Category Archives: Work

Sage Summit 2012

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So here I sit at BNA, which is the airport in Nashville Tennessee. It’s just after a near week-long stint at a work conference here for our database vendor, Sage. The conference went very well and I got enough out of it to feel like I got my organizations moneys worth. There were high points and low points but looking back on the entire experience the good far outweighs the bad. The next time I have to do this will be when this event moves to Washington DC on July 21st 2013.

I haven’t blogged in a while and mostly it’s because the conference and socializing pretty much grabs you right after you wake up and won’t let you go until you drop in your shoes. I got to laughing that the only real moments of privacy I had was when I was in the bathroom, only because people won’t follow you into the john to talk – thank god for that! It actually became rather tragicomic. Each time I would get ready to start working with my email, or Instapaper, or well, anything else really there would be someone who would hail me and we’d start talking. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would far prefer to be interrupted and engage, after all, that’s what I’m here for, so this isn’t a complaint. This is more of an idle observation. The only time I wasn’t engaging with peers was when I was in the bathroom. So, in a way, the bathroom is the last frontier. 🙂

As I attended sessions and get-togethers the same themes kept on appearing with an unusual regularity. That people kept on referring to their IT staff as “them” and the sense of their feelings were that their IT really didn’t understand or appreciate their needs. I’ve written about this before, about what I do in my job and that I really have never understood how other people run their shops. It has been a concern of mine that whenever I introduce people to how I run my shop I get very similar responses. It’s shock, that an IT shop is open and receptive and welcoming enough to engage with their supported staff. In many ways I suspect that these other organizations have never read the “Good Book” when it comes to running an IT shop, which is “The Practice of System and Network Administration”. There is nothing I can do for these other organizations and I’m kind of pinned at Western. During the conference it struck me that I could very well start to write about some of the philosophies that I have developed in my little tiny niche. So in the spirit of that, I will be writing more about my job and the technical things that I do in the day-to-day operation of my job.

I often times sit back and wonder how many of my work peers read any of this drivel. Much of what I write will be dry-runs for some topics I plan on presenting during the next Sage Summit in Washington, DC.

So with Nashville functionally in my past, if not positionally, the blog posts coming up next will be more about my work. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they stopped reading for a while. It’s going to be dull. 🙂

One engineer's quest for the perfect pen | DVICE

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One engineer’s quest for the perfect pen | DVICE.

Over time I myself embarked on a pursuit quite like the gentleman in this article. Looking for a pen that suited me because I wasn’t really finding a lot of usefulness in the market as it was.

I spent too long with pencils and their blurry, imprecise marks of graphite on paper that almost always faded over time until all you could note was the impressions the nib made on the paper after it was all faded away.

Mechanical pencils really didn’t help, except that they did do a rather good job in freeing me from manual sharpeners. The only time I took mechanical pencils seriously was when I took a drafting class in high school. I’ve dallied around with them at work, but they almost always end up going back to the coffee mug gulag where other writing implements go that aren’t good enough.

I then moved forward to ink pens, and here I wandered in vain for a very long time. Ball points, Gel Pens, lots of different technologies and they all shared the same awfulness. Eventually paper dust or age would clog their functional bits. These pens would suddenly skip, stop working, or after trying in vain to resurrect them they would eject their balls and void their ink all over the writing surface. I’ve never really enjoyed using modern cartridge ball point pens. I also tend to write quickly and these basic pens always leave me feeling cramped as my hand starts to resemble a claw more than anything else. Humorously, when I purchased my house I had to endure a flurry of paperwork and sign my name many times. At the end of the ordeal I actually couldn’t extend my cramped hand to shake on the purchase and so had no choice but to resort to using my left hand, which is like shaking hands with a dead bird. My left hand is nearly useless as my right hand does practically all the work. So, even these ballpoints were out. After some time I did some research on these devices and figured out that one of the chief reasons why I didn’t like them very much was that the ink really wasn’t so much ink as it was a kind of inky grease. The quality and feel of a pen as I write is more important to me, along with ink flow than anything else. As anyone knows, one of my dearest pet peeves is repeating myself. I hate repeating myself in speech and I detest repeating myself in writing. Ball points, grease pens, they all eventually fail me and force me to re-trace the same glyphs over and over again trying to deposit ink in the way that I need to in order to communicate.

As a rather humorous sidelight, I have for the most part abandoned this technology altogether for use of keyboards. In many ways I have even abandoned spoken word as I find it trying to get the right words out, especially when my poor male brain is agonizing over emotional processing and is just pushed that far enough where I can either hold on to an emotion or hold on to nouns, not both. There is something more even, more paced when it comes to writing that appeals to me, and as it turns out I’m more in touch with my emotions when I write than when I speak, it’s as if the paper provides me the mental room to explore my feelings as well as fish for the correct language to use to discuss them.

