One of the things that makes teaching difficult for me is switching gears. It’s hard to work in IT all day and then go home and think about teaching IT. Today I must have replied and processed at least 40 tickets at work, but I think the crowning achievement is the one I sent (as the user) to the GSLIS helpdesk a few minutes ago about a very important pedagogical issue. I don’t know if they love me or hate me over there, but I’m getting my money’s worth.

Dear admins,

It has come to my attention that comic sans is missing from the moodle forum post font options. I’m sure this is just an oversight, or a poor selection of default fonts, but I don’t see how I can lead a discussion about the pivotal nature of a 20th century font face without expressing myself in cutesy curly letters. Hopefully this can be addressed soon.

I mean, if a student posts www.theonion.com/video/new-study-explains-why-comic-sans-font-so-hilariou,21202/ in my 490TEG class, sparking a detailed discussion and desire to follow up with some classic McSweeney’s (www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole) it just seems wrong to do that in trebuchet. It just seems sooo pretentious, a fancy french word with silent letters and angly edges. Or maybe that’s the lesson? Maybe course management systems are for serious work, and not the kind of place to have entire syllabi in a friendly font face. Are the open source people really telling me to grow up?

If that’s true, I don’t think that’s a CMS I want to use. I would check to see if Compass has comic sans, but you know what, I don’t even care. Not even a happy scribble font can make that experience enjoyable.

I appreciate your attention. Cheers,

Dave

That really just happened. I’ll let you know how it resolves.

I’ve been brainstorming lately how it would be fun/productive/educational/interesting to add game-like “achievements” to an IT issue reporting ticket system. I’ve long been a proponent of the idea of grading certain tickets and certain users (marking things like “bestof”, “worstof” ala CraigsList, but also some level of scoring the support request on some type of quality/effectiveness/actionable scale). I don’t know how what social network/online community/MUDD a ticket system like this would tie into, or what value it would have outside of the ticket system, but it would be nice to see a “report card” for the requesting user — if only so the tech working knows what they’re up against, and also so a user who always gets poor grades could be contacted/coached on how to do better. (Yes, it should probably be a dual system where the user can give feedback to the tech support person too, and evaluated the same way.)

But recently I’ve been thinking about how to do this with the kinds of achievements unlocked like we see in Foursquare badges, or Xbox Achievements, or the like. You could see achievements like:

* First to report a major problem!
* Concise reporter — all information necessary to fulfill ticket on the initial request!
* Not my job! (issues sent to the ticket queue that are outside the control of the ticket queue)
* Some type of swarm badge for reporting about a well know issues
* A solved-your-own-problem achievement for people who figure out their own problems before we do
* Achievements based on the content of the ticket, or category, or quantities of those. (Moodle Master, you just asked your 10th CMS question!)
* Badges for things like quick replies, off-hours support, etc. based on times.
* Or on the nature of the report “A picture-says-1000-words badge unlocked!”
* Or event based “The great power outage of June 2011″ ticket.

Obviously, these could be mean, but they’d mostly be in good spirits and add a new dimension to something as mundane and drab as ticketing systems. What do you think of this? What achievements would you like to see?

[ 3 Feb 2012 edit: Danny shared this at work evilrouters.net/achievement-unlocked/ ]

If you find yourself dragging an email about an event into your calendar (in Outlook), I have a little tool that will make things easier for you.

Despite more scheduling systems and online calendars than I’d like to admit exist across campus, event announcement emails are still the lingua franca. That makes sense — even if everyone was using Outlook or Gmail, we would still be sending notification and other advertising blitz about events via email. This has annoyed me for some time; you might recall I won a programming contest in 2005 (2006?) for some automation that converted “unstructured” event info into a structured source, either an RSS feed, or email/iCalendar invites, etc.

More recently, my habit has been to just drag an email from the email Inbox in Outlook into your Calendar. It’s a cheap/dirty/quick way to import the email message into a new calendar event. The problem, even with Outlook 2010, is the logic behind it is kind of stupid. It doesn’t auto fill in some of the obvious calendar fields, like event date/time, name, location, etc. It’s certainly something that could be improved upon.

I was lamenting this functionality to my favorite renaissance man and college buddy, EJ. He’s a pretty wicked coder, understands Windows and MS APIs, uses Outlook and Exchange and all that jazz, and (most importantly) Eric can be taunted into action with jabs like “hey, do you think you could do this better?” Some app brainstorming over IM, a few feature prototypes, and he developed SlickSchedule: a plugin for Outlook 2010 for Windows to easily convert an email into a calendar event.

With SlickSchedule installed, you right-click on an email message and choose “SlickSchedule it” and the plugin imports the email into the event, but with saner default fields (meaning less manual labor to fix). The subject of the email becomes the title of the event. A copy of the email is attached to the event, so you can go back and review it. SlickSchedule does a better job of guessing the date and starting time of the event than Outlook’s drag-to-copy. It’s not perfect, but it gets most of them. (I keep trying to find good NLP/AI libraries and or papers/schemes to suggest to EJ because I know it would help the program and he’d get a kick out of it.)

