I'll need to start from scratch, so will welcome any suggestions to improve the user experience.

* Hired Brad Dougherty as a Full Time Desktop Support
* Hired 3 new fabulous student workers: Brian W, Skyler and Audrey. They have each been eager and capable. I feel really lucky to have them all.

These two items have made a significant impact on our response time for tasks. Before these changes, we were ending the day with 40-50 active tasks under general UCS Tech support. We are now typically ending the day with 10 or fewer.

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This has given me the time to work on improvement and refinement of existing resources (more to come on this).

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I've taken on software/hardware management of the labs. I'm evaluating several options to replace the atiquated imaging method that has been used in recent years. At this time, I intend to ride out teh remainder of the academic year and then image the labs.

Got Filemaker Server Advanced playing nicely on Winchester now. *note to Filemaker: if you don't allow your product to be setup with IIS security and 128 bit SSL - PUT IT IN THE FREAKING MANUAL* 'nough said.

Changed lab-* printers to default to type RAW. This should help the count jobs in advance feature. Ideally this will stop the few instances of negative print balances.

After finals week - I'll update pcounter from 2.15 to 2.20a. This is the next logical release, plus a bug fix. The one item I'm excited about is the zero page PCL bug. This happens most often in the Library.

We should be PDR'ing this week. Out with the old. This place breeds this crud.

SURVEYS: In one way, I was disappointed that more surveys were not returned. However, if folks were THAT agitated, they would have made the effort to do so. Given that most of the surveys had good things to say, I think our focus has been railroaded by a squeaky wheel. There were some good suggestions from the survey, and reinforcement for current methods.

...a legal condition whereby a person can be said to have given consent based upon an appreciation and understanding of the facts and implications of an action. The individual needs to be in possession of all of his faculties, such as not being mentally retarded or mentally ill and without an impairment of judgment at the time of consenting...

I would like to add to the list voting Republican, but that may simply be a subset of mental retardation.

...click below to continue

We certainly don't want to get 'injured' by being on the bleeding edge. Thus far, we plan to obtain a site license to keep the campus community at the same level. Certain UCS staff will test and live with the new Office for an appropriate bug-working-out time. Once we've certified it for Campus use, we'll pursue the site license. Microsoft has drastically changed their Office options, so I don't know what that will look like yet (price etc). After we have the license, we'll then determine a roll-out strategy that will work for the various and sundry parties involved (i.e. the Campus Community).

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns,

I've done 5,6, and 8. They were a few active connections on 7, so that'll have to wait till later.

Acrobat Reader: latest
Filemaker Pro: 8v3
Flash Updates: latest
Office Updates
Windows Updates
Windows Profile Hive Cleanup Service

I'll attempt to hit some of the "highlights"

Lots of hardware repairs over the last several weeks (mostly Dells)
*A few printer repairs (one big one from WUC)
*A coffee soaked laptop (hey it happens to us all at one time or another)

PDR
Central School District picked up several pallettes of PCs. We'll have 4 (or 5?) pallettes of CRT monitors ready for them by the end of the week.

Several calls about Comm Express calendar issues. At this point our most repeated statement given in a day has gone from "have you rebooted?" to "sundown:82."

Talking with Shaun Gatherum, I began to look at Deep Freeze alternatives for the Mac Labs. We asked the Apple reps when they came to visit. They were really worthless. They only wanted to know how they could take market share away from Dell. I wasn't impressed. Anywho...using the Mac server, I bound a client machine to OpenLDAP for environmental control. I also bound the same client to AD LDAP for authentication. All of our MASH users can log on...the environment is controlled. Now we just need to stress test a bit.

I've been prepping for this summer. Once spring term is done, I'd like to be able to turn off tailspin forever! I've got the pcounter client installed and have been speaking with support to get a valid license. Licensing is tied to the legacy DOMAIN NAME and the server name. My hope is that printing performance will be increased with the faster server. This will really only count for large jobs, since the small ones are already fast.

This also makes me think of the lab printer changes that are in the works for this summer. One of the dreaded phone calls for me in the Library talking about student printing. One in ten calls is something that actually needs to be fixed. The rest fall under: turning the device off and back on (or the external jet direct), realizing the student lacks the credits, workstation ghost image issue. This summer we'll introduce a novel concept - redundancy. We'll take several print devices and treat them as one group. This will alleviate a number of issues in our busier areas.

Finally ('cause it's 3:30am and my caffeine induced insomnia is wearing off) Shaun and I are setting up a test image replacement for the library machines. The current performance is pretty abysmal...I'd like to see if we can better it...

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-WOOT!