Which leads me to my own favorite pen, which runs counter to the pen described in the above link. My pen of choice, and frankly I have to admit that it is a very uniquely right-handed device is a Lamy cartridge fountain pen. It’s royal blue case and cap and ink cartridge are always with me. It shares space in my backpack with the other items I couldn’t go day-to-day without, such as my pocket watch, which I store while I’m at the gym so as to not injure it all wound up in belt and pants, as well as my gram-scale for measuring out my tea or coffee for my work life life-preserver. The way this pen writes, on any kind of paper is marvelous. The flow of ink along the feed to the nib means I don’t have to mash down and scribe the paper while I try to write along its surface and its unbroken ink means I don’t have to retrace what I tried to write, something that is worth more to me than any other feature.

Sometimes the best things are the old things. Just because modernity demands ball point, or gel pens and lauds their qualities doesn’t mean that modernity is correct. It’s been my experience that in this case, the very old design of the fountain pen, which hasn’t really changed in a thousand years from its first invention in 953 serves me delightfully to this very day. It’s funny that something so old, something that’s been with humanity for such a very long time endures. If you look out in the marketplace you won’t find these pens, I know, I’ve tried. I had to order this pen specially along with it’s ink cartridges. It wasn’t terribly expensive however this is not a pen you dispose of, this pen is something that stays with you for a very long time. It’s that function and durability that truly impress me. It won’t get clogged with paper dust, it’s not greasy, and the way it writes is beyond a pleasure. The only thing that I don’t do anymore is actually write letters with it, however now that it occurs to me, it’s something that would be a pleasure to do. Pursuing that is something that would send me off looking for the proper paper. My unusual eye would most likely be drawn by very fine paper in the A4 format. There is something delightfully rebellious and anachronistic about abandoning irrationally sized American papers for their more logical and pleasing metric counterparts. But that’s going to be another blog post, I think. 🙂

First Look at Mountain Lion OSX for Macintosh

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I purchased and downloaded the newest version of Macintosh OSX codenamed Mountain Lion. The download took a brief amount of time and once established I didn’t have a problem handling it. The first step was creating an independent system installer using a USB memory stick. I found some instructions that I remembered from when I did this with OSX Lion and the instructions worked well, up to a point. I was able to find the InstallESD.dmg file and I set up my 16GB memory stick with the proper format settings, specifically Mac HFS File System with Journaling and GUID partition map. The first issue I ran into was a strange memory error, that while restoring the dmg file to the USB memory stick, after the Mac was done really, in the verification step it failed with this odd arcane “cannot allocate memory” error. I went immediately to Google to look and found that if I mount the InstallESD.dmg file first, that *that* is the magic bullet. Turns out, it was.

Now that I have Mountain Lion on a USB memory stick I got a stock 24” iMac out of storage and set it up. Plugged the USB memory stick in, then the mouse and keyboard, main power, and while holding down the option key, turned it on. Everything worked as I expected it to! So far so good.

Once the system was up and running and in setup it prompted me to connect to a Wifi system, which was not a problem since I share Wifi from my primary work iMac (long story for another day) and it seemed satisfied. Then I ran into my first problem with Mountain Lion. During initial system setup I could not successfully log into any Apple ID. My personal one, or the one for work, either one didn’t work. The system allows you to continue without it and so that’s exactly what I did. Once I moved on to setting the time zone, this also failed, but I suspect it has everything to do with my shared Wifi coming from my Snow Leopard iMac and not something endemic to Mountain Lion. Instead of Mountain Lion successfully setting the time zone by it’s location I set it by hand. Not really a problem.

Once I got the system up and running, idle at the desktop everything was as it should be. My next step was to try to connect my test iMac up to my Apple ID. So logically I went first for System Preferences, then to Accounts, and there set my Apple ID. I was half hoping that setting it there would have had a chain reaction and set it everywhere else, but that didn’t happen. I noticed that iCloud wasn’t set up properly, so I found it in System Preferences, it wasn’t a problem, just a very weak annoyance. Then I tried the Mac App Store, had to do it again, same for iTunes. The only real irk that upset me was fiddling around with “Back To My Mac” feature which asked me to turn on sharing with a button that lead to the sharing panel. I was lost in there (no, not really, but I was in the headspace of an end-user) and it took me a while to notice that Apple did tell you where to go to set things up, so my one tweet about this being a problem is wrong, I was just hasty. I must say that much of this I will pin on me being in the “end user headspace” and not as an Admin, which I would have been much more careful and slow with in my approach to Mountain Lion. If you read and aren’t hasty, this isn’t a problem.

