I setup an iMac on my desk to more easily monitor the network. I've given up aspirations of becoming a super-duper-Unix-monkey ... and relegated myself to being a great network guy instead. Heck, I can already code so I gotta learn something else, right? Speaking of networking, we've nearly finished implementing all of our Cisco equipment (security, access control, wireless, VPN, monitoring, ...). I'm pretty excited to get some training on all this new equipment. I think we can really make this place safe and run real smoothly.

We made it through move-in with few to little issues. Each year we automate a little more, so our only real issues were things like a new version of OSX and Vista's ever-increasing list of ... specialities. Overall it was pretty good.

I'm still plugging away at my master's degree. This term is Organizational Leadership. I've actually learned a lot, though this may turn out to be my last seat class. I have some real interesting projects coming up soon. I'm excited to get some time to work on them.

I have a new fence. It's awesome. I didn't build it :(

VoIP phones are still a champ. Just need to find a compatible headset for this ... really ... unique little pluggy-thinger-ma-bob. Hmm.

My pile of mini's continues to grow :) One day I'll make a cluster/cloud and run something cool. Seriously. Cool.

Lately, I've been losing the hope that one day I'll actually get all this stuff on my todo list done and be able to build new and interesting things. Oh well. A guy can dream can't he?

What's the advantage? For new/moving offices, separate cable for phones&computers no longer need to be pulled. Pairs of network cable can be more simply run. Also, physical cabling is not required to be tied back into the core phone system. It's great: cost savings, simplicity, increased clarity, security, ... the list goes on and on.

But who wants to be stuck to a desk. How about WIRELESS VoIP?!? Oh yeah. We got that too.

For like $400 we can get a phone that will roam about campus and perform all the same functions as a desk phone ... but fit in your pocket. I gotta tell you. This is some of the coolest technology I've seen lately. The only disadvantage is that my "office" phone rings in my pocket (even during meetings), but it also keeps track of missed calls, has callerID, ... again the list goes on.

So as we setup new areas on campus (Health & Wellness, Residence Hall), we can more easily and inexpensively provide a higher quality service for the WOU campus.

It's a wave of the future...

We are also continuing to upgrade and refine our security technologies. This is a great interest area for me, and as I delve into it, I find that the topic is nearly bottomless. I intend to get some training in the upcoming months to help me further refine my knowledge and be able to provide more advanced services to the campus.

Other programming projects are making progress, which is good as I gear up to design some significant upgrades to the WOUPortal application. I hope to finish 2 major upgrades and complete a project for the Health Center before Fall Term starts anew.

Everbridge (3n Emergency Notification) integration with the Portal.

Preparations for the conversion of AllFacStaff email to allow filtering. I hope to go live with this system next week, but we'll see.

We've implemented some VoIP technology in our department lately. It is very interesting and we are just learning the basics at this point. New areas on campus are very likely to only get VoIP phones from now on.

I have 4 programs that need upgrades before Fall Term: Timesheet, Dining's Nutrition page, the Campus Wellness Challenge (CWC) and (of course) the WOU Portal. Each of these programs comes with a unique background and current set of complication. My goal is to make each easier to use and more fully integrated into the campus environment.

I've also been experimenting with Linux, and hope to get Oracle installed on at least one flavor of Linux/UNIX to do some testing.

WOU Alumni: (Students who have graduated from WOU)
Network Login & Drives: Deleted after 2 years (from graduation)
Email: Deleted after 5 years of inactivity

In essence, WOU graduates can have their email account forever -- but only so long as they continue to use it.

WOU Withdrawn Students: (Accepted students who left the University without graduating)
Network Login & Drives: Deleted after 2 years (from last class)
Email: Deleted after 2 years (from last class)

WOU Staff & Non-Emeritus Faculty:
Network Login & Drives: Disabled immediately
Email: Disabled immediately

WOU Emeritus Faculty: (Tenured faculty who have retired)
Network Login & Drives: Disabled (unless needed for WOU teaching/interaction)
Email: Deleted after 3 years of inactivity

We are rapidly approaching yet another commencement. It has been just over a year since I moved up to ITC. It has been a good, though busy, year. Not that I wasn't busy before - but it is a new kind of busy. I have learned soooo much. During these last 15 months I have had the chance to develop skills and receive training in many new areas. I really like to learn.

The Mac Mini cluster project is not making much progress but that will change come July (when life gets much calmer I hope). I recently acquired bright pink network cables for them all :)
I have piles of other equipment lying around as well, but the mini project is what I'm most excited about.

I really want to spend a lot of time this summer in my yard getting it finished up. We've lived there for 5+ years and it is time to finalize all the projects we started.

I'm taking an AI for games class this term. Not so much business-type-reading and lots more doing. I'm a do-er. Anyway it's fun and my final project is coming along. It's due next week.

I still have a lot to learn but after June thing should change pace and we should be able to buckle down and get stuff done. I'm looking forward to it!

Thus far, the Solaris CD I've been using makes it into grub OK and starts the installer, but then loses connection ... with the keyboard? Once I get started I can't type and so can't finish the install... very weird.

