Category Archives: Work

Waiting is the hardest part

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Waiting for Verizon. It’s the hardest part of my February so far. For those who have been keeping track, the IRS came and tried to strangle our wireless infrastructure to death, but apparently failed. I’ve been on-again-off-again with Verizon but now we’re firmly on-again. I’ve sent neatly wrapped missives to management but have yet to hear any response.

All of this would be maddening if Verizon was ready. Thankfully it isn’t maddening because Verizon isn’t ready. In fact, from what I’ve seen from my local Verizon sales rep, they don’t even have a vocabulary yet, let alone any plans or packages for sale. So while I struggle with this nominal Blackberry, I watch the time tick away waiting for Verizon to get off their duff and give us details on plans. Then I can take that information to management and maybe goose them into action.

Last night was a problem because I couldn’t make an outbound call with my minimally acceptable Sprint service on my Blackberry. I had to turn off Automatic Roaming, go up to the upper level of my house where I could get the weakest of signals and make a call to order pizza for dinner. Sprint’s network is wretchedly bad, and it almost never was the case before.

I haven’t the heart to call Sprint and tell them what I’m planning. So far all they know is that the IRS is likely going to be the reason why we close our contract. It’s a total straw-man, and as far as today, a rather nifty fabrication. The last time I told them I was contemplating leaving Sprint for Verizon they sent my sales rep, a VP of sales, and a third fellow who had the word “synergy” in his title, or something to that effect. Truth to be told, I don’t have a problem with my Sprint sales rep, or the VP of sales that came to visit, but that third guy was aggressive, abrasive, and thoroughly an unpleasant human being. If Sprint ever gets around to thinking about why they lost my business they can look no further than this third-man they brought with them. Leaving him in his cubicle may be the best move for their future business, if they have any after Verizon poaches every single one of their customers.

I couldn’t properly express to Sprint exactly why the iPhone on Verizon was so compelling. They kept on pushing Android on their network — Are you serious? Verizon is a double-dunk. The device has pretty much already sold me. The Verizon network is the other half of the power-shot and the fact that Verizon is willing to drop the pretense and become a commodity wireless service vendor means the biggest fear I had about the iPhone on Verizon went up in smoke. They aren’t going to nail it down, cover it with obnoxious Verizon “VZ” bullshit, they are going to simply put the device on their network and let the chips fall where they may.

This is like a hat-trick from heaven. Sprint pre-occupied with an IRS straw-man, iPhone on Verizon, and Verizon keeping their ugly branding out of the pot. Bam Bam BAM! If anyone wants to know why, that’s why. A hat-trick.

Now if only Verizon would get back to me… tick tock tick tock gentlemen!

Java

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I’ve written before that my feelings for technology are strong and passionate. I regard Apple with a nearly perfect halo of saintly perfection despite all the Chinese workers committing suicide and some of Apple’s darker acts in regards to the iOS App Store, but despite all that they are still as pure as driven snow in my eyes.

Not so with Sun Microsystems’ Java. It’s not that I hate Java in and of itself, actually I appreciate Java for what it has accomplished with the tools available. What I hate is tangential but squarely placed against Java. Here at work we have two really big monolithic database systems. The first is our in-house alumni database, Millennium. The second is SunGard’s Banner Student Information System.

What do these two pieces of software have to do with Java? Well, that’s the core of my agony. The two have to be used at the same time, but one needs Java 1.5.10 and the other 1.6.3. It’s impossible to expect people to understand Java versioning and when they accidentally upgrade their Java installation with 1.6.3 or later for Banner use, their Millennium client goes completely out-of-spec and makes their lives a living hell, mostly with stupid script errors as code written against 1.5.10 scrambles at the cliffs-of-insanity of 1.6.3 or later.

