Taste of Tech

Dean Shareski blogged a few weeks ago about being busy, and  Ryan Collins picked up on it.  Dean’s point is that eveyone’s busy all the time. It’s a badge of honor that we all wear from time to time. We must be pretty important if we have all of these things to do. Or, maybe, pretty inefficient. But telling someone how busy you are is about as insightful as telling them you’ve been doing a lot of breathing lately, or that you ate dinner again last night.
It’s interesting to me how others react to my busyness, or their perception of it. Several times a week, people will stop me in the hall, and say something like, “boy, you must be really busy.” They want to chat about it. I want to get the mail server running. I just smile, acknowledge their concern, and move on. For the most part, I work with a sympathetic — if not empathetic staff.

But there are those who are on their own missions. They don’t care what I might be doing, or how overwhelmed I may be at the moment. They walk in to my office, have a seat, and start explaining how technology is ruining their productivity today.  My top priority has just switched from whatever I was working on to getting them out of my office. These are the people who make me so busy.

Yesterday, I was programming. I am not a programmer. I can fumble my way though PHP and MySQL, but 95% of what I learned in my undergrad programming classes has been long forgotten (if you care, here’s the useful 5%). So, when I program, I can’t multitask. I even close my email client to avoid distraction.

The application I was working on extracts data from an LDAP database, merges it with data from an SQL database, creates an export file in a certain format, and then uploads that file to a remote server, where it gets imported into their database. It’s not rocket science, but, then again, I’m not a rocket scientist (Dieu Merci).

So I’m trying to figure out why, at the end of all of this code, some of the phone numbers are only three digits. I think I have it nailed down to a few lines of perl code in a function called by the php script. The phone rings. I glance at the callerID. It’s not my wife; it’s not my boss. So I let it go to voice mail and jump back into the code. Five minutes later, the caller appears in my doorway. She needs a one-on-one tutorial on using a WYSIWYG web interface to update her web page. It has to be right now, because she’s very busy. So, I stop and go through it with her (again). Forty minutes later, I’m back to the phone numbers. I eventually solved the problem, but didn’t get to the second item on my to-do list.

Sure, it’s my job to help her, and I did. I tried (somewhat successfully) not to act like I was completely annoyed at the interruption. The truth is, I have two jobs. One is to be the behind-the-scenes person who makes everything work. The other is to support all of the people who use it. A lot of times, those two roles collide, and result in “busy.”

I’d like to write more about this, but I really don’t have time right now…

I was reading usenet a while back, and came across a creative solution to an annoying problem. A person had posted some fairly technical, hard-to-find information that he had finally found after a fairly exhaustive search. The post looked something like this (though this is not the actual example):

The extract potential of Belgian Biscuit malt is 35. I’m posting this here so I can find it later.

While the post didn’t add much to the discussion, it did accomplish its purpose. It added that one tidbit of information, along with all of the associated keywords, into the great digital dumpster that is the usenet archive. So, a year from now, when he needs to find that information again, he simply goes to Google Groups and searches for “extract potential” and “Belgian Biscuit malt,” and the result is instantly retrieved. It’s arguably as fast as pulling up the same data on a PDA or an Excel file.

There are some things I’ve had to look up a million times. What’s our ldap search string (uid=schinkerj,ou=Users,ou=OxObjects,dc=bbhcsd,dc=org)? What’s the difference between XGA (1024×768), SXGA (1280×1024), SXGA+ (1400×1050), WXGA (1280×800), and WSXGA+ (1680×1050)? Do we use active mode or passive mode ftp (passive)? What day of the week is the 4th of July (Wednesday in 2007)? I could just post all of this stuff to Usenet, and then search for it when I need it.

I’ve considered doing the same thing with the blog (and, actually, I just did with the previous paragraph). I could create a content category that no one ever looks at (like, say, “teacher resources” :-)). Then, I could just post the things I want to keep track of to the blog. When I need to know something, I just search the blog for it, and up it comes. Of course, I wouldn’t post the root passwords for my servers there or anything, but for things that don’t have to be secure, it’s not a bad idea.

Alvin has described a similar system that he uses. Instead of keeping a pad of paper by the phone at home, he has a computer there. When someone wants to take a message for a family member, he or she just adds a blog post. The whole thing ends up being a giant knowlegebase of the household’s contacts. Need your aunt’s phone number? Just search the blog. Want to know who has been calling and leaving messages at home? Just subscribe to your home message blog RSS feed.

