Work for OIIT! Become our 4th DBA / technical support person for our team. Located in Athens, GA (college town, UGA football) $, benefits, generous leave, rare snow we love open source PDF of GeorgiaVIEW DBA position Check out the PDF (right) for more information. Sorry for the convoluted route to the application… Click this…
Mashable has an interesting article about why Twitter persists despite frequent performance issues: “Less is more. Simplicity is power.” By providing little more than an API, upon which numerous others have built tools, it doesn’t so directly compete with other services. I wonder if perhaps this is the right approach for a learning system? One…
The worst response technical support can give me is to suggest I try something I have already tried without success. An explanation why this suggestion is going to work this time when the previous attempt(s) did not work would help. Otherwise, why would I expect it to work this time when it didn’t last time?…
Image via Wikipedia Apparently the official launch of Firefox 3 is tomorrow. So we get to look forward to 4+ months of students and faculty members asking why Blackboard Vista doesn’t recognize Fx 3 as supported. Every week’s call with Blackboard will have the conversation: Us: Is it supported yet? Bb: Not yet. We are…
Would you believe United States employees cost their employers $650 billion in productivity costs in the seconds it takes for them to return attention back to the task at hand? The time spans lost are the same amount of time required to interpret a CAPTCHA. E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. are all distractions from getting…
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley My review rating: 5 of 5 stars Darwin’s theory of natural selection opened a can of worms. Matt Ridley adds to the support for the case by attempting to explain: Why sexual and not asexual reproduction? Why males and females? Why do…
Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…
Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…