Summer is going along great but it is passing us by way too fast, or so it seems. As I wrote earlier, we traveled a fair amount in June and attended a couple of weddings. In one of the weddings, there were events for 4 days which was exciting, but we were tired. I have a lot of golfing to catch up on. I have been helping out with a couple of software projects as well as co-write a report on the symposium we held in the Spring – “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age”. And then, wanted to get a good handle on how well we did in the past year financially. By our count, we did great. However, the system of record – Banner, says otherwise. That provided some summer drama for a few hours/days until we sorted them all out and all is well.

I also spent considerable amount of time calling AT&T trying to get credit ($60) for mistakes that they made in my bill. This happens every time we go on an international trip. In reality, you should be able to manage all of this on the web, but you can’t. You can certainly do all activities on the web that brings in money for the companies. But you cannot do anything like requesting credit online with proper explanation, that their agents can then either approve or reject based on its merit. You have to call! And you have to remember some 4 digit code, which I don’t because I rarely make calls. They then send it through text that you have to punch in and then change. You punch in your phone number, zip code and last four digits of your social security number only to be told that for security reasons I need to recite the whole thing again to the agent. Then rewind and state the problem all over. I did this six times. One good soul REALLY understood the issue and then I lost the connection (which I honestly believe AT&T arranges) just when I thought I was getting through. Thankfully, he called back and assured me that he will issue the credit in 48 hours. I thanked him profusely and waited for 96 hours, because I know that the companies don’t like to part with money. But I found no credit. Last thursday, while stuck in traffic due to heavy rains, all determined to sort this out, I made the call and told the woman at the other end my frustration and asked for a supervisor. She told me that she will be happy to pass it on if she cannot solve the problem. All it took was 5 minutes. She understood, issued the credit, and sent a confirmation email. I am happy to report that the credit came through.

Whether it is the year end reconciliation issues in Banner or the AT&T inefficiencies, I blame the software “systems” that are simply broken!

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I was interviewed by a reporter from Bloomberg regarding Apple’s decision to withdraw from EPEAT ratings and what Wellesley is planning to do about it. Since I don’t control how my responses are going to be used in the story, I felt that it is important to state what I said 🙂

EPEAT ratings provide guidance on how environment friendly the computer systems are. It has been widely known that Apple hardware are not rated very high in EPEAT, whereas some of the PC manufacturers have gotten them pretty high. We purchase PC hardware that are rated gold. In terms of Apple hardware, we do not have the same options that one has with PC hardware.

We make purchasing decisions based on many factors, environmental concerns as well as use cases. In certain academic disciplines they use software to teach that runs only on certain computer platforms. If it is essential to have a Mac based on this reason, the fact that it does not have the stellar environmental rating is less important, because one has no other choice. So, we provide some best practice guidelines on energy conservation and expect the users to follow them.

One of the questions that I was asked was, is Wellesley going to decide to stop purchasing Macs because of this. This was based on the decision by the City of San Francisco to stop purchasing Apple hardware based on this story. My answer was that we will watch how this develops very carefully and decide on further actions such as joining any collective initiative to let Apple know the need to be environmentally conscious in producing their hardware. Apple claims that their hardware is energy efficient, of course.

I also mentioned that I usually watch the discussion on EDUCAUSE CIO Listserve to see how this develops further. It is also the case that we do not have a laptop program and therefore we do not determine what computers the students purchase. We do provide recommended configurations.

So, this is in essence what I conveyed, but who knows how the story will come out!!!