First of a series....

..here we will be tackling 'assumed software'.

I know that sounds vague but trust me it is no more vague than some of the syllabi I have encountered. It is also the thing that is on my mind as of this moment and is also of paramount importance to the poor prospective student.

Here is what has me nearly up in arms tonight. Very close to physically acquiring a gun and hunting down an instructor or two, actually. The system is so skewed to the use of certain programs that if you don't have access to these packages the message you seem to get is essentially get lost you poor piece of shit. Specifically, while trying to access a proprietary format 'powerpoint' presentation. Here is the thing, while I appreciate standards, I can't seem to find any benefit in relying on a closed standard. The fact that I should be required to use an overly expensive piece of software from a gluttonous corporation such as micro$uck just to review an instructors class notes basically infuriates me. Why in the hell would a public university or a local community college (that supposedly caters to poorer or less fortunate students) allow their faculty to distribute course material in a proprietary format that is not usable on an open and free platform? It boggles the mind. And while I can't access the instructors material, unless I use a school machine with the needed software, I am here bitching about it. Good use of time no?

Another aspect of that is that most of the classes I have taken so far distribute there text documents in either word or powerpoint. And while most M$ systems come with works (the el cheapo version of word) and you can get a powerpoint viewer for free it is just utterly retarded for public institutions to rely on private sector proprietary systems and virtually force their students to incur more debt to acquire full versions of these packages. If also occurs to me that many of my fellow class-mates may not know about the 'el cheapo' versions or the availability of free viewers. Hell on my first trip to the bookstore last year I had a guy in front of me buying a copy of Word '07 because he just had to have it to do class work. Not only was it a third more expensive than he could have bought from other vendors (trust me I will get to the bookstore bullshit soon) it was also a 'student' version which is about half crippled right out of the box. Seriously fuck the bookstore and the system that lets them operate a legal scam(again trust me I will get to these fuck faces).

It would be easier, in a sense for these places to use PDF as the universal university format. At least there is a easily recognized and well known PDF reader available for free and there is virtually no system that doesn't have it to begin with. That doesn't really solve my current problem but at least I would be able to view the shit my instructor wants me to know without jumping through a bunch of ridiculous hoops. My current problem is that even though my homework is available on PDF, it isn't editable in it's native form unless you have the Pro version. So what am I and most people in this class to do? Buy the pro version? Print out the pages, work out the problems, scan it back in and then email it? Or what. The system is just fucking retarded and so are the people that play into this, which brings me to a final point...

Yesterday, the first day of class for the term, I talked to another student and asked him where he got his book. He said he got it from the bookstore. BIG FUCKING MISTAKE. I paid 12 bucks for the text on Amazon and he paid over ten times as much for the same thing. His reasoning was that he didn't want to fill out paper work to get reimbursed after the fact and it 'didn't matter anyway since the government was paying anyway.' I could of strangled this fuckhead but then I realized it wasn't really his fault and he didn't know any better. And that is the topic for my next rant. And oh boy will this be a big steaming pile of ranty goodness.

See you soon.

Cheers