What is our solution? It’s ugly but it works. We split the software by virtualized operating system. Two XP’s running side-by-side, one with Java 1.5.10 the other with Java 1.6.3. It isn’t elegant, and it starts me thinking about why exactly Java is in any of these products to start with. For Banner it’s pretty clear, Banner is written against Oracle and the client software is exceptionally poor, it’s called jInitiator and I feel ill and tremble even when contemplating it. It’s the kind of software that I fantasize about staking to the earth and watch the sun rise as it burns and screams, hissing and spitting giant gobs of ichor everywhere as it slowly burns to dust.

Millennium isn’t as bad, but there is Java still. Why? It could be wholly a W3C compliant application, I mean, that’s where it’s headed, and if you want fancy bits you could always use JavaScript or even AJAX tricks to do the same things that they have Java doing. Thankfully I’ve bullied the authors into promising that by version 9 of the software, that Java will be a sad sorry memory.

So it’s not really that I’m angry at Java, but I am angry at these companies that write in ways that permanently fix a version of Java on a machine and that only invites issues like viruses, security breaches, and these horribly gross incompatibilities and there is nothing I can do to address them other than apply virtualization technology like a cure-all salve. It’s quite like hunting fleas with a BFG. Annoying.

So for those out there who are thinking about using Java to make your software shiny or somehow cute, just skip it. Your customers won’t really appreciate what neat shiny you can bring to the table and the admin tasked with keeping it all together will thank you for one less versioning nightmare to have to deal with. I blame Java because without it, my life would be much easier. One just has to wait for things to get better, at least there is hope.

 

Hamster Wheel

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A week ago a policy was sent which indicated that the IRS was effectively going to strangle the life out of our wireless infrastructure. Yesterday afternoon I learned that while the policy may be published, it was an error that it was sent out and the brouhaha that it caused was a mistake.

I talked it over with my boss and I commented that the only information I had to act on was the policy sent down and I didn’t have any other guidance. I had sent an email to management but never got a reply. Then my boss told me that sometimes not hearing an answer is an answer – and it hit me – a line right out of Serendipity, one of the best lines that Jeremy Piven’s character Dean Kansky said “So the absence of a sign, is a sign!?!.. They should make pills for this…” hit me and I had to suppress a serious case of the giggles.

So after talking with management, which is apparently dominated by the doppler effect, in so far that the words I hear are modulated by pitch changes as they rush away to another meeting, I got what I was after, which was an ounce of clarification.

So the policy exists and we are moving ahead with a wireless infrastructure. I contacted our Verizon rep and placed the toy train back on the tracks after so violently derailing it earlier and set the track power to maximum so we could catch up. Just as much as we don’t know exactly how we’re going to approach our wireless infrastructure, Verizon doesn’t know how they are going to handle our contract, at least yet. I bet when we make decisions, that will oddly be the same moment that Verizon makes it’s decisions. I suspect we’ll have a bumper crop of Kismet coming down the pike.

Picky picky

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What arrived in campus mail today was a marvelous surprise. It was my reimbursement request, sent back to me by the central bureaucracy that not only was my request rejected because it lacked a business purpose but also that my reimbursement would not include the sales tax that I paid. =Insert rude gesture here= 🙂

Really, the sales tax comes down to $2.22 but like many things, it isn’t about the money as so much as it’s about the principles behind it. I can’t buy iTunes Cards or iPad Apps directly with my University Procurement Card, so I’m stuck, so the only way to move forward is to fund it privately and request reimbursement. This was something I was fine with, it helps everyone get along and business can continue without interruption. That was, until I discovered that getting said reimbursement is an uphill battle and that I won’t get a fair shake because there is a policy that people can hide behind when convenient.

So, knowing the rules of the ‘game’ now, between me and my employer, I elect to withdraw my initial “helping out” because it is plainly not equitable. I pay money on behalf of this institution and I don’t get a fair and proper reimbursement. I don’t blame this place for the failure, I blame myself. I was dumb enough to volunteer my resources to further the efforts of this institution and that was a mistake. So, a few moments ago I logged into my work-based iTunes account and removed the reference to my credit card. Since there are no funds attached to the account and no credit card, future App purchases are effectively dead until WMU decides on how it’s going to proceed on its own.