Every app that I’ve used worked well, some needed Java to be installed but the OS prompted to fetch it and install it for me without a problem so that was fine. Of the apps that work that I’ve tested, at least in that they open up are:

* Aqua Data Studio 11.0
* Dropbox
* iSquint
* KompoZer
* MarsEdit
* Miro Video Converter
* MPlayerX
* Music Manager (Google Cloud)
* OpenOffice.org
* Photo Wrangler 2.1
* Picasa (needed update)
* Postbox
* Seashore
* Spotify (needed update)
* The Unarchiver
* Transmission
* VLC
* What’s Keeping Me?
* XTabulator
* Zipeg

Of course, all the apps from the Mac App Store I assume work well. Dropbox was a non-issue, 1Password was smooth-as-glass, as I expected. But what really surprised me was Postbox. I recently fled Sparrow as an email client when they announced that Google was acquiring them. Postbox was my alternative. When I copied over Postbox and started it for the first time it offered to collect the settings form Mail.app which I didn’t think anything of and let it go ahead. Postbox seamlessly captured my iCloud email account and after I typed in my Apple ID password, I was up and running! For some strange reason, that really pleased me.

So, what is next? So far everything seems to test fine in Mountain Lion. There are some goobers from Lion that I still need to work out – such as secondary monitors in full screen mode being stupid, that sort of thing, and also to see if VirtualBox will work, but for the most part I’m satisfied that this new OS is exactly as Apple bills it, and they have done a very good job. There are some small irky bits and on my Twitter I’m sure it came across as being ranting-and-raving, but actually it’s quite good.

Next steps at work are tallying up all the people interested in Mountain Lion and figuring out how we’re to pay Apple for the licenses, then helping everyone set up Apple ID’s on their own. There is going to be a headache with all these new very independent and unmanaged Apple ID’s floating around in space, but if you want the Bright and Shiny you have to swallow a seed or two.

Dell Exec: The iPad Is Too ‘Shiny’ For Business | Cult of Mac

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Dell Exec: The iPad Is Too ‘Shiny’ For Business | Cult of Mac.

I read this article and found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. Here where I work we’ve got many iOS devices and they are all working quite well. That Dell has the temerity to criticize iOS devices in the enterprise setting really strikes me as sour grapes that their stupid Streak tablet failed to catch hold. Then again, it was trying to use Windows on a tablet, which I can pretty much guarantee is going to flame out before it even gets going.

The article states that the fellow from Dell Australia went so far as to claim that it would put a burden on the IT infrastructure. I call bullshit on that. I’ve been working with a gaggle of iPhones and iPads and frankly, I’ve never had one person come to me seeking support for their iPads, mostly because the devices are built that well. Now perhaps they are all quietly suffering in silence, but I think it has more to do with how well the devices are constructed and how integrated the entire experience is. The hardware and the OS work so tightly with each other that there is little room for bugs to rear their ugly heads.

SupportPress In Action

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My first week with SupportPress has been magnificent. It was just in time as well, as we are looking down the barrel of a bunch of employee location movements which always requires lots of tickets and tracking because there are just so many discrete pieces to work with whenever someone moves from their established location to a new one, even if it’s temporary.

It’s also been a series of lessons when it comes to introducing new technology to regular folk. The adoption rate was much higher than I hoped for, as people were actually jockeying for “first ticket” so that felt really good. I’d estimate about fifteen percent of the staff have moved their communications channel to the help desk completely over to the new SupportPress system, while the rest have yet to break their old ways.

The old ways we still will respect. Having this new help desk system has given me moments of decision to make and learn from. Do I force people to only use the SupportPress system? Do I turn the office into a BOFH zone by forcing my clients to fold their entire communications structure into a ticket? Turns out I rejected that choice and elected to endure the steeper path of being, in what really turns out to be a human bridge, for my clients. So when someone drops by, someone calls, someone emails, or someone iChats us up, each time it calls for a ticket. SupportPress in this regard is really great, as we can create tickets on behalf of our clients and fill in all the details as if they penned the tickets themselves.

Another choice was one of statistics and performance. Now that the SupportPress system is providing us with ticket numbers and categories as well as ticket ages, the data is ripe for analysis, categorization, and the temptation to turn all of these raw numbers into performance metrics is very strong. This, as it turns out, is just another BOFH move that I simply cannot take. I refuse to use the raw data to measure any kind of performance metric – there is more to my life, to my assistants life than how many tickets we land or how old the tickets get before we tend to them. Here is a central tenet of mine, this system is meant to help only. It will never be used as a dashboard, it will never be turned into a yoke, or a bridle. The same way I rejected the before-mentioned BOFH move of forcing tickets out of clients, this is somewhat like the other side of the argument. The reasoning behind it is that I want people to use this resource. I want my employees (singular notwithstanding) to not fear that they will be lined up against some artificial measuring stick and slotted. I refuse to have First Trumpet, Second Trumpet, and Screwup Trumpet chairs in my orchestra.

There are other things that have occurred to me but I have rejected out of hand, brought about by SupportPress. I have considered and rejected a “Zero Ticket Friday” policy as fundamentally broken. What is so special about Friday that all tickets should be closed? If I institute that policy and some tickets are stuck in the waiting queue, do I penalize people for it? If you start making accommodations for things like “tickets can languish in the waiting queue forever” then what the hell is the point of the first move on this policy? Eventually it’s the self-defeating policies like these that create the bullshit of “It’s Friday, lets push all the tickets into the waiting queue.” It’s just dumb. So we aren’t doing it.

