We are all just a random grouping of molecules that happened to come together

This is what the scientific world would like you to believe. I thought about this yesterday as I was driving down the California coast and realizing that I couldnt stop smiling because of all the the great childhood memories that were going through my head as I passed through the area from Crescent City down to Eureka. Our brains are amazing things, the fact that we can create memories, recall memories, learn things, recall that knowledge at the most random times. The complexities of our brains are outstanding and yet scientists would like you to believe that our brains are the product of evolution over the years and that we wanted our brains to get these abilities and our evolution followed that path. Are you kidding me? We just happened to get these incredibly complex brains by evolution? Wow. That is very narrow minded and I feel sorry for them. It amazes me how you could see the complexities of the human brain and not see that there is a Creator behind these wonderful things. And in this season of celebrating that Creator coming to earth, I hope that we do not all get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the season, but that we remember to take some time to thanks our Creator for the wonders that he bestows on us daily whether we see it or not. Merry Christmas!

To CC or not to CC that is the question

So recently I have been part of a lot of email conversations at work and one thing I have noticed A LOT is that there a whole bunch of people in the work force that like to CC someone on an email when that person has no need to be included on the conversation. If you are going to email me asking me to do some work for you, you dont need to include my boss on the email. To me that is a very chicken move on your part to think that you have to include my boss on an email to get things done. If you have a problem with me say it to my face dont be chicken about it, if I did something that offended you tell me and I will apologize. If you dont tell me I probably wont know that I offended you. So please everyone out there, dont CC someone on an email when they dont need to be included, it fills up their inbox with useless email and it is a very chicken thing to do on your part.

7 yrs have come and gone already?

So today is September 11th, 2008, wow. It does not seem like it was 7 years ago today that we watched in horror as those Twin Towers fell in New York, as the Pentagon got hit, as the plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. A lot of things have changed since that morning.

A lot of things have gone back to how they were before that morning. Where were you when you first heard the news? I had just stumbled out of bed and wandered down to the bathroom in the dorm, heard the TV on in my RA's room and they were talking about the Twin Towers being gone. I wasnt coherent enough to completely comprehend that until after coming back out of the bathroom at which point i ran back down to my room and turned on the TV and saw what the rest of our nation saw that day. The United States changed that day. We no longer were a nation that went about our daily business thinking that we were safe and nothing bad would ever happen to us. Yes we had been attacked previously at the Twin Towers (We did basically nothing to respond to that by the way), but we had long since forgotten. That morning we found out the level of deep hatred some of the rest of the world held for our nation and the things we stand for. We were attacked on our soil, with our resources, killing innocent Americans who were just going about their work trying to provide for their families, also killing innocent Americans that were trying to rescue those people in those building.

What changed for you that day?

The attackers wanted to change America. They accomplished that in a very large way. One of the big things that happened was we became a united nation. We all came together and said prayers for those who were lost, we cared for our neighbors, we appreciated family a little bit more, and oh so many more things. We became united under the United States Flag and proudly displayed that we were Americans and we would not back down when we are faced with adversity. Just like the old flag that said "Dont tread on me" with the picture of the coiled rattlesnake, we stood up and said we wont stand for this type of thing and will strike back when you strike us. We stood behind our leaders as we struck back at those that struck us first. We knew the reason for our fighting and pursuing those that attacked us. They had caused our nation pain and we wanted justice for that pain, and were ready to do what it took to bring those who hurt us to justice. We would never be able to travel an airline with the same "ease" that we did previously.

Has that feeling persisted in the US?

NO! As time progessed we all went back to the way things were previously. We were back to not caring for our neighbors, family wasnt as big for us anymore, and most importantly the American flags we were proudly displaying made there way back to being stored in our closets. We no longer were "Proud to be an American", we were just Americans.

It is interesting to think back on those times now as we are approaching the elections this year. We are now engaged in a battle for the Presidency. And it is certainly a battle. The two camps are clearly divided and fighting the other for the Presidency. We no longer care that we are all Americans and we need to be striving to better our nation as a whole, it now becomes a matter of well my candidate says that they will do the most for me. We attack the other candidate on things that have no relevance to the wonderful nation in which we live. The other candidate may have some good views on things, they may not but we are against them from the start solely because of them being the candidate for the other party.

There are a lot of issues that we need to address in our nation, the candidates each have their own ideas for dealing with these issues. The big ones of course being the energy crisis and the war. Our nation has forgotten the reasons we went overseas to pursue those that lashed out at us by killing our citizens. We have forgotten the evil man that was the leader of the one country, we have forgotten the numerous attempts by the UN to check his country for WMDs where he basically dictated to the UN where they could check and where they couldnt.

