Blackboard down 28 hours in fall semester

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN – In a report issued today from Gerry McCartney, Purdue’s Vice President for Information Technology & CIO, Blackboard was out of commission for nearly 28 hours during the fall 2008 semester at the West Lafayette campus.

Blackboard is an online system allowing instructors to distribute course materials, communicate with students, post grades and administer online quizzes, among other things.  However, when the website is down, these materials are inaccessible, leaving many students and instructors frustrated with the loss of productivity.

Ben Holmes, a Purdue IT support specialist who works with Blackboard, wrote in an e-mail in mid-November that the system “has been less reliable lately than we would wish.  We are in direct contact with the company [Blackboard Inc.] by phone in an effort to prevent future problems.”

McCartney's report on Blackboard outages total nearly 28 hours of lost productivity during the fall 2008 semester (click to enlarge)

The source of these problems is the sheer number of students trying to access the site.  Purdue, with over 50,000 students and instructors across four campuses, is the largest client of Blackboard.  McCartney explains that “as is the case with much system-level software, scale is an important determinant of stability.”

What is being done to address the problem?  McCartney has spoken frankly with the CEO of Blackboard, Inc. about the university’s need for a reliable service.  “Our issues are not yet resolved but we expect Blackboard to be fully engaged in the resolution of issues as they continue to emerge,” he said in an e-mail.

McCartney has an annual salary of $264,000.

COMMENTARY:  McCartney, since his hire in 2006 has pressed too hard for the implementation of a fully integrated system across the four campuses.  I do not understand his desire for everyone to be on the same system.  There are many unique challenges faced by a computer system when 50,000 people try to gain access, and Blackboard is not capable of delivering the reliability we need, as evidenced by this most recent outage report.

I do not believe that uniformity should be placed before reliability.  If Blackboard continues to have reliability issues (and McCartney has given no reason to believe this will change any time soon), the IT department at Purdue (ITaP) should not push instructors away from the smaller systems they’re used to.  This pressure to get all courses onto Blackboard seems to be coming through the dislocation of resources which helped instructors learn other available course management systems such as YACS, a system used by several departments at Purdue including agriculture, pharmacy, nursing and health sciences, which has no reliability issues that I am aware of.  I am a strong opponent of the integration of systems when the chosen system to use does not have the resources to adequately meet our needs.

The full Fall 2008 Vista Outage Report can be found here in PDF format.  For the report formatted in Microsoft Excel, please e-mail me.

Big 10 rumor

School has been busy/sometimes not busy. Blah blah blah. Ten bucks says you’re not interested.

However, I want to let you in on one of the rumors that has been flying around the Big 10. Due to the current state of the economy, universities are hemorrhaging at the seams. Purdue’s doing pretty bad, from what I hear (not just on the gridiron). Interestingly, my sources close within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (which happens to be doing better than us, by the way), tell me that Illinois is seriously considering taking extreme measures to cut costs temporarily. They are in talks to delay the start of the spring semester by 2 weeks! This would minimize heating/energy, maintenance, etc. costs during the coldest parts of the year.  How crazy is that — a 5 week Christmas break? Since Purdue is doing worse, I’m hoping we at least get the same! That’s like 10 snow days in a row!! Party at my place!!! (kidding)

Oh, by the way, my old organic chemistry professor just cured SARS.

of golf and holes

Troy, this one’s for you…  Thanks for the text today bro!

Yeah, I know it’s been a long time, but you have to trust me that it is for the better.  Anything I would have said prior to today would have just been venting out of frustration.  Of late, it seems that I am just playing the role of the Vicodin police.  Which, whatever, is kind of my job, but I’ve been letting my frustrations slip into my real life.  Take this article I saw on Purdue’s homepage.  (Just so you know if you’re not familiar, only the biggest news stories from Purdue get posted on the front page.)  Let me quote the first line of the story:

Golfers who play well are more likely to see the hole as larger than their poor-playing counterparts, according to a Purdue University researcher.

This for some reason absolutely infuriated me last week.  I haven’t even read the entire article because it is completely uninteresting and would only make me more mad.  I had to stop reading after a quote from this psychologist chick Jessica Witt,

We know a relationship exists between performance and perception, but we are uncertain how they affect each other. For example, do golfers see the hole as bigger so they putt better? Or if they putt better, does that mean they see the hole as bigger? I believe it is a cyclical relationship, but more studies are needed to clarify if one affects the other.

