Back in the saddle

You don't find out how many people actually read your website until you get lazy and stop updating it for a week.  I don't want this site to die, I've just been busy.  Spring has finally sprung here in Iowa, and after being shut up inside all winter, I've got urges to go places and do things, but not to update my weblog.

My equipment requests were approved yesterday, now I just have to orchestrate the purchase of the equipment.  My coworker and I are getting much-needed 21 inch monitors, as our 19 inch displays are of low quality, as well as being several years old.  The new Trinitrons should serve quite nicely.

My request to outfit our building with 802.11b wireless networking was approved too, now I just need to get some wireless cards.  Unfortunately, the 802.11b module for my Visor won't be out until May, at least...

We're also going to bite the bullet, and shell out the money for the Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition.  We're tired of trying to keep 250 machines all up to date manually, and of having to clean up after virus infections.  Having the centrally managed software should make our jobs much easier.

And lastly, we're getting a CD Duplicator, to enable us to make large batches of CDs for when faculty would like to hand out supplemental digital materials to their students.  This should be interesting, I've never used anything like it before, but being able to duplicate up to 75 CDs at a time should be handy, and a lot easier than the current methods..

Busy Life

It's been a busy past few days, and now that Userland seems to have gotten their server problems remedied, I can write about it. Thursday night, my dad called me and told me that my grandmother had just been diagnosed with colon cancer. I dashed off an e-mail to work, telling them I wouldn't be in on Friday, then drove the 90 miles to my grandparents' house, where I spent the weekend. There are still more tests to come, so no real prognosis yet for my grandmother...

Saturday, we had the mother of all windstorms. Several of the older sheds on my grandparents' farm were blown down, as were many trees. A limb broke off one of the trees near the house, and fell onto the porch, ripping the railing out of the concrete steps. Their dog was sitting on the porch at the time, but he escape with only a bloodied paw and a bad scare. Winds were gusting up to 70mph.

Slacking

Wow, I've really been slacking off on the 'ol weblog lately. this is partly due to being outside more, now that the spring thaw has come to Iowa, and partly due to being busy with equipment requests at work. At least I got to take my bike out for a spin this weekend... Equipment requests are a funny business. Departments request a bunch of money from the Dean to buy the equipment they want/need. Much of this is quite technical, so I am asked to pick it out, and quote it by the departments. Then I'm asked my opinion of what they want to use it for, by the Dean's office. To add a third complication, I've got some requests of my own in there, so that gives me some incentive to downplay the importance of other people's requests, so that mine have a better chance of being funded. I'm really in the middle of it all, and doing my best to remain unbiased, yet trying to be skeptical about every request and whether or not it's really necessary in the grand scheme of things.

Slowdown

It's pretty sad that I haven't written anything on this weblog for several days, considering I haven't been busy at all. I'm in the slow part of the semester right now, but things will pick up in a couple of weeks, I'm sure. This week, we were essentially told that we had nothing to fear but fear itself by our university president. The state legislature and the governor are going to cut our budget, how much remains to be seen. If it becomes a 10% cut, I may be looking for a new job, as I'm a recent hire, and thus the first to be laid off. Anyone looking to hire a tech support guy?

A hiring freeze has already been implemented, so if you were looking for a job at UNI, you're going to be waiting a while. A hiring freeze means that we may not have the faculty we need to teach courses next fall, which in turn means that we may not be able to offer as many classes, which means that some students won't graduate on time. Add the almost-certain increases in tuition that will be coming this fall (think at least 10%) and you've got an unhappy student body to deal with as well.

What to do

I'm posting this from within Internet Explorer 6.0, which apparently breaks the WYSIWYG editor and the fancy little formatting bar in Manila. Hopefully, Userland will get this fixed soon...

Macintouch linked to this list of things that Apple should do to reclaim the education market.  I don't agree with all of them, especially the large number of requests for lower pricing on several items.  To me, the most important things for Apple to take from that list are:

• Assume that the IT person is a Windows person, and you've got to sell them on Macs.
• Make Mac Certification easy and cheap to obtain.
• Provide a special software package with the utilities for IT departments.
• Offer better education channel warranties that 1 year. (this is the most important one for me)
• Give school districts more advance notice of product developments, even if they have to sign NDAs.  (This is also ridiculous on Apple's part.  Our Dell rep handed me their roadmap, showing me when each of the new models would be introduced for the next year.  Try getting that from Apple.)
• Encourage hardware loaners to schools. (This is especially important for places that don't have an installed Mac base.  Loan out some PowerBook G4s to some of the Administrators, and see how quickly they order more)

Dell introduced their Optiplex GX150 mini-tower today, just as the roadmap I saw last month told me they would.  This is the machine that I plan to standardize on for faculty and staff for all of our spring/summer purchases.  By next fall, I imagine that a Pentium 4 chipset that uses SDRAM will be available, as I'm not keen on the expensive RDRAM memory.