prone to enthusiasms….
Despite my reputation as the office technologist, I’m fundamentally skeptical about specific technologies; organizationally, we’ve a job to accomplish, and that task is not “change the technology.” The central office’s charge is, and always has been, putting information where folks can use it. We are getting better at framing the questions, methinks, and it’s fun to be in the middle of that effort.
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on November 27th 2003
I prefaced the response by noting that “jowo’s kinda preachy today.”
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on November 24th 2003
Meantime, Margie’s telling me the production system’s down, too; she’s already heard from one of the beta testers. Different symptoms, though; it’s running, but the system won’t process transactions. I check that; yup, down too. Call Tony; no response, so I leave a message. Call his coder on this project; same result, same message. Call our tech support guy; get him, and get his committment to check the production system. Finally check my e-mail. (47 spam messages and nothing real. Yuck.) Tony’s coder calls me back; reports that the test server was taken off-line for routine maintenance, then hadn’t restarted cleanly. We agree this isn’t a good testing situation. Tony will call me at 9:00….
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on November 24th 2003
Everything went wrong. Everything. The web part didn’t reliably communicate with the back end, and when they did talk it was often in pidgin. We’d report to the testing center every morning, and quickly demonstrate to the web vendor that things weren’t properly connected. Karl, their lead coder, would start making phone calls, and we’d soon have the two vendors and the network guys arguing about the problem. By noon, things would be “working.”
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on November 23rd 2003
All in all, that’s a rather impressive performance. The increasing spam count is also rather impressive; after all, I added this tool to my kit because the junk seemed to be getting out of hand.
Filed under Semi-Geekery Posted on November 21st 2003
The object is to write, and to publish. The tools are tools. So are the design details.
Filed under
Dabbler Notebook
Semi-Geekery
Posted on
November 20th 2003
I receive between 50 and 100 e-mails each day, and read about 60% of those (the unread ones are either duplicates or spam). I used to read about 85% of my mail; the change in percentage is largely because of the increasing spam load. (Eudora has a reporting function; these numbers have some relation to reality.) Perhaps 65% of the real mail has baseball content of some sort or other; the rest is on a wide range of topics.
Filed under Semi-Geekery Posted on November 16th 2003
Johnson won the day, McCarthy won the campaign, Humphrey won the nomination, and Nixon won the election. The year changed my life–mostly for the good.
Filed under
Life's Stories
Politickin'
Posted on
November 16th 2003
Anne’s encore was David Roth’s Manuel Garcia, a song about cancer, and families, and love, and support. I really needed that; thanks, Anne.
Filed under
Life's Stories
Musicks
Yarns and Tales
Posted on
November 14th 2003
Some days just drive you up the wall. You go to work with a plan. Then you get to see if it survives.
Filed under
Bureaucratic Whimsy
Life's Stories
Semi-Geekery
Posted on
November 13th 2003
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