After many days of great weather, today is a dreary day. It was pretty bad last night that I had to watch Texas vs Detroit play in ALCS. I recognized very few players and besides I didn’t care about the outcome. While watching that and this morning, I heard about the dismantling of the administrative structure of Red Sox (as well as players feeling unhappy) after several successful seasons.
I also noticed that a Google Engineer “accidentally” shared a communication written primarily about the bad management practices at Amazon and then about Google. I have “accidentally” in quotes because I am always suspicious when smart people claim to do things like this or lose a “to be released” iPhone in a bar accidentally, so I think it was intentional. On the other hand, what do I know?
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I was saddened to hear about the death of Steve Jobs last night. I have been a user of many of the Apple products from day one like many of you are. Steve was one of those rare visionaries who revolutionized the usability of computing devices by anyone. How many iPhone or iPod users ever used a manual to start using the device? I was also one of those folks who were in love with the NeXT operating system and I remember installing it and using it for a long time in the early to mid 90’s. He will be missed very much.
Yesterday, I spoke at the Academic Council regarding the two major projects that we are currently engaged in – Sakai and Google Apps for Education. I showed the current state of affairs, such as how many courses are using Sakai, to what extent and which tools of Sakai are being used the most. It turns out that the resources and forums are the two mostly used with tools such as Assignments and Gradebook usage picking up.
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It is that time of the year – Baseball playoffs, football, short days etc. I was able to squeeze a round of golf a couple of days ago. The desperation showed – we were unwilling to stop though there was not enough light. The Red Sox are still alive but so are the Rays. Hope the Red Sox make it to the playoffs and turn their worst performance in September into a soaring October performance. Things in LTS are moving along well. We will soon be sending the Annual Report for 2010-2011 which will highlight many of our collective accomplishments. We will also be sending a communication today announcing a Google Support hotline, availability of additional Email aliases and a single point of contact for managing major projects for the academic departments.
Yesterday I met with Melissa Trevvett (Executive Director) and Amanda Schmidt (Asst. Director) from the Boston Library Consortium (BLC). We are one of the 17 members of the BLC and enjoy the benefits of the consortium at several levels. Melissa began her role as the Executive Director recently and is visiting the member institutions. During our brief meeting, we touched on the “C” word – “Collaboration” and I told Melissa about my views on Collaboration. It reminds me of the “A” word used by the media and politicians – “American People”. They are words that are used a lot but the answer to “Where is it?” or “Which American People told you this?” will likely to be a useless exercise.
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I can’t believe that it was a year ago that I interviewed for the CIO job at Wellesley. My first interview was on Sep 10 when I met with the search committee in two groups and then the second one was on Sep 17th, which was a day-long visit to the campus with some individual and some group interviews. This was followed by a student from South Africa giving me a tour of the College campus and then dinner with a few members of the search committee. During the interviews I heard about FirstClass a little bit, but the student talked a lot about it. Honestly, I had no clue about it until then. After I accepted the job in early October, FirstClass would occupy a significant portion of my life and it still continues, a year later.
I remember Sept 17th vividly – I was staying in a hotel in Needham and was trying to look up directions to the College and the website was down. I looked in Google Maps and left the hotel. I had totally underestimated the time it would take to get to the College. I parked in the garage and was desperately looking to see how to get to the President’s office for my first interview with President Bottomly and there were no clear signs. I asked a student who pointed me in the direction of Green Hall and I rushed, but no idea which entrance to use. Somehow, I made it with 5 minutes to spare. And praying that I will not get a crisis call from Pace University (where I was working) during the day. And my prayers were answered.
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We finally got power in our house in Higganum, CT on Friday, 9/2. That was 5 1/2 days without electricity. I believe there are still 2% of the Connecticut Light & Power customers who do not have power. We were looking at the CT river as we drove past it and it looks muddy and unclean – who knows what contaminants have gotten into it. I also saw the kind of destruction Irene brought to Vermont – it is unbelievable that a Hurricane which struck North Carolina was so potent that 1400 miles or so further, it still had the punch to cause so much damage. And now Lee is dumping all the rains. I have never ever paid so much attention to weather in my life!
Another academic year has begun. It is not what it used to be 10-15 years ago for the technology support staff. It is true that we experience high call volumes at this time, but, I remember many of us losing sleep over the first few weeks of the Fall semester. Things have changed tremendously as they should.
