheerleaders, bouncing around trying to excite the freshers about the prospects of a year on this hallowed ground on intellectual endeavour.

And then there's the aesthetic assault. Whoever imagined that an O-Week Tshirt could be quite so, well, urgly? Eish! If one is going to offend the Ninja Turtles, why not do them all at once, rather than picking off just one of them for special discrimination?

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Having posted this, I should not really have been surprised to arrive home on Friday to a house in darkness. Well, not darkness entirely - despite having stopped at the gym on the way home, I arrived home before sunset and found ample light outside in the garden to read my Weekly Mail.

The drifting smell of woodsmoke alerted me to the contingency plans neighbours had made for supper, but the last red meat my freezer had seen was the lost Antarctic explorer eternally frozen into one of the glaciers in its depths - together with a host of forgotten, sun-stretched casette tapes and a hard drive or two.

Besides, when one is in the mood for decent curry, nothing else will do!

And so, I went in search of the Mr Delivery menu, to see if there were curry purveyors somewhere, who might just have had enough electricity to complete their culinary adventures before blackout, and discovered that the teenagers who'd had the house to themselves during my wanderings over the sea had moved the candles from their normal, easy to find, location.

And the batteries in the torches - all of them - were flat.

There were spare AA batteries though - the wrong size for the iPod speakers, which needed AAA - and so I scratched out a light that required AA batteries.

At which point the power came back on.

Ah well - I'm off for a surf; that doesn't need any electricity...