Friday, April 4

Last night I was asleep before 22:00 and woke on my own at about 6:30. I lay in bed for twenty minutes slowly coming to. This was the first time I had done this for as long as I can remember.

Naa was at Kamppi overnight so I am alone at the breakfast table. Irma has put the bag of cereal we bought in Warsaw on the table in case the current cereal finishes. It does, but there is enough in my bowl for today.

Breakfast cereals, in their packaging, change from territory to territory and I find the way they change interesting. I have a collection of Rice Krispie packets, marking the changes in Snap, Crackle & Pop over time and space. I tell myself that this is related to work, but it is actually related to the purposeless curiosity-for-its-own-sake that Auo and I both had very strongly, and I still have.

At Arcada I will spend two and a half hours on the help chatline with HostMonster trying to get the ftp problem sorted out before the CMS class. At 10:15 the ftp will start working and I will race to start the class. At 10:25 I will notice that ftp access has stopped again, give the class a research task, and sit down to chat to technicians for another ninety minutes. At the end I will no longer be comfortable with the idea that the fault is self-evidently at their end. I will have a suspicion that it may be caused by student stupidity, and a pretty clear idea of which particular student is Suspect Number 1.

After lunch we will look at Buddypress in a theoretical and truncated way, because nobody except me will have direct access to an installation. I will leave the class furious, tense and unhappy.

I will then attempt to book my tickets for the trip to Denmark in three weeks to have the idiotic and non-functional booking system that Arcada uses reject every attempt of mine to log in. Tommy will tell me that he had three days of this exact problem when he tried to book his last trip; and the cost of the tickets almost doubled between when he first tried to log on and when he finally got into the site to book.

The travel site has only one advantage over services like ebookers, as far as I can see. Like the invoicing system that Arcada uses (a system that is equally unfriendly and non-functional) it serves as a sterling reminder of what web interfaces used to look like in 1998.

I will eventually give up and arm-wrestle David until he agrees to meet me on Monday to do the booking on his computer, where he can deal with all the issues. Then I will finish off some overdue administration, postpone some more, and leave for home for the weekend.