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February 16, 2006
Alas poor Communication, I knew him well.
I frequently accuse myself of being lazy. I rarely take umbrage at this, knowing it's all in good fun. Despite my more sedentary tendencies, I attempt to give it the 'ole college try whenever I geek-speak to a client. There exists certain vernacular that is associated with our crew that I do not expect the rank and file user to have in their word-a-day calendars. Whenever services are suspended, interrupted or otherwise unavailabe to the Campus at large, an email notification is usually sent out detailing what had occurred. In Travis' Blog, he has several entries that deal with jargon, frustrations with understanding and seeming unwillingness for many users to read before reacting.
This was brought to the front of my mind today when I made a routine service call...
...the user was unable to open new files created on the i drive. In the background I could hear another person prompting the user to ask "does this have anything to do with the server crashing yesterday." Honestly, this ticked me off a bit. There were two issues with this. The first is that, for a period of 30 - 45 minutes, many users were unable to access their i drive. This was discovered and fixed within that 30 - 45 minute time frame. The server did not crash (any of the dozens of servers....), web was up, printing was up, etc etc etc.....
The thing that steamed me the most was that the person in the background ostensibly has a technical background. In other words s/he should have known far better than to make such a sweeping false statement.
Today, due to the implementation of ACL's, new files were being created without the execute bit. This was discovered quickly and a remedy was ready within a short time. I don't expect very many folks to know what that means. In the spirit of good fun, i propose we send the following from now on whenever a trouble is detected:
Posted by crowej at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2006
A "BackBlog"
For faithful readers of the ole Crowe-blog you may have been wondering why the content dropped off drastically. Well, on the 23rd of December I turned 30. Not enough of an excuse for ya? Fine. On the 22nd of December I awoke to my alarm screeching whatever hideous sound it makes to rouse me. About 2.3 seconds after the alarm's crying, my own began. I had managed to throw my back in a lock-down of pain and school-girl wailing. I was out of circulation until mid-January.
I am not too big a fan of T.V. After my hiatus, I am less so. I found that my back plus meds caused me to keep odd(er) hours. I found that informercials of As-Seen-On-TV cds and an large iTunes library are a powerful combination of time wasted numbness. Though I do have the perfect playlist for 90's era butt-rock ballads. I guess every cloud does have a silver lining. Or an AquaNet one...
Posted by crowej at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)
When "Free Stuff" isn't free
Every so often a subject that you had thought (hoped) was dead and buried rises from the grave like a specter. Today was such a day. Roughly five years ago, UCS began a concentrated effort to create standards for computing. For the bulk of users that means Dell PCs (for the other folks, it means Macintosh). Standards allow a budget to be stretched. Everything from setup time to maintenance to operation is a cost-savings in a standards-based environment.
A department on campus has, in the past, had computers donated or given to them. These computers have not been the standard machines. As a tech that supports these and other machines I can tell you that I spend at least twice as long preparing these machines. Furthermore given the checkout nature of these machines (laptops) they circulate in and out of the Tech Area far more than other machines.
If I spend x amount of time setting up standard Dell laptop, I spend 2x on these "free" machines. Since they are checkout laptops, I've seen them in the Tech Area once already this term for a rebuild. Thus I've already spent 2x times two...per machine. Suddenly the "free" machine is costing the University more money than if we had paid for a standard machine outright. Compound that with the fact that something else is likely not getting seen to while these laptops are being worked on...
Posted by crowej at 08:17 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2006
Feasibility of (sparse) Appointments
When wearing my tech supervisor hat, one of the things that I've been resistent to is setting appointments. It's not that I'm against the idea of appointments, rather I've seen it as an unwise use of our limited resources.
For example, when I have a student on shift for two hours (from 2 - 4), I want two complete hours of productivity. If we have an appointment set for 2:30, then I have at least a half-hour that is wasted. We cannot know how long a given task will take. I don't want the student doing half a task. Therefore I am left with assigning quick tasks - if any are available. Couple this with the reality that all techs do not know all things. I have some techs that are very experienced, some that are new this term. On a non-appointment based schedule then one can be assured that a given tech can handle a given task as they rarely get in over their head.
This non-appointment based solution would be a 100% perfect fit if all of the faculty would agree to stop teaching classes and sit in their offices from 8-5 :^)
Since that has yet to come about, I'd like to do a test run of appointments. I'm asking for comment with the following guidelines/boundaries. The times need to occur when I have adequate staffing (think failsafes). I do not want broken appointments if at all possible. I'll begin by:
--no more than 5 hours per week reserved for appointments
--appointments cannot be made for day the task is called in
--appointment time slots will be fixed for a term
If you could comment as to the value of this solution, the times/days that would work best, anything else to consider...
Posted by crowej at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)