One thing that has come of SupportPress that we’ve noticed is that some of our clients have reacted less-than-happily about the sheer flow of SupportPress notification emails. The system sends an email when any ticket moves or changes, so clients could have at least two tickets (a start and an end) or up to double-digits especially if there are a lot of phase changes and clarification messages flowing back and forth. I personally don’t have a problem with notification floods as I am rather OCD about managing my email. I’ve written before on how I manage my Inbox – that any email has four potential destinations after they have been read. An incoming message can be stored in Evernote, sent to Toodledo, adapted and stored in SupportPress or outright deleted. Yes, I still use Toodledo, but I use it in conjunction with SupportPress. Some tasks, such as weekly reminders and such really fit better with Toodledo than SupportPress. Nobody really cares that much about getting constant notifications or trackability about daily, weekly, or even monthly tasks that I work on. Much of the regular things I do at work are “Andy does it, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore.” and so everything gets done and people can move on. That’s really helps illustrate the core features of SupportPress. SupportPress is designed to capture the discrete, non-repeating, highly interruptive traffic that any competent Help Desk must endure. There have been a lot of whitepapers written on the economy of interruptions surrounding Help Desk environments so going into it here would just be needlessly duplicative. The only really important thing to state about interruptions is that they are a necessary evil. People have to stop us to get help, it’s the nature of the beast.

SupportPress shines brightest when it comes to creating an abstraction layer between clients and the Help Desk. I like to think of the system providing a certain amount of slip between ticket arrival and first contact. In this way, SupportPress slays the interruption dragon that besets us. Instead of people electing to visit us or call us, which are the most interruptive, they can issue a ticket. We are notified that a ticket has arrived and that fact can be temporarily slipped in time so that we can conclude whatever function we are executing without having to endure the most dreaded thing of all, a context switch. Much like computers, interrupts and context switching is the number one gross consumer of time. These interrupts and context switches also threaten our quality of work. We can switch quickly but regaining traction once we’ve switched back to what we were thinking about before can be sometimes a maddeningly slippery proposition. I can’t count the number of times that interrupts and context switches have caused me lost time when dealing with a columnar data procedure such as checking items off of a long list. Where was I? Am I doing everything right? Why do I have this nagging doubt that I’m missing something? It’s this that I wish people would understand, and why when we ask people to issue their problems via ticket, why it’s so helpful to us.

So then we revisit an earlier point I had made, that I have elected to not force people to create tickets only. While this is true in spirit, I dearly wish people would on-their-own elect to use the less interruptive technologies available to them. The best thing for anyone to do would be to issue a SupportPress ticket outright, but if not that outright, then email or instant message also works well, because those technologies also include a modicum of temporal slipping that we really crave when we are knee-deep in some elaborate procedure. So while I refuse to force people to do a certain thing, I respectfully request that they do what they’ll do a certain way. Then it comes to how best to encourage people do change their course? First you have to let them know what it is that you’d like them to do, in a way, this blog entry may help with that as I suspect some of my coworkers read my blog and maybe they’ll notice the hint. One thing that can be done is rewarding people for using the ticket system by prioritizing those people who issued tickets with more force than we would otherwise pursue an incoming interrupt and context switch. It isn’t outright sabotage, but it does show that there is a preference and it’s in everyones best interest to respect us with the grace of a non-interrupt, and hence, non-context switching request. We’re driven to help and that is our passion and our purpose, but there is a best way to do it and for me at least, SupportPress is it.

So how much did it take for implementing this solution? We already have an iPage hosting account, wmichalumni.com, and frankly any host worth their salt would be just as good. I just like iPage because they are professional, no-nonsense, and cost-efficient. Any host can (and should) allow you to set up a free copy of WordPress.org. WordPress.org is an open source and free bit of software that creates a WordPress.com blog on a host that either you own or rent. The infrastructure of WordPress is actually perfect for what we are trying to do. The fact that it’s free is just a cherry on top. Installation of WordPress.org, at least on iPage is remarkably simple. It takes about 5 clicks and some little typing or usernames and passwords and preferences and the host creates a perfectly functioning WordPress.org instance for you. The theme, which is what SupportPress really is comes as a ZIP file for $100. Once you buy it, and then upload the zip file to your new WordPress.org site, everything else is pretty much a freefall into implementation. Falling down a flight of stairs is more complicated than installing SupportPress. Once the system is going, creating users is a snap, then introducing them is equally as easy, and before you know it, you’re up and running and your total outlay for the project was $100 for the theme and whatever you are paying your host.

So, then that begs the question of why we don’t self-host. I chose to not self-host because there is a field of tar which would ruin usability. iPage has unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and since we are already paying for it to do other things, it’s arguably ‘free’ to do our SupportPress infrastructure. I don’t have to endure needless bureaucracy and it’s available anywhere and anytime without me having to muck about with VPN technology or anything else. It’s not that what I am avoiding is that onerous, but this way is far far simpler and is much more satisfying to me in that the path that I took got it done. From zero to implementation with nobody to argue with, nobody to ask, nobody to cajole, and nobody peeking over my shoulder.

