Category Archives: Work

Horses and Turkeys

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I’ve often times written about the turkeys in my life. These flightless, technically useless feed-birds also have another connotation. A turkey can also be a lame workplace drag. A human doorstop. Bright as a bag of hammers. Smart as a sack of bricks. These people are witnessed by the statement “Oh God, really? Again!? Wow.”

I have evidence now of turkey-dom in my midst. A lot of my initial irritation is tempered for many of them because at some point in the past they demonstrated some measure that they respected us and our mission within the overarching structure of our organization. The context is one of the horse. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.

There is a difference between the way I used to respond to turkeys and how I do now. I’m not just drifting in space without a radio. I’ve got a tether and someone in ground control who gives a damn. So, the turkeys are being rounded up and sent to the nearest metaphorical Tyson packing plant. I’ve got direction, and I categorically refuse to let these particular dullards get me down. Their lives will suck, I’m quite tired of trying to haul them out of the water. They’ve chosen ignorance and we can’t be really bothered with that sort any more. It boggles my mind, the way some of these people behave.

C’est la vie…

Verizon, please don't be like Sprint. Please.

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My VP asked if I had included the iPhone Hotspot feature on his device and I discovered that when I had the order set up that it fell through the cracks. So the task was clear, have Verizon turn the feature on. This should have been a shrug, a flick of a switch, and blam, all set.

No.

I emailed my Verizon rep and in the subject put down the person, the line, and then in the message, would they please turn on the hotspot. My iPhone was configured to put a signature at the bottom of the email, Andy McHugh – 269-216-4597. So I sent the email to my rep at Verizon thinking that was that.

No.

What I saw was a CC’ed message from Verizon with a number I didn’t recognize. But then again, I didn’t really look at it too deeply because I remember from Sprint that my Blackberry had a “Real Number” and a “Bullshit Number” and I thought at least on a cursory glance that this iPhone had the same deal. A “Real Number” and some “Bullshit Number” that only means something to Verizon. I didn’t give it any thought at all.

Then I got a message from Verizon Government Care, “Uh, Mr. McHugh, we, uh, we can’t do anything with 269-216-4597, it’s not ours.” Yes, you are right. That’s my GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER! Durrr. So I replied “Dear Sonia, please LOOK AT THE SUBJECT.” and then reiterated my request with the name and the right phone number.

So, is it Verizon’s fault for misunderstanding my original message? Is it my fault for having a rather humdrum signature on my emails? Bygones. There is more than enough blame to go around and it wasn’t like there was anything really life-threatening on the line. I have learned a lesson though, it pays to be really REALLY demonstrative and clear and repetitive with Verizon. It’s not that they can’t do the things I ask of them, it’s just GIGO is apparently a very shallow target.

Huuuurrrr. I started to have Sprint-related flashbacks, that’s never good. 🙂

MyWMU.com

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For the past few months I’ve been pretty much ringside on a lot of new things and some pretty epic changes to this old University. One of the foremost, and I’ve discussed this at length before with family members is that we have a new vice president. This new VP is the whirlwind, it’s quite something to watch. It’s also the first time in a very long time that people have started to come to us both (my assistant and I) with really great questions. It used to be that technology wasn’t so very important and now, well, everything has changed.

We’ve released upon this world a brand new WMU experience, it’s a part of our new engagement platform that I had an integral part in forming along with (and I love this) a real team of coworkers. Not a mindless committee of disaffected drones but real passionate and incredibly creative people! It’s a refreshing change. This new experience has a new “front door” and two blogs attached, the “Western Express” which I named and am very proud of, and WMYou, the Alumni blog which has some really incredible people writing for it. You can find it all here, at MyWMU.com.

It’s quite stunning to me to see the responses we’ve gotten from the quality of our site. I don’t know if it’s modesty but this effort is what I would expect anyone in IT to be able to pull off without blinking an eye, turns out, at least from the feedback we’re getting, that what we did here is a whole order of magnitude better than the competitors. I’ve never really considered what I do to be remarkable in any way, I’m just doing a rather even-keeled job of things as far as I am concerned, but apparently it’s more than anyone expected. I feel good about all the kudos but I also feel a little awkward about all the other IT people who aren’t making things like this happen. I worry over the differences. Then again, I’ve always worried over those differences. I suppose I’ll never understand, and as far as I’ve gathered from my management, I bet they hope I never understand either. 🙂

So the site is up, and it was created in an atmosphere that I think is best summed up by what Craig Ferguson said about Dr. Who:

“The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”

I just love that, and in many ways, that’s what this new site feels a lot like. It took a long time for me to stop bludgeoning dead horses and see the light as it were. Now that I have, all the turkeys that used to get me down suddenly are very small things and easily ignored. I hope everyone enjoys this new resource and we’ve got some really cool things planned for it in the weeks to come.