And that’s kind of the core of this blog post. How can an institution like this cope with the 21st Century. At first it was just a quaint little nothing, a bird on a radar screen – the iTunes App Store. Ever since Apple pursued this strategy further with OS X 10.6.6 and introducing the App Store to the Desktop, now we have something. Plus these devices are not simply going to go away. iPads are not a fad that is going to just fade away like Bell Bottoms, they’re here to stay and finding ways to integrate them into our “enterprise” existence has led us all to a knotwork of difficulty. The professional instrumentation that exists lacks elegance, to put it mildly.

It’s not my job any more to fret and wring my hands and get all bent out of shape that this place screwed me once again. I’m not angry. I see it as an education. Now I know through a real object lesson what happens when I do something like this, and what have I learned? I’m never going to do this, or anything else like this, ever again. Once bitten, twice shy mostly. My biggest fault is electing to forget about all the times when this place has failed me or let me down or in this case, lead to a wee bit of financial loss. In a way it’s good that I suffered financial harm during this entire endeavor, perhaps that will be enough to keep the memory alive so when I face something like this in the future I can fail to offer anything beyond what is strictly a business option. Reimbursements? Nah, never again, thanks.

Now I await with bated breath to see how this institution copes.

Being Sick

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With my iPad and my MacBook I have to say that the classical lines of distinction of “The Workday” have blurred completely away. I find myself doing my best work at 1:30am or 3:30am, or even when inspiration strikes. I think that’s one of the hallmarks of how technology is changing our lives for the better. I don’t have to write a flurry of ideas down to process at some later time when I can do them RIGHT NOW. Then again, my work style is built on speed. Think fast, act fast, do it right the first time.

Even when I’m sick and hacking up a lung, I can create new blogs and assemble rights for users, and thanks to Apple and all the infrastructure I’ve combined around my work life and my private life I can do all of this pretty much from anywhere, even while driving 70MPH (as a passenger, of course! SCANDAL! :))

I think it’s something that the classical structure of business life will eventually have to address. The idea that if you have a salaried employee who is as mobile as I am and as technologically connected as I am, that we can really do our jobs competently from a rest stop as much as we can do it at work desktop. To that end I have to admit that I encourage my coworkers to heed the wisdom of non-blocking/non-interrupt based communications. I no longer really use a telephone and I don’t really value face to face communications. I prefer my communications to be of the type of Email, SMS, or Instant Message. I think these forms of communication are far more respectful than the intrusive nature of blocking/interrupt based forms of communication. Writing me an email means your message was received and understood and will get the attention it deserves, the same with the other non-blocking/non-interrupt forms, such as SMS and IM’ing. If more people would adopt these forms I know I’d be a far happier person.

I think a good portion of why people elect to use the blocking/interrupt model is because they believe there is a value in the personal approach. They are afraid of the non-blocking/non-interrupt forms to lead to alienation and depersonalization. I get enough personal interaction in my life and the last thing I need is “expensive context switches” where my task flow is interrupted by someone calling me on the telephone or knocking on my door. I often wish I could tell these people that I understand their need for human contact, I don’t require it of them myself and would vastly prefer the non-blocking/non-interrupt based communications styles. The only time I want to see someone in the flesh is if something has become an emergency, then fine. But here again, I make an exception that must be tempered – not everything is an emergency. Even when “emergencies” come up seven out of ten times those emergencies aren’t, they’re just wearing the garb of an emergency to provide an excuse to block/interrupt.

I think eventually more professional people will see the wisdom of this and finally understand that in an average workday the time-wasting emergency-based “humanizing” approach is just wasting money and time. This approach is just as good for the sources of these blocking/interrupt based issues as they are for us victims of their blocking/interrupt driven behaviors. By not having to get up, not having to pick up the phone, you save yourself so much time, to say nothing about the clarity of what you want to convey. You just can’t beat the low signal to noise ratio of text over voice.

