Rant.

While I normally like to envision (or at least project) Bishops as some sort of utopic hall of academia, mostly due to our small class sizes and level of student/prof interaction, it is certainly not without its flaws. Those on my mind today follow:

Why is it that I work for ITS (Information. Technology. Services. !!!) and almost all of our correspondence is on paper? When I got hired, I had to fill out 6 pieces of paper. Why? WHY? Most of them even had duplicated information. When I work in one of the labs, I have to go over to H150 (the main lab) and write (WRITE!) my hours onto a timesheet. Why don't we have a web application for this? Worst of all...my supervisor is the web designer for the university. In all fairness to her, I get the distinct feeling that she is overworked and that she would probably be proactive about things if her schedule permitted it. I just can't shake the feeling that reliance on old methods is something that is clogging these peoples schedules.

Even my work schedule was only available on paper, well, until yesterday anyway. Now, with an email (wow...not actual paper) announcement last night I have been informed that it is now available as an outlook schedule and hence only accessible through the official outlook application or the official webmail. WHY? Our schedule doesn't change...it's the same until December. Why can't it be just a simple web page? There is no supposed confidentiality here, it just lists who is working where and when. But hey, we do take the confidential phone numbers (which we are reminded are c.o.n.f.i.d.e.n.t.i.a.l.) and post them in the labs so that anyone can see them.

My thought: Why don't we just have a web application for the consultants and other ITS staff - password protected - that has a page to enter hours, a page to get schedules, and a page to find staff phone numbers? ITS, let me introduce you to the open source world and a package called Mambo. It irritates a nerve with me that if I showed this to someone in ITS they'd probably immediately start a search for a product they have to pay for instead.

And, please, someone...800x600 is no longer a used screen size by those of us under the age of 105! Yet it is the default on almost all lab machines across campus. Speaking of bad desktop setups, the consultants workstations (at the front of each lab) are supposed to give us access to all kinds of 'extra' software -- like the printer administration, print credit stuff and password reset features. But not all the labs are set up this way. For instance, the lab I'm in now has absolutely none of it. The only reason that I'm actually here I suppose is to prevent people from walking out with computers because I can't really do anything else. We use Windows folks, which actually makes networking not terribly difficult. Why can't we just use roaming profiles with a consultants group policy so that it doesn't matter what work station I log on at, I have access to all of the tools I might need? I had never worked with any of that stuff, but I both learned and implemented it in two weeks in Stoney Creek over the summer.

And communication people! Right now Bishops is in the middle of a switch from Novell to Microsoft's Active Directory. It makes less than no sense why they'd wait until ALL OF THE STUDENTS ARE BACK to make this change, but whatever. Problem is, we've been in a state of half-way-done for weeks now. At Bishops profs use the R drive to put course materials for students -- this normally works very well. Now however, half of the profs' offices are on the old Novell system and half are on the new system. The ones that are on Novell continue to put things on their R drives entirely oblivious to the fact that that is the Novell R drive which is NOT the same one that all of the students access when they use the lab computers (which are almost all running active directory). No one is telling them anything!

Cheers to Doocing. Better yet, cheers to Doocing while I'm at work. Actually, I suppose it's not really Doocing per se, the people I work with are nice, but we're certainly lacking something. Last year, Kent (the former ITS head) was fired and we have an interim director in place. He seems both capable and personable, but impressions don't forgive inaction. We'll see how all this progresses.