Blackbored

Just caught up on the news about Blackboard trying to copyright the Learning Management System. It's not April 1st but I suppose it is still the silly season. Unless all this is a clever joke, you might like to join the bandwagon and complain as the idea of heavyweights suing the butt off Moodle, or discouraging people from contributing to its development, is alarming. I thought WebCT was taking them over anyway - so what is this all about? Odd. Anyway, sign the petition, do.

Boldly quizzing

Pete from West Herts asked me how to do surveys in Moodle and that reminded me that I'd left out of Webtools the excellent and really simple free online surveys tool, available, aptly enough, from freeonlinesurveys.com.

Moodle's survey tool I found pretty incomprehensible at first glance, and didn't seem to me to be a survey at all. In fact, I recall using a quiz in the end which seemed more or less the same thing! Rumour has it that Moodle have improved the survey. More when I'm convinced.

Thank heavens for 'Restore'!

Either McAfee or Internet Explorer or both created panic for me on what should have been a blissfully peaceful day. First I got an upgrade invitation from the PC security people. Announced as a 'major upgrade' that would protect my computer from virtually everything other than spilt coffee, and as the firm had produced some stuff I've had good experience with for about eight years, I happily went for the download. Nice interface, all seemed well. Then the installation window said it wouldn't work because I had Adaware and Zonealarm lurking on my hard drive. I'd forgotten all about ZoneAlarm which was a free firewall application I'd used in the days before Microsoft and McAfee had anything. Adaware was great and free and just worked. I liked that but reckoned I could always download it again. Adaware uninstalled itself perfectly. Not so ZoneAlarm, which took a few tries to get rid of sufficiently to convince McAfee that it wasn't functioning any more. So, restarted the installation, which wasn't as obvious a process as it might have been, but it did it's stuff and up came the new service centre (after umpteen restarts to remove the old and start the new!) Whether I liked it or not, McAfee then proceeded to organise my computer, cleaning everything it could lay its hands on which was indeed everything including the parts one wouldn't normally attempt to reach. Took ages. Another restart. For some reason best known to those who know me well I decided that I might as well get the IE7 which, whilst still in Beta form is as close to final version as you can get. As soon as that started installing Microsoft announced that I should disable my antivirus services so I did, which the new McAfee centre loudly objected to but obliged, reluctantly. IE7 continued apace and, after another restart looked good, very good in fact. For a dedicated Firefox user, that was a compliment indeed.

Just in case something had sneaked in while McAfee was disabled I did another scan but all was clear, 278611 items examined later. Now I can't remember if it was then or the next day but the whole world slowed to a crawl. Sites appeared only after several minutes' wait, pictures creeping onto the page just like they used to do in the dial-up days but even slower in my view. That was in Firefox so I tried IE7 but that was no better. I struggled to do what I was in the middle of, restarted, made more coffee, tried cooling the system down, unplugged everything and even went to surf on my son's old machine to see if it was Tiscali on the blink. No, his whizzed away. Lucky he wasn't around to laugh at my plight, or want breakfast, lunch, tea or dinner as I could see this was going to be a long job.

Hoping it would all sort of fix itself, I asked the new McAfee service centre to check and clean. Shouldn't have done that as it presented me with all sorts of pictures and boxes to tick if I wanted them ignored in lists of things that might need attention. You figure that one out. Probably a triple negative.

In the middle of all this I tried to check my mail. No luck. Nothing connected. All accounts had the wrong user names, server addresses or other details. Who'd changed them? Not me.

Finally, I gave up and found just one restore point available - that was odd but I guess McAfee had swept away even those! I went for that anyway and hey presto! All's back to top speed again. The old McAfee program needs to be told what can and cannot access the internet which is a pain and I had to reset all the e-mail logins but they're mostly up and running now.

I may tentatively try one or the other once more but whether I'll have the courage to do both is uncertain. For a while, though, I'll stick with familiar old stuff - not like me normally but I couldn't stand that slow down for any longer!