Spreading Sickness

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It all started with a guy named Ray. He was sick, and gave it to his boyfriend, Steven. Steven gave it to our friend Justin and Justin gave it to all of us. This illness is more of a minor annoyance to me, but quite troublesome for Scott because of his already extant breathing difficulties. I’ve been ‘chugging’ down tea as fast as I can brew it, for as much as you can chug just-off-the-boil water.

This is a plain-jane rhinovirus. You feel achy and have chills for a little while, then your head fills up with gunk and over some sleepless nights it spreads into your lungs. It makes breathing difficult and spreads along your vocal cords, which for me makes me more Barry White-Betty White than I care for. The key I’ve found is hot tea, hot soup, good food, rest and apparently TheraFlu, which I just took. The TheraFlu stuff is quite good. It’s got a cough-supressant, a decongestant, and an antihistamine. You prepare it just like you do tea. I threw in a packet of Splenda to make the medicine go down but it wasn’t unpleasant at all to take. I like the idea of a powder added to hot water as it’s almost as perfect-for-your-system as it can get. No having to dissolve dextrose or cellulose pill containers, the chemicals are already a little higher than body temperature so absorption is marvellously quick. I’m sure a good portion of how I feel is placebo, but my nose is draining and my froggy/tickle has just about gone away at the back of my throat.

The question I have to face is, do I head into work tomorrow or do I attempt some sort of telecommuting angle? WMU is renowned for being very skitterish about presenteeism and handling of leaves of absences. I of course have nothing to worry about because I have over 480 hours of accrued sick leave, but I do need to get some work accomplished. I will see how I feel tomorrow of course, as is the usual way.

I think there is a trifecta for dealing with this virus, Zicam, TheraFlu, and Mucinex-D. That should make your system hut right to it, and you won’t have to put up with the obnoxious irritation that this virus represents. I knock on wood that this virus has no stomach-upsetting angle to it.

Scott has gone to urgent care as his health insurance is poor and adding him to my insurance would bankrupt me. They’ll give him a breathing treatment and then chide him for using urgent care most likely. I do not envy his position, already being under-the-gun as it were and to add this insult-to-injury. I don’t think a doctors visit for me would do any good other than probably waste money and pre-occupy a doctor with a triage-worthy sack of symptoms. I’m doing what common sense dictates, rest, fluids, and symptom management. My immune system will do the rest.

Proof of Life

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Here is some email back and forth between me and a fellow at Google Apps who doesn’t believe that I’m who I say I am. Oh how to prove WMU.

***

Email From Google:
On Jan 13, 2011, at 6:26 PM, The Google Team wrote:

Hello Andy,

Thanks for your message.

Before we can continue processing your application for an Apps for
Education Upgrade, please clarify the purpose of the specific domain you
have requested for upgrade.

In addition, can you please provide the following information:

What are the ages of the students you teach?
Do you offer degrees to students who complete the program?
Have you received accreditation from an accepted accrediting body?

Please reply to this email with your responses so we may continue to
process your request. If you are a certified 501(c)(3) non-profit
organization please send us your EIN, as you may qualify for an upgrade to
Education Edition for non-profits.

If you do not feel you meet these requirements, we invite you to continue
to manage your account with our free Google Apps, which offers many of the
same features and services.

Sincerely,

Suchit
The Google Apps Team

My Response:

Hello,

We teach students from 18 to in their 80’s… This might help:

Western Michigan University (WMU) is a public universityestablished in 1903 by Dwight B. Waldo. When the school first opened, it was known as the Western State Normal School, but was renamed Western State Teachers College in 1927 and Western Michigan College of Education in 1941. On February 26, 1957 Governor G. Mennen Williams signed into law a bill making Western Michigan College the state’s fourth public university. In its annual ranking of the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities, U.S. News & World Report consistently lists WMU as one of the nation’s top 100 public universities. (Hooray Wikipedia!)

