Word In Action, a church in the metro Vancouver area that I’d consider a “home away from home”, has recently started making their Sunday morning messages available for download.
Monthly Archive for October, 2006
Part of the job of tech support is to reduce the amount of calls you are getting in the first place (if possible). After all, if you are getting less calls, and having less issues, that means everything is working.
There are several ways to do this. You try to educate your users, so that simple issues and problems are no longer something they need to call or email concerning. You can make information available, in the form of “cheatsheets”, FAQs, or other documentation, which will eliminate a certain other percentage of calls.
In short, you do everything in your power to work yourself out of a job.
Continue reading ‘Working yourself out of a job’
The big news from OpenWorld was that Oracle will be fully supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux — even if you don’t run any Oracle products on it — and doing it for about half of what Red Hat charges.
If you’re Red Hat, that really sucks.
If you aren’t, it sounds like a pretty good deal.
Continue reading ‘Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux’
According to the oft entertaining Reuters Oddly Enough, Cobain has just topped Elvis as the top-earning dead celebrity.
I had no idea there was a sort of “Forbes 500″ list for post-humous revenue, but I suppose if something can be measured, someone somewhere is interested in measuring it.
Incidentally, I can remember that in about 1991, in a rare moment of prescience, I told a friend that Nirvana would be the Beatles of the 1990’s (or the nearest sort of equivalent). My friend sort of laughed at the thought — this was when Smells like teen spirit had only just started to penetrate into popular culture, but to the casual observer still gave no sign that Nirvana would be anything other than a one-hit wonder. I’ve got a poor track record for technology predictions, but apparently my musical acumen was more or less on target. Maybe I should go into A&R instead…
“What in the world made you change your mind? How did you arrive at these ideas?”
This is what my Sociology professor asked me. It’s a good question, and not one I could answer easily.
We were talking after class; I was in part apologizing for having previously referred to our textbook as being markedly biased (in a left-leaning sense) and also taking issue with some graphs that supposedly showed conclusively that the rich are indeed getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Continue reading ‘How do ideological shifts happen, anyways?’
I like to write about tech support, because that’s what I do. Support can be demanding, but when you get down to it there are only so many things I can write. Having the required knowledge is a given — the real variables are often things like soft skills, time management, and understanding the business process of the people you’re there to help.
So let’s just say you’re doing all this, or making your best attempt. How can you tell if the service you provide is getting better? In other words, how can you determine if you’re doing a better job? Continue reading ‘5 steps to Measuring Your Improvement’
I added a page with a few site statistics I thought were interesting.
What’s that? You say you have a need for easily hosting hundreds of thousands of blogs?
Well, thankfully, there is Wordpress MU, based on the same system currently running Wordpress.com.
I wonder if this will ever see television… Funniest political ad I’ve seen, though I guess that’s not saying too much — campaigning is not necessarily known for its humor. ;-)
More on this at Drudge.
Disclaimer: While I do work for Oracle, I’m not “in the know” concerning any corporate strategies, and any comments that follow should be taken as just as speculative as those of an outsider.
That being said, what is with the recent spate of Oracle/ Ubuntu Linux speculation?
Continue reading ‘Oracle and… Ubuntu?’
