A couple of weeks back, I was at a loss as to what to get the students to do for a lab exercise on reading and writing files, so I decided to get the students to write some basic (non-personal) information about themselves to a text file.

I had a student come see me today because she's failed the course already. The problem was, she refused to believe me.

I've been marking assignments last week, and I caught some students in my course cheating. At this stage, it looks as though two of them copied another student's partly complete assignment and then turned in almost the exact same project. To cover their tracks, they went to the enormous effort of renaming ONE variable. Just one.

I have been given a new job at work, and I really don't want it. The department's numbers have been rapidly falling and we're in trouble. To try and address the issue, we streamlined our offerings a bit, dumped a few courses (some good, some not), and decided to add a new sexy stage 1 course to lure students into our major, and more importantly, inspire them to continue.

My Dad taught me how to tie my shoelaces when I was about 4. I distinctly remember one day at primary school tying shoelaces for another girl. She didn't know how, and I was quite proud that I did. That's why I was quite shocked to learn a few months ago that I've been doing it wrong for 24 years.

Nothing is more representative of the wedding ceremony than the white dress. It is pretty widely "known" that the white dress symbolises purity & virginity (even if today this is honoured more in the breach than the observance), right?

Bus services just don't run on time in Auckland. My usual experience is that a bus supposed to run every 15 minutes actually means that you wait for 45 minutes and then three come all at once.

Some students need a lesson in manners. There are times when I wonder why I bother doing this at all.

My students are currently trying to implement a CSV import function for an assignment due tomorrow. They have to read lines from a CSV file, split those up into values, strip off any extra quotes, and then use these values to set properties of an object. It's not terribly difficult, but I haven't given them an entire code example that they can just copy and paste to do this. They actually have to figure out some of the logic themselves, and then find some functions to help them. In particular, they have to handle the stripping of quotes and figure out how to ignore the header row.

My family doesn't do Mother's day or Father's day. But for some reason I was thinking about my parents this morning. I realize that this sounds extremely arrogant, but I can't believe what a good job my parents did of raising my brother and sister and I :). Us kids certainly aren't perfect of course, but we have all turned out to be reasonably happy, healthy, well-adjusted, independent adults.