Old York Campus News

This stuff is no longer news but in the interests of using up my disk space I'm keeping it here.

Great Bales of Hay

Not really news now to anyone at York, however, I'll mention it anyway because I find it amusing. In an attempt to stop the continuing environmental collapse of the university lake some large bales of hay are tethered in place at strategic sites around the lake. Apparently, this will discourage algae who cause the lake to smell funny.

A non-artist's impression of the lake yesterday (17th November). Applications for the post of staff-artist should be emailed to the usual address. Please mark your email "Unpaid artist has nothing better to do".
Meanwhile, in a parallel scheme a large table was also spotted floating near the easternmost bales. A spokesman for the table said "Shh great innit? Wesh carried zat table for milesh to do zat." and then staggered off elsewhere.

Frivolity? No thanks.

In a mildly uninteresting statement recently a spokesman for the Physics department said this Web site was "too frivolous" to be part of the Geophysics Server. Particularly criticised were the references to the Physics Department on the Alternate Campus Map. Fortunately, the site had moved from Physics a number of weeks before the complaint so there was no need for me to do anything about it whatsoever. What do you think? Is this web site too frivolous? Should I be getting on with some work instead? Let us know - email to the usual address and please mark it "Don't read this it's frivolous".
A frivolous person, yesterday.

Tower Topples

Recently, York Computing Service's main machine `tower' has been running like one of those similies involving things which run slowly. This was apparently caused by the installation of a new operating system, IRIX 5.2. Although tower has long been unusable for serious work, things have got so bad now that mail and net news are affected. Naturally there's an outcry. The problem has been worsened by Computing Service changing the names of various of their machines causing thousands of spurious nameserver requests to gum up things still further. If you manage your own computer at York then it's seriously recommended that you change the nameserver (resolv.conf on unix box - some foolish place nobody can find under MS-DOS) to something NOT managed by Computing Service.
Although, this is obviously bad news for anyone connecting to tower either for word-processing or to use unix, I would like to take the opportunity to reassure people that I have managed to remain completely unaffected by this problem thanks to having accounts on Ebor and numerous other very fast Silicon Graphics systems. I should manage to remain unaffected as long as Computing Service can keep all those damn undergraduates from using Ebor.
Have you been affected by these problems? We'd like to hear from you if you have. Mail us at the usual address and mark your email "Due to problems with tower email is now so slow that I cannot use it at all."