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December 16, 2005
Staff Retreat
Yesterday was the OUR Staff Retreat. We went to Salem, met in a nice fireside room, and discussed issues (the main one being the upcoming accreditation process). We concluded the meeting with a party, which was also fun (though relatively short).
It was interesting how the different groups evaluated different areas of the department. Some groups (mine included) seemed to rate the Housing/Dining Area quite well - perhaps it was just the categories we got, but overall we seemed to be doing well.
In a recent online survey our marks were between 5 and 6.5 (7 being top), which is a very good score. It's always interesting to me how much of the survey data is perception (residents were the ones surveyed). We all know we do better than we were rated (on our low marks), but we are always trying to improve.
I was very appreciative to be invited and to have my opinions about Housing/Dining valued (even though I'm kind of the IT plug-in - not a standard ResLifer). It was fun, but I was very tired. Still am today after spending 3 hours hanging Christmas lights on my house last night [poorly I might add - as I probably have to do about half of them again :( ].
Posted by ellism at 7:00 PM | Comments (0)
OUR Office Move(s)
Carpet, lovely carpet. The OUR (Office of University Residences) was re-carpeted this week. So, John and David and I moved all the office computers to temporary locations, and are moving them all back today. Seems like an easy task, but it's been a lot of work. Even with the 3 of us, it's relatively hard to move (and resetup) 5-7 computers in 4 hours.
Anyway, we have more moves today, which will occupy a large percentage of the day. That's OK, but I was hoping to get more done today as it's my last day until Jan 3! :)
Posted by ellism at 6:46 PM | Comments (0)
December 8, 2005
Sexual Harassment Education
First of all, I'd like to thank Myra Gibson, who gave a good presentation about Sexual Harassment. I see why we've used her in the past, and appreciated her experienced presentation and question responses.
The information presented on sexual harassment and consensual relationships was not necessarily new. I think I've probably browsed the policies before, but after the meeting really sat down and read through them (as we did not really cover them in the meeting - but were suggested to be familiar with them). Anyway, after reading them through - still no surprises.
Some interesting points were brought up at the meeting (as you can probably tell by now this won't be a technical blog with coding style or newly released programs).
An example was given of a non-WOU office where a hug had incited someone to complain as it made them uncomfortable. Apparently the manager who was complained to, made a non-hugging rule (which inspired a comment about Hug-Police ... very funny) for the office. This in turn, created a lot of distress and discord among the office workers who had no problem with these two people (or most anyone probably) hugging in the office.
So the original complainant complained because they felt it made the office environment uncomfortable... So what about the discomfort created by that one person for the X number of others in the office who now felt like they had to walk on eggshells out of fear that someone might feel uncomfortable about ... ANYthing - and complain.
Basically the point of this blog is to ask the question "where is the line, eh?" At what point do we decide that someone could basically be offended by ... well anything ... and that our culture has run away with itself. Should the group of people who were offended at the first person who was offended by the hug have complained - and the manager made a no-getting-offended rule? How far do we take this?
As if I was done...
The other major point that was addressed was sexual harassment and it's relationship to a person's Freedom of Speech. I guess I'm not comfortable with a policy that has the power to negate the first amendment. Please understand ... I'm not supporting sexual harassment or use of the english language that supports sexual harassment. But I am concerned about progessiveness. If something like sexual harassment can extinguish the power of the first amendment, what will come next? Speaking about politics? religion? pets? family? Where will we draw the line? And by the time we do, will we still be in a healthy place?
Again, I'm not contradicting anything shared, taught, or discussed at the aforementioned meeting. I'm just asking (not answering) questions that I feel are relevant...
Someone is probably asking now "How is this blog work related"? Easy, everyone is supposed to go the training at some point. So technically that makes it part of my job - and therefore a valid point of interest for blogging. I think it's important to be able to discuss issues like this, lest we all become well-trained automata.
We must continue to think. It might make some people uncomfortable, might even offend someone (heaven forbid) - but it's healthy. Like setting a broken bone - gotta go through the pain of re-aligning the break before it can heal. So let us not shy away from the hard stuff.
Posted by ellism at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)
December 5, 2005
StreamCam: Preliminaries
Well the results are in:
StreamCam has been running successfully for a week (ish) without any issues. That's not just cool, it's very encouraging - that we can run this as a full-time solution. Public Safety is thrilled with the test and could not now be, I think, ever convinced to change back. Most importantly, StreamCam can be deployed to multiple locations and users MUCH faster than BigBro can. It seems to require less system resources, and has run for the past week (ish) without needing the machine to be rebooted.
Preliminary Results?
Positive. StreamCam may be the best new thing we've had in awhile.
Posted by ellism at 6:29 PM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2005
This morning
I was unable to participate in the Staff Development becuase the OUR (Office of University Residences - Campus Dining staff were there too) Office meeting this morning went quite long.
For the 2nd half of this term, I was invited to the OUR meetings (which happen to partly overlap my StaffDev time. They are only every other week, and this was the last normal one. In two weeks, the office staff is having a retreat, so I'll miss my development time altogether.
Fortunately for Residential Computing, John is taking full advantage of the StaffDev time - and he and Paul seem to be learning lots. Every few days he shows me something new he can do/figured out with MRTG. I think after some work, it'll be a very nice tool to integrate into many applications. Specifically for me, I want to use MRTG as a reporting tool inside our PL/SQL applications.
John will also be coming with me to the OUR retreat. It's nice to be a part of more than one staff. It can be weird sometimes too, but mostly it's nice).
Posted by ellism at 7:48 PM | Comments (0)