~ sea-ville ~

21 March 2007

auntie erin

tomorrow is Mary’s birthday and she had a little happy-hour get together in her cabin tonight to celebrate. Michael & Mary have sailed before and one of the perks of that is that they live on the 7th deck. Which is very swanky. The Deans have cabins up there as well as the Global Studies Coordinator and the Archbishop. And then the life-long-learners that have paid a lotttttt of money for the privilege. Michael & Mary have a lovely sitting area in their cabin and a great balcony. We hung out on the balcony and watched the sun set. We’ve had many beautiful sunsets, but this one was pretty spectacular. I wish I had my camera on me. We are currently in the middle of the Indian Ocean and are going pretty much due-north. But, it turns out we won’t cross the equator until about 2 am tomorrow morning.

The ship has a program called "extended families" where faculty & staff & life-long-learners "adopt" students. They have birthday parties or game night or dinner together or whatever. Each of the adoptive families has 6 or 7 students. I thought briefly about adopting some students but, frankly, that number was pretty overwhelming. The other night Mary was saying that there were still students needing adoption and she was trying to talk a couple of us into joining the program. I joked that I'd rather be adopted myself. So, Mary & Michael have adopted me too now. Michael has taken to calling me "Auntie Erin" whenever he sees me. Tomorrow night, I’ll meet the rest of my "family" when we celebrate Mary’s birthday with the students.

The internet is still horrid. We also got cut off from the UVA proxy server again. Students are putting in their Internet password into the UVA password box & it fails & then, after many failed attempts, the UVA proxy server thinks it’s getting a denial-of-service attack and they block our IP address. This is the 3rd time this has happened. We’re doing more publicity around here, “password education”, ITC calls it. And ITC is doing things are their end to help their server recognize our IP address. Between the two, it’d be good if something helped. Today, we were back connected to the proxy server but the connection to the Internet is just so horrid that it didn’t matter much. No one is in any kind of mood to do research, it takes so long to send a search & get a result. Before you even try to download anything. They are "asking" students to stop skyping (telephoning or video-phoning, via the computer), because it eats the bandwidth but hard to know if students will actually stop. They keep telling us the ISP company is working on fixing the problem, but there definitely appears to be lack of progress.

Of yesterday’s overdue notices, only one book was still overdue today. And, today, we only delivered 3 overdue notices (two new ones plus a second notice for yesterday). Sad lesson learned: a dash of threatening does actually do a bit of good …