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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I was out in Jupiter FL during the Memorial day weekend to attend my wife’s nephew’s high school graduation. For me who has been used to small high school graduations (my children’s graduating classes were 155 and 170 students respectively), this was grand. It was held at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where a group had to go early to reserve seats, despite being asked not to do it! Some of us joined a little late after a nice nap. As a result of this trip, I missed the commencement, well sort of… I was out that day, so I watched it on my PDA. It was great quality stream. There were 700-1000 views during the 10:30-1:00 PM live cast. We have heard very good feedback, and I am sure several parents and relatives of international students who could not make it here in person, benefited from watching this remotely.
Information overload is everywhere, it is also local. We routinely hear from our users how they did not know about something important that we have communicated to. This will continue to be the case because what is important and relevant is in the eyes of the beholders and depending on how it is conveyed, it may or may not sound important! One of the major problems is the lack of coherence – information is all over the place. This is where, the promised land of enterprise portals comes in.
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It has been a couple of weeks since I wrote a post here. It is certainly not because I have been busier than usual – in fact I forced myself to work from home a couple of days in the past two weeks to get some real work done. Time just flies, especially when there is a lot going on. Yesterday evening we went to hear a South Indian classical music concert by T.M. Krishna at the Stata Center in MIT. It was a fantastic 4 hour concert that once upon a time only those living in Chennai in South India were treated to. This is one of the benefits of living near Boston – we get to hear a lot of quality Indian music. We used to drive two hours from Middletown, CT to come to Boston to hear some of the best artists. Our jealous friends from central CT, who had two hours of driving left while it was a mere 20 minutes for us now, were making a note that how bright it was (at 8 PM) – as if it was going to last till 10 PM!
I got up at my usual time at 5:30 to see the brightness after a whole week of miserable weather. The apocalypse that was promised on 21st of May has come and gone and we all are still here. I remember the days when the academic cycle’s effect on libraries and technologies were far more noticeable than now – especially on technology support. Summer was a time to engage in all sorts of major projects (because it was the “lean time”) to get ready for the Fall. Whereas this continues to be true (you can tell that the summer has begun by looking at all the books that are waiting to be shelved!), it just doesn’t feel the same. It seems that we are engaged in major projects all the time!
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It is that time of the year when semesters wind down and everyone is looking forward to the summer and graduations. I am off to Florida later this month to attend my wife’s nephew’s high school graduation, and of course play some golf. I was talking to a friend from India this past weekend when my wife was at UConn commencement about how different things were back home. We did not have graduation ceremonies for high school or for finishing undergraduate degrees! We all wrote our final exams and the results were published in newspapers (now they are available online). The day after the results, newspapers carried stories about the disappointed souls – some of them way too disappointed because they did not get the highest ranks in their respective schools! I completed my Masters degree in Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where we had a commencement, primarily due to the foreign connections of the IITs. Things are beginning to change there.
For administrative staff in Higher Ed, this is also the time when performance reviews are done and goals are set for the upcoming year. Having worked in Higher Ed for 25 years, I know that these processes have been relatively new. I was a skeptic about this whole thing when we got started, but over the years, I have come to understand the value of the process.
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We had a fabulous parents weekend in Hanover, NH, where we spent time from Friday till Sunday afternoon. Listened to President Jim Yong Kim, a terrific speaker, who described some of the serious issues such as bringing binge drinking and sexual assaults and what the administration is doing to address these. He also discussed the 16 Habits of the Mind and how this will figure in the curriculum planning going forward. We also met with the parents/guardians of our son Varun’s roommates, which is always a lot of fun. One of Varun’s roommate is William Kamkwamba, the kid from Malawi, who built a windmill to power his own home. Tom Rielly, who is a community director at the famous TED conferences, had a part to play in William coming to Dartmouth, so he joined us for dinner one night. We had a fantastic time and talked a lot about emerging technologies and Tom’s views on ubiquitous connectivity.
Tired after long nights on Friday and Saturday, we went to bed a little earlier than normal and were woken up by a phone call from our son Vivek who called us about Osama bin Laden’s death because I did not respond to his chat message. We got up to watch the President speak and see all the celebration on TV. Great news after ten years and amazing how the mission was carried out. I should share with you a tweet from GhostOsama which read “Well this sucks…I accidentally enabled location on my tweets.” On that note about ubiquity of connections…
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