Here I am on the Auld Sod of my Alma Mater, the campus of Indiana University – Bloomington, sitting in the corner of my wife’s graduate class in the Dick Enberg* Distance Learning Studio in the HPER building. (link, scroll to bottom)
She won a scholarship for next year and had to come down and get her picture taken for the “wall of fame”, so she decided to actually attend her class meeting while she was at it. And naturally I got talked into chauffeuring her.
IU’s computer network has become unbelievably locked-down since I worked at IUPUI back in the early ’90s. Back then you could plug in just about anywhere there was an Ethernet jack and get logged in. Now you have to jump through a bazillion hoops…so I said “Fuck it” and fired up my phone’s hotspot instead.
It seems like IUB is trying its damnedest to make the campus vehicle-unfriendly, so I wonder why they don’t just close the campus to private vehicles altogether, build parking garages on the perimeter, and buy a fleet of trolleys or buses or something to move people around.
Truly glad I probably don’t have to come back down here until she graduates in a couple of years…
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* FWIW, I am not shitting you…Dick Enberg is a graduate (MS and PhD) of IU School of HPER, and apparently he kicked in a donation for this lovely distance learning room in 1999. It does not look anything like this picture anymore; it’s been significantly upgraded, and they’ve just gotten a major grant to upgrade it more. The huge ceiling mikes are gone, replaced with a bunch of tiny “mikes on wires” hanging from the ceiling; the TVs have been upgraded to 60″ plasmas; the red chairs are gone, replaced with grey roller chairs that are probably a lot easier to move around (if, alas, no more comfortable) than the red ones were. They’ve also replaced the tables with grey ones that match the chairs. Oh, and I didn’t see Dick Enberg’s Emmy anywhere in the room.