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.