I think that any Help Desk, especially one in academia, but really this extends to any other industry as well could really benefit from SupportPress. I like to reward products that please me and do their jobs well. When I find a product, like SupportPress, I flog it for all it’s worth. My only regret with SupportPress is that I didn’t have this technology 10 years ago. I am blessed to have it now and I plan on continuing to use it and I plan on taking it with me wherever I roam in the future. If anyone has any questions about anything I’ve written here, you know where to get ahold of me. I welcome questions on this, SupportPress is that good.

Throw It Back

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I used to fret and worry about my relationship with alcohol. What did it mean? Is the drinking itself bad or is it the reason behind the drinking the really bad part? Maybe it was a combination of both. Next month I’ll turn 37 years old and quickly plowing myself into my 40’s. So what preciousness is to save that I’m holding onto?

Americans have a really funny way of dealing with alcohol. We used to love it, then we hated it, then we prohibited it completely and all the while our relationship and use of the substance has not changed. I notice this a lot when I go to purchase alcohol from shops, especially here in Michigan. People are so, I suppose the emotion they must feel is embarrassment, because the shops all reflexively wrap bottles of alcohol in brown paper wrappers. Like it’s shameful or embarrassing to be seen in polite society with a bottle of Jack Daniels, Jamesons, or Captain Morgan. Wine never really got the sharp end of the stick, and neither really did beer. Both of those spirits are too weak to be of mention. You’ll go to the bathroom a lot before you’ll feel much in the way of an effect from those particular drinks. It’s the harder liquors that surprise me. First off, Michigan rigidly controls the price of spirits right down to what retailers are allowed to sell the spirits for. It doesn’t matter who sells what, they all get their prices out of this dog-eared pale-blue booklet that the state hands them. I sometimes wonder why the state of Michigan thinks it’s the sole arbiter of the price and availability of spirits in their state borders? As if they could control their citizenry with laws. Hah. But there it is, artificial price fixing for no good reason. A 750ml bottle of Jameson’s Whiskey is $25 in Michigan and $17 in Illinois. The only reason I’d buy liquor in Michigan is out of laziness.

And as it turns out, my favorite liquors are Jamesons, what a shocker, and as funny as it seems, the low-brow rums, Bacardi’s Oakheart and Newfoundland’s Screech. I don’t really care for the specialty long-aged rums and apparently I prefer just the english-speaking rums of the world, as the rest aren’t very much to my liking. But really where it’s at is my relationship to a bottle of Jamesons.

What is my relationship to alcohol? I drink liberally and I become intoxicated and I enjoy myself. I do not make a mess of myself by drinking beyond my personal limit, nor do I operate any machinery while under the influence. That last bit is a lie, of course, as machinery includes my iPhone and my computer, so a few bouts of drunk twittering won’t send me to jail. I’ve never operated a motor vehicle, and almost always I’m the designated driver because, well, lets face it, I have control and money issues. So back to drinking. It’s a joy. It brings warmth and happiness into my life. Not that my life was bereft of warmth and happiness before, but while intoxicated it makes many things feel better. Many things are easier to cope with. I wear my emotions on my sleeve and I share my feelings, some would say, too readily. There was a humorous picture of a boy stating what I often times find myself thinking, especially sober, and that is “We’re all thinking it, I just said it.” So we get down to the reasons why I drink.

I like to drink because it feels good. I like to drink because it tastes good. Wine is principally what I’m getting at, as there is a universe of delicious flavors in wine and more people should go exploring to see what they like. Beer? When I was a kid and very sensitive to bitters, beer was awful. As I age however, beer has become like water. It’s a drink with food, it makes you belch, and makes you have to see a man about a horse quite often. In many ways, beer and wine are somewhat okay ways to replace water, especially if you question the quality of water. I personally have never felt that the water where I live is good for me. Now, before people get really worked up, the gentle reader should be aware that I was raised on the worlds best water. The city supply of Syracuse, New York. That water is drawn from Skaneateles Lake and is some of the best tasting water on the planet. I am sorry that more people don’t understand just how wonderful it is to walk up to the tap in your house, turn it on and be able to drink what comes out without even a single iota of worry, and enjoying the taste, which is the way water should taste. It should not taste like a chlorinated fish bowl. So the water is a big reason for the more simpler spirits. But that doesn’t touch on the stronger ones. Here again I like the taste, or perhaps, in the case of Jamesons, I’m genetically predisposed to enjoy the taste, I do sometimes wonder about that. I also enjoy the feeling it gives me, and then, and what everyone really wants to know, is the social aspects to my alcoholism.