Anyway, I have high hopes of getting it going and doing some testing. In the long run I hope to install Ubuntu onto every mini I find and setup a big mini cluster (haha - get it?).

I suppose that meetings are good. Usually we get something done :)

My todo list continues to grow. I just haven't had any useful block of time to really get traction on a project. Next week should be better.

The DevTeam met yesterday. My long list of projects to research was shared with the team, and some of them took an interest in the projects that I was interested in. I hope to have some fun and interesting presentations to see as members return with completed research.

There is lots more going on that I'll blog about as things occur.

I needed to:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev
sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev
sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libSM-dev libxrender-dev libfontconfig1-dev libxext-dev

to get the projects to compile. Soon I hope to have a prebuilt VirtualBox machine image that folks could download and use to compile their openGL apps in Linux.

"
There are a few issues at hand here, so I'll try to cover each. To begin, we actually purchases license of Office 2007 with new computers as we buy them (so we can migrate when its time). That's progress, but we have quite a few older machines that haven't been replaced lately and so don't have 2007 licenses. To purchase office 2007 for every computer/terminal server would place us in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars arena. From a management/support perspective, we are simply unwilling (and unable from a staffing perspective) to partially deploy 2007.

Supporting two versions of the software (with users not knowing which they are using) is a nightmare. So, logically, when we move to Office 2007, we'll migrate the entire campus at once. When that day comes, we will have to time the change in such a way as to allow training for campus members.

Students (not the mention faculty and staff) would be presented with a VERY NEW interface that honestly takes time to get used to. Macros, 3rd party integration apps and customizations would be lost and need to be supported by UCS. This is honestly hundreds of man hours for a full migration and support. Finally, some features of 2007 were meant to be instituted simultaneously with Vista (which is recommended). As we have no intent up migrating to Vista in the near future, upgrading 2007 has not been a priroity. We were also warned by articles like this one:

http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid192_gci1232198,00.html

This type of information (which we received from many sources) does not encourage us to migrate to 2007 quickly. The migration will take some real time, thought and planning. The good news is that yesterday I saw an email about the planning process that would define how and when to roll out Office 2007 to campus, so the process has begun.

I believe that most 2007 versions allow you to save your project to an older version (although some newer, advanced functionality may be lost) so that campus (and most of the world) can properly view them. In this case we had to choose between upgrading for the minority of power users (like yourself) or maintaining a level we could support for the majority of students, faculty and staff.
"

In the past, UCS has used videos and video tutorials to strive to educate campus members about technology. Today's recording may very well be the beginning of a video series explaining Computing Resources and giving functional walkthrough in non-nerd-speak.

Although I'm not thrilled about having my face in such a public presentation, I guess that is the price of having a good idea - or of driving it home. I want to help WOU and make daily processes more efficient. I think we CAN help, but often education takes time. The long-term payoff is well worth it, so I hope the information provided is perceived as helpful by the campus community.

We have some up-and-coming programmers are "Portal"-izing ServiceMatch for Disability Services. This involves migrating the security AND the layout from the current setup to a full portal integration. It is excellent experience for each of them. When they are done, I have some minor report/page mods they can do. This will help each of them to be more confident and proficient in the PL/SQL coding.

I'll be recording a video soon explaining changes we hope to make to the allfacstaff email list. Now that UCS and VPS are in one department (Computing and Video Production), I can leverage new types of technology (online videos, podcasting, video walkthroughs, ...) to help educate and support campus users. This is pretty exciting.

I've done hundreds of other things too, but can't hardly remember any of them. This is the downside of blogging on a friday ;)

I find that in my new position I get less contact with the 'end-user' than I used to, but I also find that I define 'end-user' differently. I hope that my todo list begins to shift into a more manageable mess than it is now. Sometimes juggling too many tasks can be hazardous to one's health.

Today I met with the designers of the Campus Wellness Challenge (located inside the WOUPortal), about changes and future additions. I'm excited not only about their project, but that we can begin to use our Project Management tools/processes to help manage it. It will be a great test run for some new ideas we are implementing.

Strengths:
Evernote can take my many groups of projects/tasks and logically group them together. Those groups can be sorted by name, shortened to see more, etc...

Weaknesses:
I can't drag and drop the categories to reorganize them. To compensate, I put ordered numbers in front of the categories then sorted by note name to order them as I desired. Still, it is odd that I could not move them up and down or sort, etc...

Not only does the desktop version allow me to stay organized, but with a single click to the Synchronize button I can synchronize my info with the web, allowing me to access the same data from a standard web browser, or via my mobile web browser. Windows-based smartphones and iPhones have a downloadable app for Evernote, but alas my new Blackberry Storm does not quality for either of those groups. However, the mobile site for evernote is sufficient for those rare times I need to browse/edit my tasklist remotely.

The program is cute and fully-featured, but I would prefer to be able to turn off unused features in an effort to conserve space to see each item of each task. As it is there is a list view option so I can view each task above and quickly jump to the details for each task/note. You can tag and search tasks. I think you can also create separate notebooks, which could be helpful if you wanted a personal todo and a work todo (for instance.

I have yet to really play with all the functionality, but am pleased at this early stage.
I'll report more when I've really had the chance to put Evernote through the paces.