Thursday, June 28, 2007
Back from vacation, part 2
The downside to these vacations, especially ones with lots of other people, is the age old one Doctors know all to well.
"Oh, you work in computers?"
Those of you in the industry know the dread that phrase incurs. It means that you will shortly be asked a question about a computer problem, usually software. Or a strange error messages. Or a thingy that worked last week but just suddenly stopped. Any ideas? And in this age of laptops everywhere, even on vacation when there is zero WiFi coverage, the offending hardware can be whipped out for some on the spot troubleshooting.
The real demon of it is that while I do work "in computers", 95% of the questions I get from friends and relatives are for the part of "in computers" I don't do. Specifically, desktop OS and application support. I used to be able to do that sort of thing, but at the time I worked on a helpdesk doing that every day. Not any more.
What I do every day could be called "enterprise". One question I did field this weekend actually WAS near my area of speciality, someone wanted to know how to connect to a service hosted on a desktop machine behind their NAT router from the internet. For the rest, especially the Vista questions, I was singularly unhelpful.
For the OSS advocates out there, one guy did ask me about linux. His son had set him up with linux on a desktop system he gave him. Very nice, shows advocacy. Unfortunately, printing mysteriously stopped last week and did I know how to get it back? Um.... no. He didn't know what distribution he was using, or even if it was KDE or Gnome. How do you explain THAT? As with all things linux there are three completely different ways to set printing up, and each distro seems to configure it, or skin the configuration, its own way. It is much much harder to troubleshoot these things from the remove of a user who doesn't know the interface trying to describe it. In this case I'm pretty sure it was Ubuntu, and I've never used that distro.
So I'm considering revising my answer to the statement, "oh, you work in computers?" To, "no, I work in networks. Not the same thing." They'll still pitch their problems at me, but perhaps the expectation of getting a resolution will go down.
"Oh, you work in computers?"
Those of you in the industry know the dread that phrase incurs. It means that you will shortly be asked a question about a computer problem, usually software. Or a strange error messages. Or a thingy that worked last week but just suddenly stopped. Any ideas? And in this age of laptops everywhere, even on vacation when there is zero WiFi coverage, the offending hardware can be whipped out for some on the spot troubleshooting.
The real demon of it is that while I do work "in computers", 95% of the questions I get from friends and relatives are for the part of "in computers" I don't do. Specifically, desktop OS and application support. I used to be able to do that sort of thing, but at the time I worked on a helpdesk doing that every day. Not any more.
What I do every day could be called "enterprise". One question I did field this weekend actually WAS near my area of speciality, someone wanted to know how to connect to a service hosted on a desktop machine behind their NAT router from the internet. For the rest, especially the Vista questions, I was singularly unhelpful.
For the OSS advocates out there, one guy did ask me about linux. His son had set him up with linux on a desktop system he gave him. Very nice, shows advocacy. Unfortunately, printing mysteriously stopped last week and did I know how to get it back? Um.... no. He didn't know what distribution he was using, or even if it was KDE or Gnome. How do you explain THAT? As with all things linux there are three completely different ways to set printing up, and each distro seems to configure it, or skin the configuration, its own way. It is much much harder to troubleshoot these things from the remove of a user who doesn't know the interface trying to describe it. In this case I'm pretty sure it was Ubuntu, and I've never used that distro.
So I'm considering revising my answer to the statement, "oh, you work in computers?" To, "no, I work in networks. Not the same thing." They'll still pitch their problems at me, but perhaps the expectation of getting a resolution will go down.
Back from vacation, part 1
The reason there haven't been any posts for the last 7 days is that I've been hanging out here:
Which was quite nice. I even have the mosquito bites to prove that I had fun! It was relaxing.
And I come back to fine that OES2 hasn't released yet, but there is at least a public beta of the Novell Client for Vista out. Win one, lose one.
Which was quite nice. I even have the mosquito bites to prove that I had fun! It was relaxing.
And I come back to fine that OES2 hasn't released yet, but there is at least a public beta of the Novell Client for Vista out. Win one, lose one.
Labels: vacation
Monday, July 24, 2006
Returning
I have returned. I'm now going through the vast expanse of e-mail that stacked up in my absence. But things have already moved along since I was out, and I haven't even gotten all the way through the stacked up e-mail.
Tags: vacation
- The NovusHR update was worked while I was gone, and the folk who managed it feel good about the whole process. This is good, as this was the first test of 'in production' procedures while we're in test.
- The SymantecAV replacement of McAfee has proceeded apace. The lack of "oh crap!" mail suggests the process has been largely error free. [and as an aside, Sophos was notified of the RFP for this upgrade process, but they never submitted a bid that fit all the requrements and were therefore eliminated as a contender]
- We're getting another UPS for our data-center to help share the load. The first round of rack moves to accomodate the new equipment will happen tomorrow!
Tags: vacation
Labels: vacation