SlickSchedule is a cool app made by a friend of mine that saves me time, and I’m glad to finally talk about it here. I’m not sure if I can post the direct link to the download, but if you’re interested, hit me up and I’ll share it with you.

I have a Sprint cell phone with Google Voice integration, which is a neat “unified communication” system giving me flexibility with computers and phones when it comes to things like making calls, texting, voice mail, etc. Campus is switching to Microsoft Lync for our phones (and email and calendaring, since it’s all tied into Outlook) and along with that comes a level of flexibility with calls, call routing, voicemail, etc.

When my old cell phone was breaking, I got in the habit of making cell calls from work by using Google Voice to call my work Centrex/POTS line (to use that handset instead of the cell phone’s, but the caller-id/from appears as my cell number). Yesterday, CITES turned on our ability to forward our work Centrex lines into our unified communication Lync system (we won’t fully transition to Lync until the E-911 stuff is figured out later this year).

So, a few minutes ago when I donned the nifty USB headset and wanted to call Comcast, I used Google Voice to call Comcast as my cell phone number and ring/connect my work phone to place the call. The work phone number (Centrex) forwarded into Lync so I could answer it from my computer. That short phone call used 3 phone numbers, and four different phone systems on my side alone (I’m sure Comcast’s call routing is even more complex) – but it worked, seamlessly and easily. We have flexibility. We have features. We have mobility. The future is here, and it is weird. Kinda geeky cool too.

PS. The call quality was great, and the customer service rep was nice, but I am not a satisfied Comcast customer.

Tom Limoncelli is a sysadmin for Google who cares about best practices for system administration, but also good professional development and teaching system administration. Those are rare skills in our profession. If you find a sysadmin doing great things, he probably also isn’t the kinda guy (or girl) who’s going to go cheerlead about it. Or help others do great things to make them better (we’re kind of selfish with our time that way).

But Tom’s not, and he’s posted a litmus test survey for sysadmins to evaluate how “good” they are. He dubbed it The Lemoncelli Test. 32 yes-or-no questions in 7 different areas to quickly identify your strengths and areas-that-need-improvement. Like anything, there’s a lot of YMMV in these types of evaluations, but it’s interesting and the questions are a solid cross section of important sysadmin considerations.

When I took the quiz against what we do at work, I decided to rank each answer from 0-5 instead of yes or no, to evaluate the gray areas between 0–don’t do it at all and 5–we do this in our sleep. That averaged down to a 22.6 / 32, or a 70.6% score. There were fourteen 5s and three 0s. Buy me lunch sometime and I’ll tell you which got which. Find us the resources to make more 5s, and I’ll buy *you* lunch.

Hot diggity dog! To remain accredited, master’s programs are reviewed every seven years by the Committee on Accreditation (COA) of the American Library Association. GSLIS is prepping for that review with a 134 page program presentation, sent out in draft form today. And looky who got a (lengthy) shout-out on page 18:

We have been quite successful in building up a range of courses integrating the theory, application, and use of technology. But we recognized that students enter the M.S. program with varying levels of technology expertise. Responding to concerns expressed by faculty teaching technology-intensive courses, the MS student representative to the Curriculum Committee, and Advising Coordinator Meg Edwards, faculty collaboratively designed a new course, LIS 490TE Introduction to Technology in LIS. Sections were offered both on-campus and online for the first time in Fall 2010, assessed and modified, and offered again in Spring 2011. The course is accomplishing what we had hoped, serving as an “on-ramp” to more advanced information technology courses and giving students a stronger context for understanding discussions of information technology in their other courses. David Mussulman, a GSLIS graduate and instructor of the on-campus section, has secured grant funding for summer 2011 to develop new modules to be used to enhance instruction of some of the topics covered in the course. The course description states:

This is an introductory course in the fundamentals of technology in LIS. Following an overview of information system concepts, terminology and usage in organizations, there will be discussions covering a wide variety of topics including hardware and software, systems development (traditional and modern methods), programming languages, databases and the internet. Special attention will be paid to the knowledge and skills needed to succeed at GSLIS (servers, file access and management, office software, markup languages, website design and development, etc.) and LIS professional settings. Application of concepts is key. Readings will be supplemented with hands-on exercises and collaborative projects.

Once again, I’m honored and humbled to work with an incredible group at GSLIS as we help each other reach our goals.

The sports season schedule isn’t real to me until I see it in my calendar. As I do, I whipped up an iCalendar format to make loading the men’s baseball schedule into Outlook easier.

2010-11 Illini Men’s baseball home schedule in iCal format (right click, Save As) In Outlook, use File/Import rather than double-clicking on it. iCalendar is a standard format, so it may import into other software/calendars, but YMMV.

