Today, I manually ran a software authentication on each of forty machines. No, I don’t know why it had to be manually (well, because doing it automatically didn’t work, apparently), but better to get it done now than field complaints come September and classes start again. I started, logged-on, ran a batch file, ran the […]

I wandered across this post lamenting the low proportion of women who wrote articles for an O’Reilly book about coding practice.
Out of 39 authors, only one is woman, and she’s a co-author of one chapter.
There is some debate about whether this low number is due to relatively few women being considered as leading programmers (and […]

My sister frequently takes me to task for saying please and thank you too often. However, in my experience, these words can’t be over-used. I’m not talking about the politeness and courtesy aspect of these social niceties. I’m talking about how you can use them to interact better with others.
Everyday, we encounter dozens of acquaintances […]

This morning I read an article which suggested that many user complaints could be complicated by confusion (try saying that five times fast). Often, the problem isn’t stupid users, it’s that they don’t understand the terminology to communicate their problem. It’s up to us, as computer support officers, or technicians, or engineers, or customer service […]