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Dorm Storm?
The Ape With No Name writes: "I work as a network technician at a major Southern university and we are gearing up for what is lovingly called "Dorm Storm," aka the weekend the students return to their dorm rooms, ethernet connections and BearShare. We'll move in approx. 3500 students, install and configure 1500 or so network cards and troubleshoot hundreds of circuit, switch and routing problems over the course of the next two weeks (with less than 50 people or so). I was wondering if anybody out in the academic computing community had some advice, stories to relate, yarns to spin for the rest of Slashdot with regard to other universities and their networking for students. You might think you have had a hell of a time setting up machines for users, but this becomes a Sisyphean task when you face a wireless, IP only, Novell setup for a grumpy architecture student on a budget Win2K laptop - one after another after another!"
I'm sure this has happened to a lot of techies out there, but I have to say it, because I was ready to explode with laughter when it happened.
We got a call from one of the new freshmen coming in saying that he couldn't connect to the network. We asked the usual round of questions..."Did you follow the guidelines on the 'Network Instalation' sheet?" "Is everything plugged in...is the network cord plugged from the wall jack to the Network card in your computer?" "Is your computer on and running?" He was getting insulted, because he said he came from a high school that was "pretty high tech, at least compared to here." So, I got sent over as a tech.
I got there, didn't get anything other than the DHCP error messages that said that it couldn't find a network to obtain an IP address. So, I checked the back of the computer quick, saw that things were plugged in, then ran to the room with the hubs to check that his line was connected. It was, and so I ran a line check to make sure it was the correct line. That too passed the test. I didn't hear of any other complaints from anyone else saying that they couldn't connect, so I figured that the NIC was probably bad. I opened up the computer and was about to take out the card when I removed the cable from the NIC, only to notice that it was simple phone cable, not an ethernet cable. I told this to the freshman, and got a "well, it fit in just fine, so it must have been the right cable" response.
As soon as I left his room, I exploded in laughter and laughed all the way back to the CS department.
Yup, that's what antisemitism is about: misunderstood and therefore personalized anti-capitalism. Capital is an abstract relationship, for god's sake, wake up dude, read some Marx.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Troll-monster. I've got fanaies too.