You may have seen my recent rant about the University of Reading’s e-mail software. I got so fed up, in fact, that I decided to do something about it.

That something was to “migrate” my University e-mail to Google Mail. With a release a few months ago, Google gave Mail the complete toolset you need to get it to act as a mail client for your Uni account – seamlessly. This wasn’t the only reason, though – with a Google account, the mail and contacts sync much better with my Nexus One.

Here’s how I migrated so you can too – in about 15 minutes.

I was always under the impression that part of the point of University was to help get people ready to go out into the real world and make a contribution to society.

I can’t help but thinking that the University is trying to not help us in its use of mail software.

“Prayer” (the name of the service, and also what we regularly do when we need to receive an important e-mail) seems to have recently been re-branded as an IT Services thing, but it originally started out as an open-source project at the University of Cambridge.

I’m almost fairly certain that it would never ever be used in a corporate environment. Here’s why.

On Friday I posted some photos of the University of Reading’s London Road campus, which I had entered in a competition (still time to vote! Search for Chris A or University of Reading – the competition site is terrible).

They were the nice, shiny, red brick side of the London Road campus.

As I went off in search of more unique and slightly more abstract photos, I came across what seemed to be another world shielded by the manicured bushes and neat paths.

A few weeks ago, the Microsoft Student Rally was brought to my attention – a photography competition for students to capture photos of their favourite places at their University.

The idea is to take some stills of the best bits of your campus, put them online for everyone to see, and win some pretty awesome prizes at the same time.

For other competitions like this, you can become a fan of Microsoft Student on Facebook.

Check out my photos below. You can also vote for my entry if you like them! (Just search for Chris A or University of Reading – the competition site is terrible!!)

I took a contrasting set, showing the other side of the University, which I will also publish in the next few days.

Blackboard is an academic tool, used by hundreds of educational establishments worldwide. It is a highly adaptable, extensible database back-end and web interface front-end.

On paper it is quite simply phenomenal, in practice however I suspect it’s the worst ‘web-app’ designed by man. Hit the link to find out why.