Poodle training sessions are always full of suspense. Our school version of Moodle has been in place for some four years now, from an abandoned desktop converted to Linux in a corner of the server room, via several hosted servers, finally to return to the same server room clad in Starwars armor-plating in a choice of Dell colors (black).
These last few days there’s been a slight sense of urgency, particularly among the teachers who were non-starters a year ago when our bandwidth was so bad it was challenging to open even an email. Now we have a fully funcional service and dozens of brand new laptops (black) ready to be switched on. Let ‘em roll.
As the willing teachers type their class content and boldly strike their Enter keys you can imagine the excitement and apprehension as they await the proof they have followed all the steps and are about to be rewarded with a beautifully formatted page, ready to be pushed to a world of learners.
Freeze.
At that moment, deep inside the memory of Microsoft, in a far-away galaxy, bits and bytes are stirring. A new laptop has just been spotted and the installed version of Windows (XP) hasn’t been switched on since the truckload of computers was delivered, checked, imaged and stored ready for school opening. Now the machine is turned back on and the hills are alive with Windows updates. As many as twenty of them are jostling their way through the processor to rush to the surface in a race to outdo each other and stamp out erroneous code we had all been living with for years.
You’d think the poor teacher would be thankful Microsoft was taking care of his/her machine.
Freeze.
Inevitably the response is – what am I doing wrong?
Answer – trying to work when your operating system is trying to right its wrongs.
Answer – returning from vacation before your computer has done just that.
Answer – opening a box as unpredicable as Pandora.
Solution?
Turn on computer, stand back and take a couple of days extra vacation. The sun is out, the sky is blue, the Rock en Seine Festival is days away just down the street from school. If you go back to your laptop you’re going to say nasty things to it.
Tomorrow sees all our new students arriving at school and we’ll be greeting them and welcoming them to our special learning community. Let’s hope our own human operating systems won’t be interrupted by system messages.
uarter-notes are rather like apples – round with stems, easy to count up in sets and pack away without dropping a beat. Apples, like music, have all the ambiguity of a simple phrase that may lead to more than just a basic cadence.