I thought Wikis were a little too unstructured. They just let anyone create links anywhere, with new pages popping up all the time, and a very organic (lack of) structure. This is even worse. But if the information being stored is to be found through searching, and not through browsing, it may make sense.

Dan showed me this. In Windows XP, right click on the desktop and choose properties. Select Appearance, and then Effects. In the second drop-down box, change the font smoothing method from “Standard” to “ClearType.” Then click OK a couple times to dismiss the windows and apply the changes. It took me a while to notice the difference. Sure, it looks a little different, but is it better? After a day, I was convinced. For me, it substantially improves the readability of the text (content notwithstanding) and reduces eye strain. We’ve added it to the list of things to do to new computers before delivering them.

It has been a rough start to the school year this year. It seems like just about every day, my to-do list is interrupted by the emergency du jour. They’re never little things. No one can send email. The web server just crashed. We can’t get to the Internet. We’ve been hacked. Who deleted all of the files on the server? When asked if we’re having a technology problem, my answer used to be “not that I know of.” Now, I’ve changed that to “apparently.” If they’re asking, something’s wrong.

A pretty good indicator of how things are going is my blog volume. Last school year, I was posting 2-4 times per week. This is my first post in more than three weeks. I haven’t been thinking about new, innovative technologies or applications that would apply to education. I’m not launching a bunch of new inititatives to improve my teachers’ and students’ productivity. I haven’t been reading the magazines or the blogs. I’m not learning. So I haven’t had much to say. I’m just trying to keep up.
Earlier this week, I attended a meeting of technology coordinators from around the area. It was a sorry-looking, battle-worn group. One person commented, “it’s not a nightmare if you don’t ever sleep.” It’s been a hard year for everyone. But why? What has changed?

We’ve become victims of our own success. Now that everyone’s using email, when there’s a problem, it’s mission-critical. Electronic grading has made grade reporting much easier, and it has improved teacher-parent communications through things like Parent Viewer. But when it breaks, people notice very quickly. New students can’t wait a few days for a network account anymore. The library can’t afford to have a computer that’s not working. If we can’t get to the Internet, we might as well go home.

This year, we’re adding more and more critical applications. Parents can check students’ grades online. Students use a debit system to buy lunch. Teachers use a web interface to call in sick, and secretaries use the same service to see which subs will be coming. Professional development and teacher licensure are handled through a new online system. We’ve just started using Orchard with our fourth and fifth graders to improve reading, math, and science skills. Some of our first graders are using Headsprout to improve their reading. If there’s a snow day or a school emergency, all of our families are notified by phone. We’re in the second year of serious online learning tool use. When these things don’t work, my phone rings, and it’s an emergency.

We have to re-think the technology support. If we’re really going to support all of these things, we need to approach it in a different way. Specifically, we have to:

• Take on a sane number of new technology initiatives each year. We can’t do everything at the same time. New things take time to implement if we’re going to get it right.
• Stop expecting the technology people to know everything. I spent two days this week in training for software I’ll never use. Why? Because it’s technology, and that’s my job. My actual roles in the training were to (1) make sure they don’t make any critical mistakes in the way they organize their data, and (2) to pay attention so, when someone asks me a question about it two years from now, I’ll know what they’re talking about.
• Reduce the support burden. Standardize. Simplify. Make everything as easy as possible. We already do a pretty good job of this. We use one office productiivity package. We have one desktop platform. We use one printer manufacturer.
• Prioritize. What is affecting the most users? What is the most critical problem? How do I end the day with a list that’s not longer than the one I started with? It’s not all going to get done today. Some of it will never get done. Some if it *should* never get done.
• Get better at what we do. Learn from our mistakes. Innovate. Find new ways to do old things. Automate. Find ways to reduce the workload.
• Learn from each other. I think I’m going to propose to the group of glassy-eyed tech coordinators that we start a support group. Even if we only get together once a month for an hour, we’re all in the same crazy business, we’re not competing against one another, and we should help each other out.

I’ve been trying to avoid posting a lot of pessimistic stuff here. I do have some neat things to write about. But at the moment, I don’t have time to play with them first, so they’re going to have to wait. In the meantime, I have to finish this up. The voicemail light is on, and my cell phone is ringing….