Bottleneck
Alice and I giggled at her. We three live in this space. And we all take blood pressure meds.
Archive for March, 2004
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on March 31st 2004
The Joy of Numbers
Except that the consistency is, itself, interesting. This program took about three months to ramp up, but found its natural customer base very quickly and they’re very loyal to it. We offer a half-dozen ways to handle renewal transactions, and all of the others generate more income, but for this one set of customers we’ve found the right way to interact. That’s interesting, and worth knowing.
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on March 31st 2004
Margie Wins One
IT’s renewal policy clearly assumes all contractual relationships are inherently unstable. The short-cycle renewal process assures that we’ve got current information about the actual staffers supporting our products. I’ve known support teams where such caution was appropriate, but such precautions are not always appropriate. Margie’s case was that the policy needs more nuance, and she convinced ‘em. How this will work out for the rest of IT’s customers remains to be seen, but she’s got a commitment through the end of our vendor’s contract. Good work.
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on March 29th 2004
UCE: gone?
They haven’t told us about it, but about a week ago IT apparently put a spam filter on our email system. I know this because only one piece of true junk made it to my mailbox last week–down from 80 or so the week before. I certainly don’t miss the unsolicited mail, but I’m a little wary because I don’t know how the filter works, and I don’t know what mail it stops. Odds are pretty good I’ve been cut off from some email source I value–but who knows what that is? I’m a little concerned, as I said, but apparently not enough to follow up….
Filed under Bureaucratic Whimsy Posted on March 29th 2004
Witty
Witty seems to have been an orchestrated attack, albeit using an opportunistic method. The paper argues convincingly that we’re using the wrong security model; if we don’t change, the bad guys are gonna take down a lot of computers. Doesn’t matter if it’s a prank or something really malicious, it’s going to be costly regardless.
Filed under Semi-Geekery Posted on March 28th 2004
Tungsten
Turns out I don’t think the laptop makes a satisfactory PDA, despite its obvious advantages and excellent form factor, so I bought a Palm Tungsten E the other day and have been whipping it into shape. It’s a pretty slick device.
Filed under
Life's Stories
Semi-Geekery
Yarns and Tales
Posted on
March 28th 2004
POPFile on PowerBook
I resisted installing POPfile for several weeks–partly because I wanted to be more familiar with the Mac environment before installing something so far out of the ordinary, and partly because I wanted to give mail.app’s junk filter a test. By January’s end, it was pretty clear that the Junk Mail filter doesn’t work as well as I’d like, and I missed POPfile’s more general mail sorting capabilities. As I’ve mentioned before, I sort incoming mail into a couple dozen categories. Teaching POPfile to recognize those categories lets me get by with two dozen rules, rather than a couple hundred. Much better.
Filed under Semi-Geekery Posted on March 26th 2004
Millie Jeffrey
Millie was a key player in Michigan and national politics before I was born, and remained active pretty much forever. Her friends and her causes will miss her. We all owe her for a life well lived.
Filed under Passing On Posted on March 26th 2004
Stitchings
It’s an unholy mess, but we make progress. I wouldn’t say we’ve got a strategy, exactly, but we’ve got a consensus that we need to get to this place, and that there are tools which can help build the department we envision. We’ve made some mistakes. We’ve learned that you can’t just buy stuff and expect it automatically to work with everything else, and that IT’s not blind to the shortcomings of the legacy systems. Systems have both inertia and entropy, and neither ever works to our advantage. The endeavor’s worthwhile, and needs to be made. Our customers–Michigan’s citizens–deserve our best efforts.
Filed under
Bureaucratic Whimsy
Semi-Geekery
Posted on
March 25th 2004
Siebel Sorts
Meantime, we’re still waiting for upper management to decide how to implement the upgrade. We have a couple vendors’ bids in hand, neither of which is particularly attractive. We expect this to be resolved within a month. There’s every reason to expect my role to be reduced to Subject Matter Expert. That’s OK.
Filed under
Bureaucratic Whimsy
Life's Stories
Semi-Geekery
Posted on
March 24th 2004