We as a nation have come so far in the last 7 yrs. We have also regressed back in a lot of ways. As we look back on the last 7 yrs and look to the future, are we truly going to change the way our nation thinks? Are we going to change the way our nation acts? Are we going to once again become Americans united with the best interest of our nation at heart? I really hope that we are able to do those things, I am not going to be stupid in thinking it is certainly going to happen. Sadly I almost feel that it is going to take another event like the horrible events of that September morning 7 yrs ago for our nation to once again become united as Americans.

What are your thoughts/reflections on these last 7 yrs?

Miracles do happen

So today the second miracle happened in my life. I know we throw that word around a lot in reference to sports and other small things that happen in our lives that we didnt expect. This miracle goes way beyond any of those and falls in the actual could only have happened by God's grace category. My dad was taken to the ER on Sunday evening with chest pain. He had a mild heart attack. That is was the start of the miracle. The miracle came to full fruition today when they took him in for an angioplasty to fix what they believed to be a small blockage in an artery. When they got in to do the angioplasty today and injected to die to find the blockage they found that one of his arteries was 99% blocked and there was a good amount of blockage in a couple other arteries as well. They immediately put him on the schedule this afternoon for bypass surgery. They got in this afternoon and ended up doing a quadruple bypass. They found that there was no damage done to his heart. Everything is functioning properly now and the doctors are very happy with the results. There is no way that this situation can be explained other than a complete miracle happening. For him to have 99% blockage and blockage in other arteries and only have a minor heart attack and no damage to the heart. This is the second time in my life I have witnessed a miracle. The other was the day before either my 14th or 15th birthday but that is another story for another time. Thank you God for a huge miracle and keeping my dad around longer with us.

Wake Up People

So this post s definitely going to be a rant. Why do so many seem to think that the Desktop is a place to store files? The desktop is not meant for that. Sure you can use it TEMPORARILY for things but it isnt meant to be the place that you keep stuff permanently. The desktop is meant for shortcut icons and pretty pictures. Speaking of pretty pictures, the "picture" on the desktop is called a Wallpaper not the Screensaver. Come on people it is amazing how many of you out there get these terms mixed up. Wallpaper = Pretty picture on desktop. Screensaver = That thing that turns on when your computer sits idle for 15 min that can display pivoting 3d text, multiple pictures or a multitude of other things. Wake Up People and learn these two facts and it will make your resident IT professional at your job a lot happier.

Video Games = Society's Scapegoat

Here is an interesting article, talking about how video games are taking too much blame for the "downfall" of society lately. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10005871-17.html I agree with the author, video games are taking way to much blame for things. We are going after video games like GTA IV because a couple of kids have re-enacted the game. Most recently a kid in Thailand killed a taxi cab driver because he saw it in GTA IV and emulated it in real life. Now dont get me wrong I am not advocating games like GTA IV in any way but we put a bit to much blame on video game producers for these games. The game is rated M for Mature. That means that it is intended for people 17 and up. That means that if it is getting into the hands of anyone other than 17 year olds and up the PARENTS are buying the game for their kids. Parents are the ones that need to step up in this country. Parents nowadays seem to try and push the responsibility to everyone but themselves. The schools are supposed to teach our kids, the government is supposed to regulate the movies and video games, the schools are supposed to watch what our kids eat, the list goes on. The video game violence while it may be more "realistic" today than it has been ever before, it still falls short in comparison to most movies. The violence in Saving Private Ryan which came out in 1998 thats 10 years ago far outways the realism of the violence in GTA IV or any other of the "violent" video games of today. I think that video games get a bad rap because a few people out of the MILLIONS that play video games dont have enough sense to realize, or havent been taught by their parents, that video games arent real they are make believe and what you can do in a video game you cant and shouldnt be doing in real life. In real life if you get shot you cant just keep right on going and heal yourself with a health pack just down the road. So Thailand's response to the killing of the taxi cab driver was to stop the sales of GTA IV, wouldnt the better response be to put a call out to parents to actually do some, i dont know, PARENTING?

Why Apple Why?

So I went to synch the music on my computer with my iPod Touch. I currently have only been using it for podcasts and tv shows. It is currently set up to pull podcasts and tv shows off after I watch them once. Great system for keeping the storage from getting overloaded. Well as soon as I turned the synch my music feature on it started to reload all of the old audio podcasts that I have listened to onto the iPod again. Now yes audio podcasts are technically music since they are mp3 files but really apple? You are the pioneers of the podcast you would think you would have figured out a way that iTunes and the iPod would view podcasts as something other than music. Especially now that we are on iTunes 7.7 and had many many generations of iPods. Come on Apple you should really get this one right.

Website = FAIL

So today we started using Google Analytics to keep track of things on our webpage. The analytics are amazing and give us some great information about our visitors. So you might ask where the fail comes in, well with Analytics you can actually keep track of Goals on a page. Essentially if you are an ecommerce site it would be keeping track of people adding things to their carts, viewing their carts, and then finally a Thank You style page after they have made their purchases (a funnel to the Thank You page essentially). Well it would be really great if we could do this on our webpage except the FAIL of our page is that the big things we would want to keep track of (ie a student filling out an application for admission) is done by an outside company and is in no way assosciated with our webpage. That is just plain ridiculous. Basically we are directing the traffic to a point where we have no way of tracking any of it and cant measure how many people go through the application process online. I sure hope that we can change this in the not to distant future so that we can keep track of things.