We offer many degrees, Everything from Bachelors all the way up to PhD’s. We’ve got about 117,000 alumni who we’ve graced with degrees. We’ve got 278,000 living constituents… I’m just saying.

And once again…

Western Michigan University is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, 30 North LaSalle Street, Suite 2400, Chicago, Illinois 60602-2504; Web site www.ncahigherlearningcommission.org.

Feel free to give me a call, 269-387-8719 and we can discuss Western Michigan University in detail. I’m the system administrator for WMU Development and Alumni Relations, my office is in Walwood Hall room 133E. I’m sure we could likely also find a few of our graduates who WORK AT GOOGLE and have degrees from our COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING. Oye!

Thanks for the laughs, I hope some of this works for you guys…

Andy McHugh
269-216-4597

Moving to Verizon iPhone

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So I have done it. I have sent an email to my Verizon representative, Mr. Steven Miller with a letter expressing extreme interest in transferring our mobile infrastructure away from Sprint and towards Verizon on the iPhone device. We’re going to move 5 connection cards and 17 phone lines from Sprint to Verizon.

Now I wait with bated breath for the quote! Light I’m on pins and needles! To be free of this abominable Blackberry, I hardly know what to do with myself!

New Years Resolutions

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Everyone makes them and everyone breaks them. The classic ones over the year have been to lose weight or get out of debt, these aren’t things I can simply check-off my list in a year, they are long-term things. So I have to start small. One thing that I can definitely get a handle on and work on is to not be so very angry in the coming new year.

To cease being so angry I also have to bury a lot of zombies that are shambling about. The zombies take the form of the past. Previous coworkers, previous problems, previous angers. I visualize that I’ve got them in a giant earthen pit and I’m laughing with a shovel in one hand and a molotov cocktail in the other hand, looking at the zombies shambling  around the pit sloshing around in gasoline. I light the cocktail, lob it in, and watch as all the past issues and annoyances and bugbears burn like so much straw men. Once the screaming and shuffling is over I get down off the tower platform I’m standing on and get busy shoveling all this nasty into the shallow grave it so richly deserves.

So my goal for 2011 is to not let the past bother me, to not get so angry, and to not let myself get caught up in vortexes of rage so that all I can think about is revenge and destruction. The shortcut is with psychotropic medications, I think the more honest path is with plain old willpower and determination. We’ll see how 2011 stacks up.

All Too Shocking

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I’m pursuing a new passion at work, advocating for increased use of social networking at Western. As I see it there are three phases to what I have to do in order to bring about change around here:

  • Identify the organic condition of WMU’s position in the social networking sphere.
  • Identify and recommend avenues of future development and arguments for increased activity in social networking spheres.
  • Educate and encourage management to see the value in the arguments and endorse pursuit of our goal of increased social networking involvement.

So far I’ve looked at a batch of social networking services and one thing is crystal clear to me. WMU has as an organization done very little to take ownership of its social networking “Voice”. The current Voice is being controlled by students, a mish-mash of staff and faculty, and various organizations in Kalamazoo such as the Kalamazoo Gazette. I myself was contributing to the not-WMU Voice wrangling before I clenched up my privacy and online security, so that my Facebook and Twitter streams are private now. The only still-public wrangling I give the Voice is here on my WordPress blog.

I would like to say I was shocked, but I am not. I’ve known for a very long time and I’ve been agitated with the knowledge that everyone else but WMU is actually in control of the “social message” of this University. This “social message” should be firmly in-hand here at WMU. We should be leading the discourse, guiding the “social message”. It’s not only that we don’t control our “social message” but we are also inexplicably ignoring a vast and ripe market space by treating social networking as a passing fad. It is very much not a passing fad.

