Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Bi-Weekly Meeting Day In about a half-hour, I am in a two-hour meeting.  Essentially, it is a meeting of the managers of my stem here at the University.  Interestingly, I only started going about two weeks ago, but now I get all the cool manager emails and such.  My participation results largely from my role in our disaster recover planning efforts and my work with my boss.  It is somewhat interesting seeing the dynamic that plays out in the room.  For the most part, our Director is pretty cool.  Once you know how he works, it becomes quite easy to get things done.  The good part is getting to know what is going on in different parts of our stem.  For example, at the last meeting I was able to learn of some problems that are being encountered with our new interim email solution.  I also learned of someone's fairly new PowerBook being swiped from their office in less than five minutes.  (Further proving my theory about the utility of the fruity machines, eebmore).  One of the more interesting things to watch, though, is the interaction between managers and their management styles.  It sounds boring at first, but it is pretty enlightening.  One manager is quite laid back and detests meetings of any sort and makes sure you know that.  He and another manager have been engaging in what I sarcastically describe as "mutual lovefests."  The interaction, though, also allows us to see how the other managers interact with our Director.  Finally, I get the skinny on things like raises and such.  In some respects, it is somewhat nice to attend something where I am just not seen as a systems administrator.  9:43:29 AM    comment []  trackback []

Unintentional Break My momentary interruption in blogging yesterday was brought about by a technical error of my own making.  While busy installing some things to allow some remote work on my home workstation, I gave my machine the command line shutdown command.  I, of course, forgot to pass it the restart switch.  So, my machine--and hence my blogging software--were down until I returned home last night.  Dare I say, I was a little embarrassed when I realized my mistake.  I had a nice, relaxing weekend.  It was nice to spend a weekend back home without having to travel anywhere.  Of course, as Fool said, Saturday was just not a particularly well-thought idea.  Damn losing football and enjoying too many mojitos!  Fortunately, there was Sunday to rest and relax.  9:40:13 AM    comment []  trackback []