mark roseman
Internet collaboration software and more.
Elvis Fathered my 699 Class... and other stories
It all started innocently enough, really. You pick up a few supermarket tabloids, you know, just browsing at the checkout stand. Then you buy one once. Then another. And another. Pretty soon you just can't stop. All the while your half-senile metaphysics professor is babbling on about how he'd like to retire to Florida and go work for the tabloids... David Hume would surely approve.And thats when thoughts start creeping into your brain. Particularly, say, after grading a bunch of written assignments submitted by senior undergraduate students who clearly don't have a clue about such foreign concepts as, oh, grammar and spelling. And you see an article in the Weekly World News about a teacher (somewhere in the deep south States, God bless 'em) who shot a student after they mispelled a word. Well, you really just can't resist using that as part of a presentation to your class, now can you?
The worst was probably an entire presentation, using faked Weekly World News slides, complete with wonky title, bylines, photos, and so on. At the very least it did keep the audience awake, and they didn't lock me up after. It was quite entertaining, but I'm not about to scan the entire set of slides. They are all proudly displayed, along with a fine selection of "legitimate" articles, on the wall of our lab however. So if you happen to be in Calgary...
The scan below was the intro slide for one class presentation I gave. David was of course the class professor, but bearing a close resemblance to John Cleese, does also have a good sense of humour about things like that. Tom, one of the students, was unfortunately the butt of a number of jokes regarding his tendency to inhale large quantities of doughnuts. I dare say that not a single presentation after mine could be complete without another such reference. I ended up hiring Tom when I worked at ISA, so he also appears in the play about software development.
