Today was my first day back for the spring term. I didn’t have to teach today, only advise. I’ve always considered myself pretty poor at advising, but I had several students today — all of whom I think I was able to help.

It seems like the only difficulty I really have at advising is the technology. Not only is Banner a difficult system to use — it’s on this archaic mainframe that’s cryptic at best — it is not available for the Mac. It’s a web-based system run on Java, but for some reason it is not compatible with Mac. I’ve tried to find out why, since the old version worked fine. Ever since the “upgrade” last summer, it’s been broken.

So I end up having to go to the conference room to use this Gateway from the middle ages. I was told by tech support that it’s SCT — the makers of Banner — who do not support Macs. Really? Tell me: how difficult would it really be? Especially since it worked in the last version. Sounds a bit anti-competitive to me, especially since one of the reasons for developing in Java is for compatibility.

So, how about it, SunGard?