I drink because Hell is other people. This is very general and expansive and it’s not really meant to hurt others feelings, but lets face it, unless I’m in love with you or we are exceptionally close, Sartre’s statement about Hell being other people eventually finds it’s mark. I can endure a lot of things from people, especially when I have no other choice. I can be whatever I need to be to endure the situation. That’s the blessing that comes with a monumentally strong sense of self-monitoring. In work meetings I can be calm and reserved and measured, that sort of thing. Generally however I can’t stand humanity. In all the ways we are unique and special and loving, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the baser things that bother me, the odd behaviors, the many varied ways we abuse each other and in many ways, so effortlessly and lets face it, callously. It can range from being a real prat to being incidentally and nebulously a horrible human being. So what comes of all these unpleasant feelings? Being exposed to people who chew too loudly, snort, wheeze, moan, whine, or in one way or another do whatever they can to be as awful to others as they can, where is there to go? Where can anyone go if they are trapped in that situation? I am forever thankful for alcohol. “Please pass the wine” is a far more pleasant thing to say than dragging out (or dragging up) the varied unpleasantnesses that surround some social situations. I find that it’s almost always more preferable to prepend potentially unpleasant social interactions with a precautionary buffer of alcohol in my system. If I am nursing a beer or a glass of wine, of throwing back shots of Jamesons, I can eventually reach a place where the things that upset me no longer really bother me, and in a way, alcohol makes everything better. So yes, I drink, at least as a partial reason, to cope with the people in my life. I am not going to point fingers at who makes me drink, that would just be courting disaster, but in a general sense, Hell is other people.

So to get back to the beginning, is it a problem? Should I be concerned? The answer is, I don’t give a damn. I’m not going to fret over what drinking means to me, I’m just going to enjoy my life and all the things in it and if I spend my time in a beer bottle or a bottle of Jamesons, then that’s where I want to be. For pleasure, for joy, for happiness, and to escape Hell, at least for a short while. Anything can be endured as long as there is a break to it, a stop, a discontinuity to horribleness. In many ways, alcohol is a blessing to endurance.

SupportPress

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I just rolled SupportPress out to the rank and file at work. Or at least I thought I did. My day was going so well, so smoothly. I got my introduction email with graphics sent out (or so I thought) and I got all the invites shipped out as well. Everything was going just peachy – until I looked at the sent mail and noticed that when I sent the message by copying all the discrete addresses that only the first address took. So I didn’t send out any message at all!

To really get a grasp on how irritating this was, I couldn’t send a message to the LDAP alias that expands out to all the people I work with, the address is dar-staff@wmich.edu. The SMTP server at WMU was rejecting it out of hand. Turns out I figured out why – it was the screenshot graphics. That system they have rejects mail with pictures. So I had no choice but to copy down all the addresses from our Wiki and do it manually. Turns out when you copy that kind of information into Sparrow, it only looks at the first address and ignores everything else. It was my thinking that it would see the commas and figure out I was copying in 48 addresses. No, just one really long address.

When I noticed this, all I had was my iPhone and I was having lunch with Scott. I was cursing Webmail Plus and the LDAP directory for placing artificial limits on email and so I figured I could get the list of addresses and paste them into my iPhone and use the Mail app in my iPhone to do the heavy lifting. Turns out it suffered the same mental block, treating the addresses I pasted in as one giant address. So after lunch was over I was in my car trying to tap and copy one address at a time in. This is another bad idea because if you tap and don’t hold the iPhone thinks you want to email to just that one person and so dumps the draft you were working on and starts a new draft with an empty email. The forwarded bit with all the text and graphics? Lost. Three times lost. I was successful in the end, shipping my intro email out to all my coworkers despite all the technology surrounding me meant to make things easier.

Alls well that ends well, so we’re up online with SupportPress and I have to say that I am very happily surprised with what I see. Clients see a very simple version of the site and it’s compatible with every browser, every computer, including iPhone and iPad to boot! Now that I’ve let the genie out of the bottle it will be very interesting to see how it is received. There has been lots to say on that topic before, and in another post, a more private one, I’ll go further into the nitty gritty details.

So despite technological hurdles, I was able to get my automated help desk system off the ground and show it off to people. Monday is going to be a rip-roaring day, indeed!

Lepers of East Main

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Kalamazoo has a section of road that I absolutely detest. The road in question is at the foot of Eastwood Hill. It’s East Main Street as it drops with an almost twenty percent grade downhill. The reason why I hate this section of road so much is because just to the left, as you are going downhill, there is always (or at least it seems so) a cop waiting in the unused parking lot just in front of the DQ on the corner of East Main and East Michigan. What makes this road so awful and uniquely suited to attract cops? The entire downward slope is set at 25 miles per hour and the cops are very fond of detecting oncoming cars with radar and pulling them over if they were in excess of this limit.