WHO THE HELL CARES?  Why is this news?  Am I alone in thinking that no more studies need to be done on this?  Is this how my tax dollars are spent?  I am stunned that the National Institutes of Health funded this garbage, when I know these funds could be used for research that actually matters.  While writing about this story, I stumbled upon a graphic which was to be included in the University News Service story to help clarify this incredibly difficult concept of the cyclical relationship between performance and perception, but was edited from the final publication at the last minute.  This is a Ternary Complex exclusive:

So I’ve got this idea that Jessica Witt is so self-righteous that she Googles herself on a weekly basis, so my guess is here in a few days I’m going to get a nasty e-mail from her or one of her MUF (Masters in Ultimate Frisbee) students telling me to take this down.

You see what I mean?  I warned you I become mean-spirited when I get frustrated.  Maybe I’m not as calmed down as I thought I was.  Either way, YouTube has become my safeplace.  I love spending hours on there just seeing where the related videos take me.  People can be so creative and goofy.  I love it!

The thing about work which frustrates me is that I spent all this year learning about how to best serve, educate, and manage a proverbial entity called “the patient.”  All the profs say, “when treating your patients…” or “be sure to educate your patient that…”  And we as students naturally tend to envision our grandmas as this proverbial “patient.”  I scoured over my notes for hours on end every single day of the year trying to learn as much as I possibly could to be the most help to this “patient.”  But then I talk to these drug-seekers like the lady who called the pharmacy today on three separate occasions to ask three different people when Medicaid would pay for her “Vico-dans” next, or the opiate-addicts who I’m supposed to feel good about because I’m replacing their heroin use with Suboxone addiction, and my idealism is chipped away little by little.

I race home to the quietude of YouTube or my book.  I listen to Steve P.’s sermons and get so excited about the fall that I start dancing.  I long for the day that I get regular again (yes, I’m talking about my bowels here).

There’s a recurring theme that Dostoevsky keeps bringing up about life, which I discovered several months ago on my own.  I’ll be able to write about his interpretation of it a bit later, but I want to quickly introduce my ideas on it to you now.  It’s the idea that in order to find anything important to you in life, you have to lose it first by knowingly giving it up – that you have to fall to the lowest of lows before you can start your climb to redemption.  I remember well my lowest day.  It was Saturday, January 26, 2008.  I’m nearing my 6 month mark of a rocky, but gradual climb.  I have much to be thankful for, and little to be frustrated about, even though it takes a reminder every once in a while.  I’m really growing in my faith, and am very excited about the new push at Northview for “Living a Life on Loan” in service to those in my community.

Coming soon (if I get to it):  a review of Lafayette Civic Theater Under the Stars and another video!

flashing 12:00’s

My brother’s in Santa Monica and my sister’s in DC, so I’m a little bored.  Visits to my site are way down, so I guess that means it’s time for an update!

Last week was Bible School, so I didn’t have a chance to update.  Now, not a whole lot is going on.  The power has gone out in this house so many times the last few weeks.  So I’ve been pretty busy resetting all the clocks and everything.  I can’t stand to have any flashing 12:00’s.  Resetting clocks is one of my hidden talents.

On Tuesday, I went up to Purdue to register for wine tasting this fall.  (I have to refine my palate before my big move to California.)  As I was doing that, I ran into Dr. A— and he said he’d help me get a residency there.  And when that man says he’ll do something, he makes sure it gets done.  I think it was a phone call from him that got me in pharmacy school in the first place.  I promise, if that man were any nicer, well, I don’t even think that’s possible so I don’t know where I’m going with this.

That night, Ryan and I were sitting on the front step being eaten alive by all the mosquitos (thanks Mitch…), and Ryan mentions, “It’s so funny how differently our minds think.”  And it’s true, but I love it.  We do have radically different approaches to thinking about things.  And I was just thinking how crazy it is that two people whose lives are so different could somehow converge into the same city on the same front step.  It’s all such an amazing Plan!  For the first time ever I’m actually really excited about living arrangements for next year.  Ryan has hard core arranged his room and it looks really good.  Everything matches and it has a very rustic New England feel to it, I think, complete with lobster cage.  It (almost) makes me want to put at least one chair in my room to make it a little more inviting.  But even if his whole room didn’t match his bedspread, I’d still be just as excited.

And while I’m thinking about it, I want to mention one of my pet peeves.  I can’t stand it when people say the phrase “this next.”  It really annoys me.  OK, I just googled that phrase, and I’m going to use this sentence as an example:  “The Gibbon won the G-race to be our engineering mascot for this next release, but it was a close run.”  Which release are you talking about?  This release, or the next one?  They’re two different releases!  But so frequently people use the phrase “this next” when they can just say “next.”  It’s redundant!  I don’t know why this bothers me, but it does.

And you officially know I’m between semesters because… I have to go to the dentist tomorrow.  Meh