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January 24, 2006
Travel Time
Conference Time again. Karen Nelles (WOU Foodservice Director) and I are going to Woodland Hills, CA to the Computrition Symposium. We've had Computrition for a little over a year now I think, and (from a support point-of-view) I like it.
Not only does CT (Computrition) run on Oracle, it was originally programmed in Visual Studio (which used to be one of my favorite dev environments). Long story short, I was very pleased by the quality, style and stability of their product.
From a real support point-of-view, CT is very pleasant in that it 'just runs' for months on end with no real need for pampering. Now every 2-3 months it hiccups (either due to user error, or DB issues) and we make a call to support, who's response time and solutions are excellent. Overall I've been well pleased with their product and support.
So Karen and I are going and I think we'll learn a lot. I've been to an ACUHO-IT conference, a ResNet conference, and a CBORD conference - so this will be an interesting comparison as Computrition seems to be a relatively high-class company.
I'm excited to go and hope to learn as much as possible. I'm also very fortunate to have the opportunites that I've had to travel. Being born and raised not 40 miles from here - I haven't really branched out much in the 'travel' area of my life. I'm relatively happy just 'being at home'. But the last few years I (and occasionally my wife and I) have had some incredible opportunities to 'see the world'.
Strangely the more I travel, the more interested I am to see more of the world. I think some people probably see some, and are quite satisfied, but the more I see, the more interested I am in going.
Not that I love airplanes - but they are an occupational hazard for world travelers such as myself. I know that we won't always have the opportunity to travel as much as we have been/are, but I'm very grateful for a job that lends itself to travel opportunities and supervisors who have found me worthy of that training.
Posted by ellism at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
Break Stayover Program
University Residences, in their continuing effort to provide higher levels of service and support to residents, is creating an online program for residents to sign-up to stayover during breaks.
For students living in Heritage, Landers, Barnum, Butler and Gentle - breaks like Thanksgiving Break, Christmas Break and Spring Break are not covered in their contract. It's good and healthy (for us all) for them to go home for a week or 4. Anyway, for students who have to work, or who's coaches require it, or who live ... like in Japan - we do offer the option to stayover during the breaks. It does cost money, as it's not included in the contract, but it's better than nothing.
You might be asking - what about those folks in Arbor Park (Cedar, Noble, Spruce, Alder View)? Well the breaks are included in their contracts - so we ask that they signup, but there is no fee.
Anyway, we intend to release this program for residents to use coming a little before Spring Break. The program then records who is staying, and where they will be during the break (as students are often moved temporarily for the break). It will record billing, past breaks, etc... It is a real step in the right direction.
Now that we have 2 student programs like this (and a third on the way - Online Work Order System), I will be standardizing my PL/SQL mini-portal code. Summer and I made a huge leap in this direction by standardizing the Cookie Security Code. Now instead of anyone logging into a program directly, they log into the mini-portal - which gives them a cookie that works for all their systems. RA's (Resident Assitants) have 4-5 programs, Residents will soon have 3, and the Housing Staff is going from 1 to 3 very soon.
I'm pretty excited about all of this because I'm dabbling in mini portal technology, using LDAP authentication and bringing programs and education all together.
It's a win-win.
Posted by ellism at 6:09 PM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2006
Standard 5
We had our first Standard 5 team meeting last week. I'm still not exactly sure what we are doing, but I'm confident that we'll figure it out soon.
I think that I helped Tina and Karen with their first step, but did not know it until the meeting with had for S5 in HL 205. I'm guessing we'll be doing some of the same things, but with more information gathering, research and evaluation.
It should be an interesting process (Accreditation), and I think a lot of people will be relieved when it's completed.
Posted by ellism at 7:59 PM | Comments (0)
January 12, 2006
StreamCam and all it's glory (ha!)
Well the break was nice, but it's time to get back in the groove (not to be confused with a rut).
One of the most irritating things about taking leave is that things seem to wait to break until I'm not here. Streamcam, for example... I've had multiple issues with this baby-server over the last 6 weeks. As we took steps to resolve one issue, we often ran into another issue.