For those that are wondering, yes, I did get caught going 35 down the hill. It’s an evil hill because to go down it at 25 you have to chew up your brakes the whole way down. This got me to thinking about alternatives to this route, heading downhill. I started to explore the local roads and discovered that if I select Humphrey Road instead of East Main to make my way downtown I have three choices to make from that point and they all have minimums of 40, except for one which doesn’t matter. If I turn on Bixby then I’m guaranteed a red-light-signal which may or may not give me clearance to make an easy left onto Gull Road and head downtown. If I don’t do that, I can run to the end of Humphrey and brave a left onto Gull from that position further along, it’s more dangerous because there is no controls on the flow of traffic on Gull Road from there. Another path I’ve found is to turn right and head into the residential areas. If I turn right on Charlotte, then I can turn left on Bridge Street and that has just one dangerous intersection. The safest path is Bixby with the light, the quickest is actually a split between the end of Humphrey and Bridge Street.

Throughout all of this it bears noticing that I never once suggest following East Main downtown. It’s just not worth the trouble. The worn out brakes, the aggressive cops and their speed traps, or the stop light that always seems to catch me at the most time-consuming parts of it’s cycle. As I traverse these roads every morning I get to thinking just how much that particular section of East Main is kind of a taboo section of road now. Nobody should use it, it should be a one-way heading away from downtown. That would eliminate the brake wear and make it that much harder for cops to set up their damned speed traps. It’s much easier to have to scale a hill starting out slow, noticing the cop, and progressing slow with an assiduous use of the accelerator pedal instead having to endure watching dollars peel off your brakes as you use them up to slow yourself down.

If anyone else who reads this blog likes this intersection, all you have to do is get caught once in the speed trap and you’ll change your tune. If the city turned the entire affair into a one-way, that also would solve the issue. One can hope.

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow

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It eventually had to happen. I read this little nugget in a spam email that was delivered to my inbox just now:

Excuse me ,
I have a question- have you seen this picture of yours in attachment?? Three facebook friends sent it to me today… why did you put it online? wouldn’t it harm your job? what if parents see it? you must be way cooler than I thought about you man :))))

The attachment is IMG9821.zip. Come on. A zip file? Seriously?

Just a note to everyone who might come across this blog post. When you get files in your email that you aren’t expecting, don’t willy-nilly go clicking on them. Even if you have a Mac you could be duped into running a Trojan Horse, which would be very bad. This is likely a Windows virus trying to spread via social manipulation.

Anyhow, if there are compromising photos of you on the net, own them. Be proud of them. There is very little you can do to combat something like that so you might as well make the best of the situation.

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow. 🙂

GLMUG, with the Lead Pipe, at NIU.

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Just returned from a work-related mini-conference. Every year all the sites that use Sage Millennium gather together in their regions and meet with Sage representatives and talk about the database, how we use it, how we get other people to use it, and to socialize between each other. For us, we are a part of the Great Lakes Millennium Users Group, GLMUG for short. Over the years we have gotten together at WMU, where I work, and other years we have gone to St. Olaf University in Minnesota, Medical College of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and this year Northern Illinois University.

For these events we are centrally located to pretty much every GLMUG member so for us, we pretty much always drive to wherever is selected to be our host for the meetings. We schedule a three day mini-conference, with the first day occupied by landing and socializing, then we dive into topics the next day, and the last day is mopping up any topics we missed on the second day and talking about the product and sharing notes between each other where one site does something unique and helps another site out. I always enjoy myself during these events because it gives me a ringside seat to some of the biggest changes to the software, brought to us by our Sage rep, as well as some of the biggest challenges to how we use the software. I am a DBA / System Admin so I see things in terms of IT, hardware, training, and the logical parts of how things are arranged. I also have a ‘unique viewpoint’ which often times is at odds with the more soft-pedal approach that most people prefer. I’m brash, sometimes vulgar, but I bring the same passion to these discussions that I do to my workplace. I don’t do anyone any good if I just shuffle along and mumble as a yes man. Fortune favors the bold. If nothing else, I am bold. Sometimes I’m a few other four-letter things too, but bold is nice and friendly.

This year we visited NIU, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been to Dekalb, Illinois. On the way up my coworkers and I got to talking about Illinois trivia that doesn’t have anything to do with Chicago, which is the obvious 800 pound elephant taking a figurative dump in the corner. The only thing that I could readily volunteer was that Illinois is the nation’s number one producer of pumpkins. Funny what you get from a John Carpenter’s Halloween movie trivia track on the DVD. 🙂 I am the movie generation. We see things in terms of movies that we’ve seen, and in a lot of ways we relate to our world through the vocabulary of cinema that we are fond of. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve recognized situations that come out of Airplane!, Clue, or Princess Bride. To say nothing of the endless quotes from those movies. People often times wonder where I get my oddball humor from and I tell them time and time again that those three movies are a great place to start to get to know me better. My mind spends a lot of time thinking about those movies.

