Although december should be the month with all the good days: graduation of girlfriend, christmas, Sinterklaas(Dutch Santa), New Year and all the freedays, this year it started a little rough: my girlfriends laptop got stolen from her workplace at the university. Which happens regularly it seems but it is quite something, laptop cable lock, closed department with keycard, and you have to walk through a hall which is quite busy. Mainly with traffic from workplace <-> lab, in this time 15 minutes tops, it got stolen. Only the externals where left, including an untouched laptop lock. The nicest thing about it, it isn’t covered anywhere it seems, university will most likely not replace it. Sucks.
Last night we went to the gym and our good friends and safe keepers aka the police wa again giving every student coming from college/gym after dark a fine if their lights weren’t working properly. Lucky us I just replaced all the batteries and wires. 
Winter is coming, days are getting smaller and cycling is my primiary way of getting from A to B. Time to fix 4 bikes for winter. Yes 4, I have 2 and my girlfriend has 2 as well. This is sort of a backup if one gets stolen or breaks down we can still cycle. The stolen part is our main problem here in The Netherlands so we have old bikes to start with so they don’t pull attention but they break sooner.
My two bikes where broken the last 2 months and I didn’t had time or didn’t want to fix them so it was about time. So after 2 days doing it in small steps we have again 3 bikes that are in mint condition so far as old bikes can be and 1 has to go for repairs.
As most Teachers are required to use blackboard I have to go through it on daily basis. What was blackboard thinking when linking stuff together or for better words not linking and making dead ends. The front page doesn’t give the user a update view accept for announcements. The beauty of things teachers get annoyed by it as well.
Wed, Sep 27, 2006 — Button My Grades
The button “My Grades” is back!
After some dreadful clicking around, I managed to recover it.
Tue, Sep 26, 2006 — Marks Exercise 1
I put the marks for Exercise 1 in the Gradebook.
Unfortunately, I deleted the button from the Machines page and I do not (yet) see how to recover it.
Perhaps this works: Click Course Tools and then My Grades.
Well this is from a computer course teacher nice going Blackboard on usability and overall usefulness.
Yesterday evening, I started a course in Ballroom dancing with my girlfriend. It was great fun, a little crowded and warm but great fun. We learned basic steps of the “Quick-step”, very easy as we both did a course before but that was ages ago and with different partner so we decided to start from scratch. Next week we will learn the basic of the “Cha-Cha-Cha”.
I was baking pancakes for lunch with my girlfriend when she suddenly says: “Look the clouds, they have a beautiful pattern.” So we walked to the roofed balcony and started to watch a massive Thundercloud roll in. With the wind coming from the other side of building it was quite nice to see and some times feel the sound as we where not getting wet. As it was raining so hard everything went grey. Read more…