Finally it's been stable lately. John is now checking it each morning (as best he can as the lab is 10Mb and Remote Desktop just doesn't have enough bandwidth to do an adequate job). Soon I hope to be able to give John more and more responsibility when it comes to cameras. He's done a good job with tasks I've given him in the past, and I am hopeful of that performance in the future.
We have a few more 'deploys' to do (moving folks from BigBro to Streamcam). Once those are done, I think cameras on campus will be more stable in general. I'm looking forward to that.
Posted by ellism at 6:25 PM | Comments (0)
They have arrived...
Well the standard report: Students have returned to the halls, and we've been pretty busy keeping up with the flood of new computers, viruses, issues, etc...
I would say that for the most part, we've done a good job - people are getting the help they need with, for the most part, a short waiting period (if any). Our only primary issue (which is a year-long issue) is our inability to contact residents after they have contacted us. Sometimes they call and we do everything over the phone we can - but can't fix it. Either they have to run to class, or they don't want to bring their computer in - or the issue needs to have troubleshooting done in their room... In any case, we have a list of about 7 people who we are trying to contact, but often students don't have a phone in their room, etc...
So things are going well. At this rate, I'm relatively confident things will be quiet by the end of next week. The only Major issue we've had was a room in Landers. Travis and Troy found a room that was broadcasting 50-80 Mb (of a possible 100 Mb) - and was basically causing a complete DOS (Denial of Service) attack on the 120 subnet. Residents complained about this outage, and T&T disabled them Sunday night. Unfortunately this attack happened again a second time while I was attempting to figure out which computer in the room was causing the problem. This short (15 min) attack was the final episode, and we appear to have gotten them cleaned and they are back online.
So move-in for this term seems to be a success. Now we can focus on projects once again.
Posted by ellism at 6:19 PM | Comments (0)
January 6, 2006
Things are shaping up...
Well it's almost time for all the residents to return - and that makes it a busy time for Residential Computing.
We really took on a lot this break. I was gone for 2 weeks, and left John and David with a nice long list. When I returned, I was happy to find the list mostly complete (which means they were not buried, nor bored). Today we moved some machines around - speaking of which - we just got some hand-me-down Dimension 4500's from Rick - who is a HECK of a nice guy :)
So we've been making Ghost images of our older 4100's and now our newer 4500's. This will allow us to PDR quite a few older machines, and replace THE LAST OF THE DFI's! Das Vedana DFI!
Anyway, we've gotten things to look a little better down here - not to mention run a little smoother. We are continuing to think of new ideas and get the lab to run ever more efficiently.
I'm really proud of my staff, and how hard they work. I hope everyone's staff works as hard as mine - and gets as much done.
A little more from the 3 of us tomorrow, and we'll be WELL prepared for the Return of the Residents (Part Deaux).
Posted by ellism at 3:43 AM | Comments (0)
January 3, 2006
I'm back
Well I'm back. Yup. I've been gone since Dec 16th. I wasn't in Hawaii (like I was in October), nor in New York City (like I was in May) - I was at home. I spent about half of that time sick - but not in bed. I spent the other half working (not for WOU much). However, I did find some time to play, relax and do a bit of reading.
I think it's important and healthy to spend chuncks of time away from the office now and then. I've been very blessed to have been able to take some fabulous trips this last year (NYC, Atlanta, Hawaii). 2005 was definitely a year for traveling and 2006 has a real chance of being similar. I'll be gone from Jan 25-29 in CA for a Computrition conference. There are some other large trips possible this year, but I'll keep those under wraps for now.
Traveling isn't so bad so long as you've got good gear, and are prepared. Not that I love to fly, but the more I travel (for business or pleasure) the more I enjoy 'getting out' and seeing new things. I'm excited for the time when I get to leave the country and 'see the world'.
Anyway, I was planning on cleaning up a LOT of stuff today as I've been gone for more than 15 days. However, the load today was relatively lite. My 400 emails are now only about 10, and things are definitely stable enough for me to be gone tomorrow (wednesday is my traditional day off). Anyway that's all for now - just saying hi.
HI
Posted by ellism at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)