Caution: The following post was brought on by extreme frustration, as such it is highly unlikely to be terribly enjoyable reading, although it might actually be a bit more interesting than my usual blather.

ARGH! People who cannot run computers should NOT be made graduate level EE professors. Let 'em teach philosophy or something where not using comptuers could be thought of as a virtue. The subject of this rant is actually in general a fairly decent professor, until it comes to the whole information-transfer-over-the-web stuff, which is not a good weak spot for prof who would rather lecture to an empty room than come to main campus. We'll start with least annoying first: the syllabus doesn't say anything about where course information might be found on the internet. Turns out that it's all on Blackboard, so this isn't a big deal, but it'd be nice to say something about that (particularly as every other ECE professor I've had has preferred to use their own website, so that this is the first semester I've ever used Blackboard). Ok, so, figured that out, no big deal. Gripe #2: apparenly he's never heard of pdf's. Everything is saved in Microsoft Office - which I don't have yet. Now, the .doc files are no big deal, they actually look just fine in my text editor. However the homework solutions are saved as PowerPoint files, which do not open in text editor, or anything else as far as I know. So, grumble grouch grumble, I move over to Julia's computer since she's not using it at the moment. Open the ppt and guess what? Gripe #3: He took his scanned images of the handwritten solutions and put them on the slides SIDEWAYS! Now, as far as I can tell, Microsoft never really thought anyone would want to rotate slides - and I mean really, why would you? So that you can lay your projector on its side for variety?? So, I've got two options, I can tip Julia's monitor on its side (which i think she might not like so much) or I can go downstairs and print the dumb things out (hey, what's another coupla trees, right?). So, I trek down to East basement, where I discover Gripe #4: Half of the pages were either scanned or saved so badly that they're not legible, and a fourth of the ones that are legible, were scanned all cock-eyed, so that the corners are cut off... whole bits of the problems just gone. At which point, I just want to give up. "I don't care" is just written too large over all of these sheets, it's hard to convince me that I should care when the prof so obviously doesn't - but I can't start thinking like that, because I'm the one who has to be tested on this junk. At the very least, he could have made sure that we got our homework assignments back before the test so that we'd at least have those to work off of. Ok, just had to get that all off of my chest, back to the grindstone.