OK, blog...

There's a section on time management and planning ahead, and section on reflective practice where we note our thoughts and progress in a blog, so now my head's all baffled thinking of ways to write a blog about remembering to schedule time to write a blog about scheduling time.. I may need to re-think this.

So, reflective... this week has been mad at work. I was asked about 2 months ago to take over the sysprep responsibilities for the company, which is producing copies of XP preconfigured to requirements with software preinstalled. There's been a lot of research since on how it works, and what standards the company has, all useful stuff and the training I received from Roelie (our PC god departing for the home shores of south africa) means that I've no qualms about taking it on, but there's 1 issue that makes the work a whole lot harder

Toshiba produce the worst laptop range I've ever come across. Why the hell did we move from Dell, every model compatible with the last. Toshiba, every model has different software to get the "advanced features" working, even the base architecture can be different. This isn't so much a rant at Toshiba, as a rant at the people who chose which models we want to purchase for our company.

There's a core architecture underlying the operating system called a Hardware Abstraction Layer, which deals with the interface to the CPU and features such as power saving. Each model uses a different one, 1 Single processor, 1 multi processor, and 1 old version which is incompatible with both. I've figured out how to make the single and multi versions compatible, but the old version isn't, so instead of being able to produce 1 image, I've got to produce 2. Further to that, some software can't be pre-installed, so it's got to be installed after.

I raised these points with my Big boss, and he mentioned them to the Service Delivery Manager and a conversation got started about who picked the models. There was no involvement by anyone technical, the choices we made by the Admin team on size and weight, and by a director who looked at the costs. Roelie got to see them when the evaluation PC turned up, after the orders were placed!!!

We've got a similar issue with desktops, the admin ppl picked a barely expandable desktop cos it took up less desk space.

I noted the glaring oversight of this to Max, the SDM, and ended up being asked to join in a new PC architecture team who will choose the new PC's, and I'll be looking at the technical aspects. This starts with a visit to Toshiba in December to see the roadmap of their new products. I'd be looking forward to it much more if it wasn't for the fact that I hate them already. Must remember not to bite the salesman's head off, I'll stick that on the planner.

In other news, I spent 2 weeks trying to fix blue screen errors on an old PC, each one I fixed came up with a different one within a few days. The PC's been formatted, upgraded to XP from 2000, had memory swapped, and just when I got it stable, it died. Turns out it was a motherboard fault all along, which the diagnostic CD didn't pick up, but looking at the motherboard, the capacitors are faulty and are starting to pop. It went out of warrenty 6 days previously, but as it's a design fault, it's still covered. Pity I didn't check capacitors thoroughly first, would've saved a lot of hassle for me and Cath, the user. That's another for the checklist.

In College news, I've done exam 11 of CCNA and next is the final exams, so I'm about 6 weeks ahead. Need to check with Dom about when I can do them, and whether I'll be twiddling thumbs waiting for the next lot. At least I'll have time for PPD stuff.

OK, that's it for reflective. I'll mark all reflective posts accordingly, still debating how to do the other sections of PPD, I'll probably try posting them back as comments on Kerry's blog