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The “Summer” is over and as always it went way too fast. Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene caused a lot of havoc in the country, including CT. For a hurricane it moved way slower than the summer, I would say. Until Sunday morning 7 AM, we were able to watch the incessant coverage of Irene on TV as well as multitude of websites. Then the power went out and in our CT home, it is yet to come. The predictions are that our small town may not get it back until Thursday. A couple of hours later, cell signals from AT&T also vanished. Sunday night was an interesting night, no electricity and absolutely no communication and truly, we all felt lost and did not sleep well, hoping for the lights to come back on.
Wellesley, like many other Colleges and Universities, had emergency planning in effect and we helped wherever we can, by posting messages in the appropriate channels encouraging everyone to update their Emergency contact information. Overall, NY, CT and MA were spared by the wrath of Irene with the exception of a few areas such as Western MA. Events like these expose our dependence/addiction to technology. Granted that my dependence is on one extreme, but as I discuss below, the dependence is far more than some are willing to admit.
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This was yet another great summer for me and I am sure it is true for many of you. Now, the phase of getting ready for the start of the Fall semester begins. Gone are the days when this used to be the most stressful part of the support services, especially the technology side. The network bandwidth was never enough, students brought computers that would not easily connect to the network, registration systems were too slow because of the lack of compute power, so on and so forth. Most of these are non-issues, unless we want to make them into issues by introducing some unnecessary and overcautious administrivia in the middle.
All of our summer projects have gone really well, many of which I have already mentioned. Especially worth mentioning are Google Apps transition and Drupal. Given the relative enormity of these projects, we have made amazing progress in such a short time thanks to diligent and creative work by the respective teams. This in no way minimizes several other important projects we have completed, of course.
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I am glad to see that after some hiccups, our Google migration has begun again and we are all keeping our fingers crossed that it should proceed well. I am thankful to have such a dedicated and hardworking team of LTS staff who are managing this project well under difficult conditions. No change is ever easy!
A recent news is that Borders, which filed for bankruptcy protection earlier, is unable to find any buyers, so it is likely to liquidate. Apparently, this is not good news for Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Why? Because the book buyers are likely to flock to Borders to pick up the books at cheaper prices. This is true, but, it is for the short term.
The other major item that has been hogging the news recently is the phone hacking scandal. It runs like a mystery novel – celebrities, a rising star within a powerful media empire who is implicated in the scandal and is arrested, a whistleblower was found dead etc. This is a serious issue related to privacy that goes beyond just phone hacking.
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We were supposed to travel to Charlotte, NC to meet with our dear friends there and spend the July 4th weekend, but on Friday morning I got the call saying that our flight was cancelled. The next flight they can book us was on Saturday, late afternoon. So, I took the option of canceling our plans and receive a refund. Well, the reservation was through Expedia for a United Flight, sort of. It is really a USAir flight. So, USAir person could not give me the refund. She could only add a note. I had to call Expedia. After 1 hour, they validated and agreed that I am eligible for a refund. I hope I will get it. Lesson learned: Whereas Expedia is fantastic in taking your money, they are not so good in giving back money that is legitimately yours. I guess one can change Expedia with any business name and the statement will hold true.
As a result of this cancellation, we had one of the most restful four days. I got an invite to join Google Plus, Google’s FaceBook. It looks and acts like Facebook with some nicer features, but also lacks some of the social networking tool integrations such as those with Twitter and Foursquare and such. They will come in due course. But, the very fact that Facebook was the earliest and that many millions are already familiar with it poses a huge problem for Google Plus or any other FB wannabes.
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I wrote my last post on a day that is special to me and the next one is today which is also a special day for me 🙂
I got back from travel to Turkey and Greece last thursday. My wife had a meeting in Turkey, so we began there and had a wonderful time and then went to Greece, which, while a beautiful country, was not as enjoyable as Turkey for us. I will spare the details. Our Greece opinion was definitely not clouded by a not so happy incidence – my Google Nexus phone was snatched away from my hand while we were just wrapping up our last dinner in Athens before heading back to the States. It was what I would call perfect execution!
I always look to see how the other countries are doing technology as a way to benchmark ours. So, this post is some random thoughts about it. Talking about random, I am not sure how many of you heard the story that the State Department goofing up the “random” selection of applicant to an immigration lottery.
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