jeffpollard.net

You went where to study what?

So our department hired a new AA/Help Desk person a few weeks ago to take Kathryn's place. But, this new girl doesn't really seem like she knows much about computers, which makes me wonder why we hired her.

For example, a few weeks ago I received a ticket that said that someone needed help installing "iToons". Huh? What's iToons? Is this some new cartoon drawing software? Ok, so maybe she's never heard of Apple's ever popular music-playing program. She's in her mid 20's..maybe she's not into MP3s.

Ok, so today I notice that one of the tickets I received a few days ago is a request to get training for "End Design". "End Design?" What's THAT?? For those not in the graphics arts industry, Adobe InDesign is Adobe's Quark-killing page layout software that has been out in the marketplace for around 5 or 6 years. Apparently our new Help Desk person hasn't heard of it.

Ok, so maybe I'm being a little mean, right? I mean, comon, you can't expect someone who's never worked in an IT department to know about the software we use, right? Wrong. Apparently, she worked at another company in their IT department before she came here. Oh, well. Maybe IT isn't her thing. Wrong again. Apparently, she graduated from a local university with a degree in MIS.

Now do you see why I wonder?

Treo 600

So I guess I never wrote again about the cellphone/PDA thing from about 2 months ago.

I ended up going with the PalmOne Treo 600. And boy is it awesome. I can't say enough good things about this device. In the month or so that I've been carrying it around, it has been incredibly useful. The phone works great and gets great reception in our house and in my office. The wireless data functionality has enabled me to check my email and surf the web almost anywhere I am. And the color screen is a great bonus, too. I don't think I've ever want to get another portable device that doesn't have a color screen.

Of geeky note, last night I was installing some updates on my web server and we had to leave the house to go to dinner. After dinner, I wanted to check in on the server and make sure everything was ok. But, the best way to do that is to SSH in to the server and I didn't have an SSH application on the Treo. So, sitting in the middle of Chris' living room, I brought up Google on my PDA, searched for an SSH client that runs on the Treo 600 and was able to download it directly to the PDA. It installed and in 2 minutes I was SSH'ed into the server to see if the update process had completed. I think it was easily the most geeky thing I've done.

About the only thing I can complain about is the uncomfortable and somewhat inadequate ear piece for the phone portion of the device. Sometimes it takes a little adjusting to find the"sweet spot" on my ear, and even then it's sometimes not loud enough. Oh well, at least it has a speaker phone, so I can use that instead, if necessary.

So, my advice is that if you're in the market for a mobile phone and you also have a PDA, consider the Treo 600. It's both the best phone and best PDA I've ever owned.

JeffandOlivia.info Remade

Since we've been really getting the ball rolling with wedding plans lately, we figured it was about time to give our wedding site (jeffandolivia.info) a new graphical look.

Go ahead, take a look!

Gosh, what do we do now?

You know, it's not often that I talk about work stuff on here. In fact, I prefer not to, just in case some of my co-workers read this as I know they do sometimes.

But I don't really care. This is my site and I can talk about whatever I want.

So sometime over the weekend a Mac laptop was stolen from an office in our building. Now, the entire building is (fairly) secured by card readers at each door and a rent-a-cop at the front desk. So, I figure it's an inside job.

Ok, so it sucks that this happened. I mean, we have somewhere around 350 well-paid employees working in our building...equipment should not be just walking off like this. But it did. And it's not the first time. I think this is laptop number 5 or 6 that's disappeared since I started there almost 4 years ago.

The worst part of it is the reaction from our department. Every time something like this happens, it seems like everyone always stands around scratching their heads saying "Gee, I wonder how this happened..." Poor security, that's how it happened. Sure, we have lots of cameras around the outside of the building, but that's only good if the rent-a-cops get bored and decide to watch the insects gather around the street lights at night.

Sure, we have key cards to keep unwanted guests out of the building. Of course, that didn't stop the last laptop theft. Someone waltzed right in the door after an employee and walked back out with a laptop. Amazing.

So what else can we do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again? Well, start with some policies. Policies that require laptop users to lock up their laptops when they leave them there for the weekend. (Side note: You don't want to know how many users that demanded a laptop have NEVER left their desk with them) So, maybe the policy would include some kind of liability, meaning that our users would *gasp* be responsible for their equipment. You get your laptop stolen because you left it out on your desk, you pay for a new one out of your next paycheck. Heaven forbid we require our users to take responsibility for the Agency's stuff.

Or, how about this: locks. Oh. Yeh, locks. Kensington makes some really great locks that plug into the side of every laptop sold on the market today. Oh, but who would have the key and how difficult would it be for them to unlock their laptop to take it to a conference room? Simple. Give them the keys. give them the responsibility to take care of their own stuff. You lose your lock, you can't unlock your laptop. You don't lock your laptop and it gets stolen, you pay for a new one out of your next paycheck.

But the truth of the matter is, our department seems to have a problem with making policies that make sense. Another example is our ongoing problem with our email system. You see, the problem started with a lack of a good policy: we've never restricted the size of incoming our outgoing email attachments. Naturally, people's inboxes have the tendency to become rather large rather quickly. Especially when one broadcast producer decides to email the latest 30MB worth of mpegs to another broadcast producer. (This is why we have file servers)

Ok, so no attachment limitations, no big deal because we have a size limit on email inboxes, right? Wrong. We don't have any strict policies in place for people's email boxes. So, we have users with 1, 2, and 3 GIGABYTE inboxes! As you can imagine, this fills up our servers' drive space rather quickly. Then, the mail server begins to crash because its drives are full. And then inevitably users complain to us because the server is down.

You see, it's a vicious, vicious circle. One that could easily be stopped with a few simple rules. As with anything, there needs to be limitations. It seems like an IT department would be smart enough to realize that. Apparently, we're not.