Comic Tent Flapping

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I’ve signed up for The Weather Channel’s “Notify” service. This is supposed to alert me when there is a meteorological emergency and I use it mostly for thunderstorms as power outages can cause havoc with my systems at work.

Mostly the service runs great, and always alerts me when there is some sort of emergency. The problem is that it alerts me too well. In alert management I believe it’s called tent flapping. The alert spawns a thick group of alerting emails and phone calls. Each alert throws off two calls, and about four emails. It’s always comic when there is an alert as every device I own beeps, vibrates, or rings.

At least I can’t say that I wasn’t alerted. 🙂

iPhone 4 on Verizon – Delightful!

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While re-reading my old Blackberry / iPhone / Droid post (which is my #1 most viewed page!) I started to chuckle at my May 10th 2010 self versus my February 16th, 2011 self. What has my experience been now that I’ve had my iPhone for a fair bit?

I am in love with this device.

Now I can fall pretty hard for a pretty face, especially when it comes to a new gadget. I categorize myself as a “use it all” kind of iPhone user, the curious geek who refuses to stop fiddling with a device until I have it just so. I don’t go as far as the GPL/FSF folks who want to take a phone and turn it into an Adirondack chair, but I do take my gadgets for pretty intense rides.

So what do I think now? Blackberry is dead. I rescued all the data I cared for out of my old Blackberry device, I wiped it clean and I removed the battery. I haven’t even looked back or even thought of it since then. I imagine in my mind’s eye, a giant crematorium where I open the giant door and start pitchforking all the useless memories and upset feelings and anger and close the door to watch it all burn to ash. I used to fantasize about annihilating my Blackberry. Now that I have my Verizon iPhone 4, I don’t really care to go back there anymore. I don’t care for Blackberry Enterprise Server, or RIM, or any of the other silly things that having a phone with a network endpoint in Canada means.

As I look out now, I respect Droid for its user base and how well it’s progressed. I’m still quite critical that certain manufacturers are keeping their customers from upgrading to the latest and greatest version of the Droid operating system in order to squeeze as much money as they can from them. I can appreciate the Droid, but I don’t espouse it’s use or recommend it to anyone I know. Most people aren’t seeking my recommendations when it comes to mobile device operating systems anyways. One small problem I have with Droid is the kill-switch that Google maintains on the devices apps and the laissez-faire style with which the Droid App Store is policed. It’s too wild and too uncontrolled for my tastes and I don’t think exposing people who aren’t interested in the hows and the whys is a very wise move. These people get it in their head to download something hazardous like a trojan horse and then the show is over.

How about the iPhone? It’s amazing. The devices display, the two cameras, all the apps! It’s kind of overwhelming. There are so many things I can do now, now that I am using a real network with a real device. I can browse the web the way I want to, not the way that my old Blackberry forced me to do. I can read my emails, including HTML emails with ease and pleasure. The network is snappy, nice and quick and about the same speed as Sprint when Sprint was in its heyday. Those days are done, by the way. This device, this iPhone does everything that Apple promises and does it exceptionally well. Everything from fit, finish, to overall quality is as I expect from Apple, beyond my wildest expectations. Of course, every cute puffy cloud does have it’s darker sides as well. There are only a few of those, and mostly it comes down to ringtones, using the iPhone on multiple machines, but beyond that, which none of them are show stoppers. Instead of wanting to throttle the Blackberry devs to death with my bare hands I just want to tousle the hair of the Apple devs who baked these oddities into their device.

Soon I will write a review sheet about all the apps I’ve gotten for my iPhone. Instead of duplicating all the apps that I reviewed already for my iPad (as there is a huge overlap) I’ll only review those apps that are unique to my iPhone and why I chose them. That’s coming up soon, keep an eye out for it if you like my reviews.

QR Codes

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Today at work I was playing around with my new Verizon iPhone 4 and found a suite of apps related to scanning QR codes. These codes are square speckled two-dimensional bar codes that can contain a surprising amount of information.

I found a great site and discovered that it had a paired iOS app:

QR Code Creator Site: http://bit.ly/dziTfL

QR Code App: http://bit.ly/h97j6H

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should check them out!

