The Digital Dad

Move-In Day for new freshmen at MSU is over. Locals may now exit their homes and resume normal activities.

With the rollout of a new system for ResNet registration and use, it was decided that IS staff should be on-hand Saturday during move-in to assist any folks who were having problems registering and remediating their machines. The new system requires a scan of your PC or Mac every 4 weeks to verify that you have legitimate AntiVirus and AntiSpyware software installed on your machine and that the definitions for those apps are up-to-date. Registering is not a huge deal, and we provide high-end McAfee AV/AS software to students free of charge if they don’t already have a legitimate suite installed. But any time you take 3500+ college students with numerous flavors of Operating System, manufacturer, hardware, etc., all in various states of disrepair and meltdown, you’re going to have some problems. Some machines wouldn’t fully run the scan application, many were still using the 1-year subscription of AV that came with their machine intially years after it had expired and stopped updating, several balked at the “Big Brother”-style mandate of requiring AV/AS software. But by and large, it went well. Of course, I’m certain most students hadn’t actually sat down and plugged in their PCs by 5 o’clock last evening, when we broke for the day, and I fully expect full-blown riots in the streets come Monday morning when thousands of students have been unable to triage their own setup and have been without internet access for an entire day.

And of course, by internet access I mean the one and only website they cared about getting to on Saturday. Webmail? No. Blackboard? No. Google? Are you kidding? — Facebook. — 3500 students back on campus for the first time in 3 months, many for the first time ever, and what do they want to do? Sit in their rooms and Facebook.

Ruddy kids. Get a frisbee.