I’ve often times used the metaphor of a herd when discussing market cohort groups. In case of “young alumni” I see them composed of Generation X and Generation Y members, people in my age bracket who graduated from University from 1995 into the current year. These people are easy for people like me to understand, as I am in the group. If it appeals to my model of what my cohort finds attractive and compelling then I know it will succeed. In many ways I imagine Western to be much like other institutions out there, we’re all competing for various scarce resources, such as money, students, legislative power, and finally, social relevance. Currently WMU and Kalamazoo are “on-the-map” because of a Glen Miller song, Teaching, Aviation, and Paper Technology. Outside of those sharp niches we’re just another public state school. Because we don’t actually inject any controlled content into the social networking sphere currently, our most powerful method of advertising and promoting our institution is in the hands of everyone else but us.

I have to admit that when I look around the sense I get is one of shy victimhood. Because we are never in control of the social message we are perpetually defending ourselves against every critic and because we are mute when it comes to our social message we cannot hope to make any progress on the sort of initiatives that matter the most to our organization. I think what is most telling to me is the nearly universal response I have seen from recent graduates and young alumni. The expressions they share are not of indifference but rather of belligerence, derision, and hatred. WMU didn’t do anything for them while they were students, and it continues to do nothing for them as Alumni, yet WMU calls with their hats in their hands asking for money. I’ve personally witnessed at least a handful of  times being the message-mule to inform WMU that certain alumni want absolutely no contact whatsoever from their alma mater.

This points to another argument I made years ago when I brought this concern up to some paid consultants. I was told that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I shouldn’t worry myself over these concerns. I have stated before that there is a huge social shift when you compare alumni who graduated in the 70’s versus alumni who graduated in the 00’s and later. In the great long ago it was a prideful privilege to attend a University, it was a mark of intelligence and was a source of pride and honor. The market, society, perhaps western culture itself changed in the 80’s and the 90’s and there was this shift towards a clear preference for higher education graduates and a dearth of employment for those without higher education. Suddenly a basic education was not sufficient, if you wanted a family and to be successful and happy you needed a degree of higher education added to your name. Higher education catered to this shift by admitting more people, but when they did it, they also became more insular and grew more callous, bureaucratic, and monolithic. What was previously something very special became exceptionally banal in just a few short years. Higher education changed from “University” to “K-16”. As this change was happening I was attending SUNY Buffalo and I immediately was confronted with something I was not expecting. Instead of an organization built on mutual respect, a passion for learning, and earned obedience and loyalty these institutions converted into featureless service and content providers. What was a chance to pursue difficult questions with like-minded adults and develop a higher intellect devolved into a high school sequel. This change has set both groups apart from each other, on one side the University with its staff and faculty and on the other side, the Student. What possible affection can be raised when your University is fundamentally indistinguishable from a Supermarket?

It is this shift that I brought up, that people graduating in my social cohort group are not enamored with higher education. It’s just another thing we felt forced into by society, we didn’t attend because we were passionate about it, we attended because there was no choice. These people are not going to give money to their University as much as they would write a check to a supermarket just because they happened to shop their once or twice. As I’ve moved along in my life and witnessed things, I have this sense that this shift was actually quite traumatic and there is profound scarring for both groups. I don’t know if modern Universities are ready to face a future where their better angels care not a jot for them and meet with closed doors, dial tones, and a profound lack of opportunities to raise money. All I can go on is what I have witnessed and that is summed up by this: “WMU didn’t do shit for me, I have a worthless degree and a lifetime of crushing debt. If they want money, they’ll have to find it somewhere else.”

So we return back to where we started. Will Higher Education embrace social networks? Can they? Is there sufficient scarring to make all of these arguments mute and this last sliver of opportunity, this last gasp of future relevance just so much pissing in the wind? At least for this place, I have hope that it is, I have hope that my arguments find some traction. Along with all of my hope comes my fear that a change-averse monolith simply hasn’t the capacity to move forward and that all this is just hot air being blown over a corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead yet and hasn’t quite gotten around to laying down in its grave. I suppose only time will tell, as it does with everything else.