I just thought I'd drop a positive post in, amid all the crap I've been putting in before. After four and a half years of cancer, my interferon treatment is doing the trick and cancerous activity seems to be on the wane. It's too early to say whether existing tumour mass is receding, but all the latest scanning technology hasn't picked up anything new. My thanks to the medical team looking after me.
I'm not going to be buying one of these, but this another nod to all those Apple-heads who think they're so cutting edge. Competitive advantage is about establishing a product or service that's in demand and difficult to imitate. This is quite hard to achieve when a competitor beats you to it.
Company results came out today, so a company meeting was scheduled. I say it was scheduled, but...
Originally the meeting was scheduled for Thursday, but someone thought it would be better to deliver results on a Friday afternoon. So we cancelled the venue we'd booked and sought one for the Friday. Then the CEO put his foot down and said company meetings shouldn't be on Friday afternoons, so we went back to the venue and tried to move it to the Thursday. They'd already booked it to someone else while we'd been changing our minds. Never mind, we'll hold a two-hour company meeting in an area of our office with 20 seats for 400 employees.
Ah, better book the seats then.
It's snowed, so loads of people haven't turned up, so we'll reschedule.
Which is a good job, because the CEO who wanted the meeting today and is presenting the company results had booked the day off work.
I think you're beginning to get an idea of some of my frustrations, particularly if you follow the work keyword for this entry.
Am I doing anything about this? Yes.
With due deference to El Reg's BOFH, let me tell you about some things that have been going on at work.
I'm participating in the KM project, an initiative to improve knowledge sharing largely through a portal (aka intranet) through which you can find relevant documents and people from the constituent companies in our recent merger. I've been drafted in to give the initiative some direction and some impetus; in other words a kick up the backside, though I may have mistaken this location with the teeth.
So today the portal was launched. Shortly afterwards, Client Partner (basically a sales director) comes back and says:
CP: I can access all the staff salary information on the portal.
Me: It's not on the portal. That's the point, it's a portal. It's just showing where you can access it on the file server.
CP: It's a disgrace. The portal's broken. It must be closed down at once.
Me: If I close the portal down, you'll still be able to access the salary information. You need to change permissions on the file server.
CP: Are you questioning me?
Me: Look, I can stop people finding this through the portal, but you're not solving the problem. You have a problem on the file server that existed before the portal did and will exist afterwards. Anyone with a mapped network drive can search using Windows search and find classified data. You need to fix this.
CP: Bring the portal down.
Me: Ok, so there's two-year old salary information available. Is that so important?
CP: It's a security risk. The portal shouldn't be able to access this information.
Me: I agree, but the search index runs as if it were any employee, so if the portal can access the data, so can anyone else. We checked with your office what should be indexed and they told us to index these folders. We have, now it's broken don't blame us.
CP: Well you obviously didn't check or we wouldn't have the problem.
Me: Here's the email that says index all the folders from your office. By the way, this problem doesn't exist for any server at any of the other offices. Doesn't that point to the problem being in your office rather than with the search tool?
CP: That's because you're from the other two offices and you don't understand how we have things set up.
Me: That's why we asked you what we should index the first time. Fine, we'll start again. We'll bring down the intranet, send you a list of all the folders that we index, you can tell us which to exclude, we'll reindex the server.
CP: I'm glad you've seen sense.
Me (to developer): Change the CP's profile so that every time you hover over their name, an appropriate message appears.
While not necessarily tackling the fundamental debates around OS -- security, user interface, mime type definition, efficiency -- this article does address the most important question about using a Mac. Given that Apple inc has just dropped the "Computers" part of its company name, I think this assessment of Macs is quite valid.
Normally I link to the print version of these articles, so that they render more easily on small-screen devices. But this time I thought the comments were quite funny, including the author's own, so be sure to follow the article to the end.
To continue on a theme, the image above is illustrative of what I have to put up with in this place. Isn't there someone competent enough, or even just willing, to make PCs work across different domains?
I can't connect to any printers, see anyone else's calendar, see most shared folders let alone write to them, use the timesheeting system, I don't have a phone, filing cabinet, allocated desk, mouse, or screen, I miss out on most company emails, don't get any departmental messages, haven't been inducted into any of the HR processes, and haven't had my appraisal, even though it's a fortnight overdue. I'm a little frustrated. But since there's no channel through which to complain (I'm either ignored or told it's someone else's responsibility, who then ignores me) I turn to the blog.
Professional services my arse.