Northern Illinois is to Dekalb in a way that WMU is to Kalamazoo. Both schools sort of hug their cities and bring a certain flavor to the area that otherwise wouldn’t be there. Western has our Bronco and the colors from the black-eyed susans that grow here – while NIU are the Huskies and much in the way that Chicago pushed painted plaster cows as a cute city theme, Dekalb pushed painted plaster Husky dogs. Every mascot is adorable in their own way. Cows are harmless herbivores. Broncos are exceptionally handy to ride (and not eat, or turn into glue, Frau Blucher!) and Huskies are arguably one of the most recognizable and adorable dog breeds there are, plus they can pull a sled. The University staff welcomed us warmly and went above and beyond to ensure that our get together was a success.

During these meetings we cover a lot of topics and the overarching theme that I kept on noticing isn’t so much technical issues but rather strategy questions about prospect management. Of course listening to all these schools talking about how they manage their prospects gets me thinking about ways to once-and-for-all solve the issues they all have. Many of them bring it up over and over again and many institutions really kind of muddle along. I see a divide between those that understand the technology and those that have to use the technology but often times aren’t really keen on understanding what they are using coming into conflict with each other. It’s a lot like the gulf that develops between IT staff and those that they support. I’ve written about incuriosity before, that it leads to a kind of prized ignorance and ultimately devolves into an unpleasant puddle of rank dependency. Those that cannot depend on those that can to help them do their jobs. It’s a whirlpool sucking at the overall efficiencies of an organization as nobody can really be said to be nimble when they are trapped in this unusual back-and-forth between executives who should use the system but do not and the support staff that help them by, in some cases, only achieving progress by applying blunt force to the situation.

Much of my exasperation, because that’s really what it is. It’s not irritation although I’m often irritated, but mostly I’m just exasperated. I was raised with a certain work ethic by my parents that has driven me my entire life. Take pride in what you do, be responsible for your actions, and be motivated enough to get your work done in a timely fashion. While my closest coworkers were with me on this trip, I was a party to several conversations which I won’t really go too deeply in on my blog because the thoughts that I harbor in my mind aren’t the most complimentary or charitable when it comes to some of the workplace issues that surround me. The only thing I can really write about is how I feel and what I would do in the situation that has been described to me. It’s mostly a part of my upbringing. I chafe strongly whenever I am a witness to certain entitled vanities. It’s the reason why I’ll never be regarded as senior management because I refuse to sugar coat my opinions. I am not a yes man, I am passionate and outspoken and sometimes exceptionally blunt. I think what really bothers me deep down is laziness. I feel awkward and ashamed if I’m just sitting around spinning my wheels and doing nothing for anyone. I feel driven to help, address issues, or at least try to make a difference in a project or someone else’s life for the better. This drive of mine is in direct opposition to my perceptions of indolence that I see from time to time. I also prize my bluntness. If people can’t or won’t do what is expected of them, then perhaps they should seek out something else to do that suits them better. There is a name for the kind of manager I would be if I had any power, that would be “Hatchet Man” as I would more likely fire someone for being willfully indolent rather than have them hoovering up resources and masquerading as human anchors. Whenever I hear “nobody listens” my nearly reflexive response is “Make their employment hinge on it. They’ll listen then.” which goes over like a leaded balloon. I spend a lot of time keeping quiet under the banner of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Plus it’s a good thing I don’t have any power over anyone. I’d be a monster.

Another thing that pops up over and over again in my mind is the fable of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” and I find my mind dwelling on the story a lot. There isn’t anything that can be done because in some situations you simply have to endure the awkwardness of the situation. You should speak up, you should say something. You should grab the Emperor and shake him or her like a deranged british nanny and try to wake them up. But in the end you don’t. You just sit there, floating in an irritated miasma and over time it eventually wears down all your sharp edges into smooth dull rounded ones. I sometimes have little fantasies that I like to entertain from time to time, what I would do in certain situations. I end up imagining what I would do in other functional positions with what I know of my passion, my drive, and my work ethic. That I just can’t sit around waiting. That I’ve got to do something, anything, because not doing something would be hell. A good part of this all is that I’m an accomplishment junkie. I love the emotional rush of getting something finished. I don’t care about recognition, I’m quite happy being the ignored little cog in the great watchmakers design, but this cog will do something! I think that’s what I left with from NIU and this mini-conference. What would I do in some of these situations? I still have the idealism and energy of my youth and I’d make sweeping pronouncements and back it up with aggression nobody has ever witnessed. Again, it’s a good thing I keep my own counsel and stay silent.

Beyond some of this more aggressive stuff, we were able to help other people out with some issues they were having and sharing the plight of one institution almost always leads to other institutions either suggesting a new thing to try or accidentally fixing something for someone else who happens to be a semi-involved bystander. It also helps to know that you aren’t the only one, that other people are wrestling with the same kinds of things and in the way that you aren’t really alone offers a kind of consolation. You aren’t singularly damned, you’re just like all the others who are struggling with, well, whatever it may be.

At the end of our meeting we opened the floor to a general question about who might host next time. The fine folks from the University of Wisconsin Foundation leapt at the opportunity so next year we’ll be Milwaukee-bound. I am looking forward to it.