So that got us started on possibly weaving QR codes in a lot of our promotional materials. Some of the ideas I’ve entertained revolving around these codes are:

  • History of a building, photos of its construction, where the funding came from and some of the neat things about the building that people might like to know.
  • Raffle codes on the back of WMU game tickets, we insert a random QR that people have to SMS or Email to enter a raffle to win a prize, or something.
  • If these codes are up on billboards, we could provide a full vCard for WMU including admissions, our website, and other contact information.

As I got to thinking about the QR codes, it’s an avenue to enable printed material to have a digital effect, in a way it completes a round-trip for information. The path from digital to physical is usually via printers, and this is a way for physical to cross back into digital. The information technology, marketing, and pure geek factor are all very high – it’s very exciting!

What does an Apple Mouse and a Blackberry have in common?

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Today has a bright note of happiness all of a sudden. One of my coworkers came in complaining that her Apple Wireless Mouse couldn’t scroll up any longer. We’ve for the longest time noticed a slow and subtle failure of these Apple Mice over time, suddenly they won’t scroll up any longer, no reason, just bloop, that’s it.

While I was thinking of solutions, out of the blue a fix I remembered for PITA Blackberry Curve and Pearl devices popped into my head. In those devices the pearl can become contaminated with skin oils and hair and whatnot and start camming and eventually cease working altogether. The solution for the Blackberry is to turn the Blackberry face-down, lay it gently on a fresh piece of paper and then roll the hell out of the ball against the paper. This apparently cleans the pearl ball of oil and grit and junk and the Blackberry returns to proper function.

So, would this work for these Apple Mice? The pearl in the Blackberry is nearly identical to the ball in the Apple Mice. So I grabbed one of the “Broken Apple Mice” and got some paper and made it squeak. It actually squeaks, so adorable! Then I plugged it in, and voilà, works like a charm!

So the solution to fixing a scroll ball in an Apple Mouse is to get some paper, turn the mouse upside down and roll it vigorously against the paper for a count of say 10 to 15. Works like a charm!

Enjoy!

Fitting Punishments

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Last night I couldn’t get the idea of punishing my Blackberry out of my mind. I was running over scenarios of destruction in my mind. How could I best bring my emotional needs to bear on this repugnant and abominable device? I thought of many things:

  • Taking the Blackberry out to the dock with our office sledgehammer and dashing it in a flurry of epithets and cussing. Screaming while I extracted a primal retribution for all the ways the device let me down and angered me.
  • Building a little bonfire and setting the piece of crap on fire. Watching it burn, drinking a very fine bottle of wine and when it’s all burned down to ash, putting it out manually.
  • Giving it a Viking Funeral, putting it on a little wooden boat and setting that on fire and pushing it off to float in a lake or pond.
  • Violent but paced deconstruction. Getting out my tools and pulling the device apart and unscrewing everything and when it’s in a neat pile, beating it with a hammer.

Then I thought about maybe having my assistant video me turning my Blackberry into a pile of slag in some of the less-personal-approaches to destroying it. Then as I laid there last night thinking about it, a part of me piped up about how if there was a video, first it would be hilarious, very Office Space of me, but it would also be rather incriminating as I would be technically destroying a workplace device.

As I continued to play scenarios through my head I started thinking about truly sadistic things I could do to this obnoxious horrible device and it hit me. It gives me a different non-destructive path to take that actually is more spiritually torturous. I have resolved to consign my Blackberry to a Velveteen Rabbit Hell. I will remove it’s battery and I will put it in a dirty disused cardboard box and I will lock it away in a locker nobody ever uses and I will forget all about it. It will stay in the box, inert, forgotten, and effectively gone from my life. Everyone wins. No video of me destroying it, no crime, nothing to upset anyone and I still get to punish it, long-term. When I do remember it I will relish its silent cardboard grave.

West Hills Snark

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I just got a big beautiful 12 page paper mailer from West Hills Athletic Facility. It’s an athletic club that the University bought that nobody I know actually goes to because it’s too expensive. It’s like any other athletic club, looks good on the outside, smells awful on the inside, it’s overpriced and I’ve got no interest in it at all. It’s good to know they have cash to burn on these big mailers. What would be more convenient for everyone and save them lots of money is if they’d just ship out PDF files in email, save the paper costs, the printing costs, and enable me to place the from address into my junk mail list and have it sent to the great bit-bucket in the sky. A win for West Hills’ advertising budget and a win for me and everyone else who doesn’t want to have to find something like this in their campus mailbox just to immediately toss it in the recycling bin.

I suppose I could just clearly print on a sticky-note on our campus mailbox a list of all the spammy bits of debris that we elect to not get. That’s an idea! 😉