It looks like Outlook 2007 got categories working (finally), so if you make a category called “Home game” and color it orange, and “Away game” and color it blue, your games will be appropriately shaded for you. There’s only one away game listed (vs Missouri at STL, which I think is the Busch game, so I left that in to be reminded of it). Since baseball’s rarely televised, I didn’t bother including the away games. If anyone wants that, let me know.

Illinois Field baseball kicks off a month from today (3/25 vs ISU). In case you didn’t hear, Illini baseball games (and other olympic sports) are FREE this season, so barring bad weather, there’s no reason we shouldn’t pack the house for spring ball.

Enjoy!

As severe winter weather ascends on Champaign-Urbana, everyone, to your battle stations!

Someone complain about the weatherman over exaggerating
Someone remark about the weatherman being right
Someone make a snow pun
Someone make a Lewis Black winter joke

Someone complain about something getting canceled
Someone complain about things never getting canceled
Someone reminisces about that one time that thing was canceled

Make a freak out last minute trip to the grocery store
Complain about all the people making freak out trips the grocery store
Whine that they’re out of XYZ
Later, whine that you didn’t stock up on XYZ

Someone talk about how pretty the snow is
Someone talk about how nasty the snow is

Someone mention the city sidewalk clearing rules
Someone mention the city snow routes

Someone mention how the weather is never this bad in $somewhere_else
Someone mention spring’s arrival

Someone asks how the traffic is
Someone warns you to take it easy out there
Someone reports traffic problems on the Internet

Someone makes a snowman
Someone videotapes the snowman just in case an MTD bus is around
Someone makes a snow penis
Someone makes a snow igloo

I miss any?

It’s Sustainability Week, or something, on campus. I got offered a newspaper/letter walking through the quad called the Green Observer*. The girl handing it out said to me, “Come on Dave Matthews, Green Observer?”

At first I was startled, then I realized I was wearing a DMB shirt today. Then I was impressed she made the connection between his green efforts and her paper hawking. She won me over so I took her paper. Why?

Because she proved she really was a Green Observer. (It’s also still #punday)

* “Friends, it’s time to begin the revolution. The green flash is striking the Champaign-Urbana area. I’d like to personally invite each one of you to join me in the greatest thing this orange and blue town has ever seen. Enter, The Green Observer. We’re the best thing since whole wheat sliced bread. Imagine the eco-friendly, cornfield-surrounded culture served to you on a silver platter. You’re going to eat this issue up and compost the remains. We know, we know, this print issue is adding to the waste dilemma. That’s why our home base is online. Check out the CU eco-happenings at www.cugreen.org. We’re moving mountains and climbing them at the same time. So start getting in touch with your environmental roots, and grow you own tree of knowledge. The bio-diesel engine is running; hop on the bandwagon and discover the bliss. Please, love, joy.”

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR EM-J STAPLES

The systems librarian is the middleman, the go-between of the supplier and user: priest-like interpreter of the mysteries; hippy-like dealer in good vibes.

Dunsire 1994

The primary responsibilities of an Automation Librarian … include the following: 1) developing original applications; 2) troubleshooting; 3) software evaluation; 4) hardware/software monitoring, maintenance, and upgrading; 5) data protection; 6) staff training; 7) system documentation; and 8 ) negotiation and communication

White 1990

So what’s it like being a systems librarian? Busy.

Schuyler 1994

Sounds familiar… More directly:

In an ideal environment, systems librarians would have a solid understanding of the operations of most, if not all, units within libraries, in addition to understanding systems work. In reality, systems librarians will have reasonable knowledge of some areas of libraries and acquire the needed details of others along the way. In the most constructive settings, this circumstance leads to a professional interdependence among library staff.

Systems librarianship, however, is not solely comprised of library knowledge. To be an effective systems librarian, one must also possess knowledge of library automation, computing, and networking. On the surface, it may appear that these demands are too disparate and no one could possibly be expected to function adequately in both arenas (i.e., libraries and computing). Muirhead (1994c) and others have indicated the stress experienced by systems librarians precisely because the expectation is that these people will be fluent in a wide variety of issues in both professional communities. Chu (1990, 91) notes that systems positions “… often do not lend themselves to the talents of a single person.”

The irony, as Muirhead notes, is two fold. First, systems librarians tend to flourish in this environment and find satisfaction from the very things that cause stress (1994c, 34). And second, these positions intriguingly combine sets of contradictions: “the world of humans and the world of machines”; “a low group profile externally and nationally and yet much influence internally”; “on the periphery of library work, yet indispensible [sic] for the day-to-day operation of the most basic services”; “a specialism with no real homogeneity or uniformity in terms of the job content, and in which the postholder can expect to find him/herself cast in a variety of roles–librarian, technician, computer professional, manager, educator”; “the glamour, the high drama, and the stress of crisis situations, and the tedium of system error reports or ongoing minor hardware faults” (Muirhead 1993, 124).

Thomas Wilson, The Systems Librarian, 1998