Some people should not use a computer EVER

So today I got a call from a user who was having problems logging into the website. I was out of the office so I had to call her back. When I called her back and found out what the problem was I figured it would be an easy thing to remedy boy was I wrong. The problem was that she was attempting to go to the old url and not the new one. Simple fix but apparently not for her. Trying to get her to navigate to the new url turned into an excercise in futility. She went to the old webpage and before i could even stop her she was about 4 levels deep in the wrong direction on the old url. When I finally got her back to the homepage which took some time, i said ok now go to the top and where you see xyz.blah change the xyz to read zzzzz.blah (yes i didnt give the real domains but if you know me and where I work you can figure it out). Once I got her to do that it still took her a little bit to find the link I was trying to direct her to in the first place. Once we got there she was finally able to login. The funny thing is she tried to claim that she was never informed that we were going to be making a domain change, there were 4 emails within the last month informing everyone of the change in domain name. The scariest part of this whole thing is that this person now has to relay the information to other users. Heaven help them cuz if it is anything like my conversation with her they are going to want to scream and throw things. I know not everyone has a lot of computer knowledge but everything I tried to walk her through is something that in this day and age of the internet that anybody who uses a computer SHOULD KNOW.

Conference in Canada, Eh?

So this past week I attended a tech conference in Canada. It was really interesting to get around other IT guys and realize that the problems that we are encountering in our IT department have been had by those in other university IT departments as well. It was very comforting to see that we are not alone in our problems.

Don't mess with the IT staff

So today one of our users tried to claim that they were not receiving the emails from their professor. Well if you are going to make that claim, realize that the IT staff has ways to verify that emails arrived and some of them will stand up in court as legal proof. So after hearing that this person was not receiving their emails I checked their account. I logged into their email account to test if it was sending and receiving emails just fine when what do I see but all 3 of the emails in question. Oh it gets better folks. 2 out of those 3 emails were READ. And one of them was even forwarded. So I take a screencap and forward that on to the person that contacted me about the other persons problem. I was very tactful in my wording of the email pointing out this persons lie. I dont know what the final outcome is going to be but it did feel good to prove that our technology actually works. Also it makes me wonder how many times this happens and we in the IT Dept dont hear about it. So moral of the day is dont lie when it comes to technology cuz it will tell the truth and make you look foolish.

Whats in a name

So we use a piece of software to track our work orders and one of the features of the software is some pre-packaged reports. One of these reports is one that gives you that average time that it takes for a certain technician to complete a work order. This report is great but it doesnt reflect the true numbers as we have projects that stay on our work order list for long periods of time. So I took it upon myself to customize a report that gives the average time to complete work orders but leaves out the projects. I got the report created and went to import that report into the program. Well that is when the fun started. The program threw an error when i went to import. Of course the error message was nothing helpful. I posted on a forum about the software asking for any advice from others who use the software. So I kept trying different things and eventually this afternoon I figured out what the problem was. Apparently the filename that I created the report with was what was causing the error. I tried importing the report with a different file name and what do you know it worked and now runs just beautifully. So apparently there is a lot in a name.

Doing the wrong thing

So recently we have had multiple users who despite doing things properly in the past have started using the wrong avenues to ask for password resets. It must be something caused by the recent bout of sunshine we have had here. It must be frying the brains of these poor oregonians who arent used to seeing the sun.

Change of Pace

So I just got back this week to work after being on vacation for a week. I was in Washington DC doing one of my other passions photography. It was a very nice change of pace from dealing with computer issues to be dealing with taking pics of 8th graders as we visited different places. Over the 6 days that we were in the DC and surrounding area I ended up taking over 700 pictures. 450 of those were for me and around 270 of them were for the trip video that will be put together by the tour company. But alas the fun of that trip has come to an end and I am now back to work fixing computer problems and such. It was a fairly uneventful week yet still busy. This coming week is finals week which means that the students will be leaving and the profs will be leaving for the summer very soon as well. That will allow us to get started on our summer projects. Our summer projects are going to be a lot of fun but a lot of work. Yay for the start of summer.

Users

It is amazing to me that despite school email addresses being the email used for communications our users still dont pay much attention to their account. You must change your password every 4 months. That isnt asking people too much but yet people still forget constantly despite there being a timer when they login to the private webpage showing when they set their password and when it will expire. If by chance they are on campus and within 14 days of their password expiring, when they login to a machine on campus it will alert them to that fact and ask them if they want to change it now. 99.9% of the users do not change their password until the absolute last day.

IT Professional is still alive

Wow I had totally forgotten about this blog. Maybe I should start posting again.