Master Nerd

Welcome 🙂

We hope that the service our department provides continuously improves.

We hope that all of your technology works together.

We hope that you remember to save often.

We hope that we all succeed in learning.

We hope that the economy improves.

We hope that your dreams and wishes come true.

We hope that you come to appreciate WOU the way that we have.

Thank you for coming.  We hope that you enjoy your stay 🙂

A new school year is an exciting time, filled with energy, and eager new students.
May we all take advantage of the time we have.
To learn, love and live.
Carpe diem.

We had hoped to make some serious progress on the Banner upgrade (2+ weeks of “mods” to be done to code/forms), but have mostly still been doing Migration cleanup, Data Warehousing and routine tasks …

The mods will need to be in place soon, as campus will need 2-6 weeks (depending on the department) to test the upgraded code/forms.  I will be meeting with Darin weekly to ensure that our communication is up-to-date and we are appropriately addressing campus issues and the Upgrade Schedule.

I am PLEASED to announce that the Banner migration (to Linux) went pretty well 🙂

This is not to say that a report was missed here-or-there, or that everything was flawless.
However, we had no large surprises, crashes or mishaps.  The Banner functional team (Faye, Michelle, Dorothy) and the programmer team (Mike, Nathan, Christina) both did a great job of preparing and testing Banner and it’s myriad features.

We begin anew, preparing for the across-the-board point release updates to various Banner modules.  We can begin implementing our mods next week.  Upon completion, both the Banner functional team and campus can begin (or conclude) the much-needed testing before November.

In an ongoing effort to maintain a secure campus infrastructure, WOU had planned to upgrade our Cisco NAC (network access control) to ISE (Identity Services Engine).

I am sad to report that this upgrade will not be in place for Fall Term.

During the implementation (in a test environment), we ran into numerous large bugs that prevented us from properly configuring ISE to required end-points (laptops, etc…) to authenticate (login) and posture (client scan for updates, AV, etc…).

In reality, ISE is not a direct cut-over from NAC.  Authentication is handled much differently, and I believe that ISE is tuned for a 802.1x environment.  Though our experience with 802.1x was limited, we tried to implement it after our 3rd ISE design change.  It was not a pleasant experience.  Again, in another environment (VPN, corporate, …) it surely works well and cleanly – but not here.

We will continue to run NAC.  We have tidy-ed it up a bit and will continue to monitor the much-needed improvements to ISE 1.2.x, expected in late January.

I spent a great deal of time this week (and last) doing performance evaluations.
“Evals” are really quite a bit of work, and require precision.

In the past I had built a self-evaluation for my employees to think about their job and performance differently.

Currently I’m build an anonymous supervisor feedback form.  It is not really designed to be an evaluation of me by my employees.  It IS designed to solicit feedback from them about what would make them more efficient, etc…

I plan to review this document with Bill during my next eval.

We’ll be launching the new campus video tour on monday.
It will replace our map found at: wou.edu/map

Each building has at least one video, and may also include multiple pictures that can be browsed.
An information section is also included for each building, including a possible link to a webpage will more complete information.

This project has been in the works for some time, and is FINALLY ready to launch.  Very exciting —

I conscripted some of our finest today to do a little cleaning project.
This project has been overdue, for some time now.
We all chipped in, including a few students and made some MAJOR progress.

Upon completion of the vacuuming, we discovered that our shop-vac had not been cleaned in awhile.  Maybe never.  So we …tried… to clean it…

So dirty:

Today was a momentous occasion.  We presented our answer to Eric for his complex and interesting data request.  We were very close, although the approach was not perfect, we can do a few tweaks next week to bring it to near-completion.

There are some very strange differences between FIS/SIS/etc… and trying to get them all to link and reconcile is VERY complicated.  Our team (Bruce, Christina, Nathan) has done an excellent job.

I had a productive meeting with Dave this week, and we are very close to having 2 of his projects completed 🙂
Unfortunately, since I last met with him, that list has grown significantly.
Still working to juggle projects, schedules, timelines, etc…

Next week should be a very productive week, with things getting crossed off of lists.