johan's Journal

As the saying goes, "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail."
Confirming that yet again: Blackboard has a baby mail client.
There's something sad about the senior execs of software companies addressing a group of several hundred or thousand users. If they attempt to get really enthused, like Steve Ballmer, it's pathetic or even kind of psychotic.
And if they just sort of drone on about this piece of software or about how important their users are, it's just plain boring, because it's fundamentally about software and business and so on. This is their creation so maybe they're happy and proud about that, but the rest of us... well, we're just users. This is like someone talking about how wonderful the new version of the interstate is, but 2 hours rather than 2 minutes.
So i suppose they're just doomed. I mean, there are 1,000 people here with me, but we aren't intent on solving the current political crisis in Haiti. Or figuring out why Phoenix must keep so many police on the street to prevent the homeless from harassing the downtown tourists. (Or why there are homless.) Or discussing just how crazy it is to plant sod in the desert. We're sitting here, listening to someone talk about software.
After the presentations, my UT companions and i just had quite a laugh at the expense of one of the presenters, David Yaskin, VP Product Strategy, Blackboard, Inc., because he repeatedly pronounced "Tucson" as "Tuk-san." We corrected him (after we stopped laughing), but it was from the back of the ballroom (which was mostly empty by then) but hopefully he isn't scarred for life.

So as is apparent from the last few entries, i'm in Phoenix, attending the Blackboard user conference. The official conference hotel is the Hyatt Regency, but that's not where i'm staying. I'm staying at the Ramada Inn, just a couple of blocks away, because, i was told, the State of Texas' per diem does not cover the cost of the Hyatt Regency.
The Ramada Inn is not so much a hotel as a motel. It's several buildings, each two stories, surrounded by parking lots, which in turn, are surrounded by a brick wall. On top of the brick wall is a pointy metal fence, and the fence-wall has large gates on wheels so that the cars can get in and out, and limit access to the entire compound.
Which is a little worrisome, but it seems safe enough. It may be that some years ago this area of downtown Phoenix was not so pleasant, but it's OK now. Haven't heard any gun shots or anything!
OK, OK, i'm getting to the smelly part. I wake up this morning, after a somewhat fitful night of sleep (the walls seem kind of thin...), and utterly failed to get anything but a little rusty trickle of water to come out of the spigot in the bath. It's a round knob-like mechanism with a roughly 4 cm long tail, and the fixture behind it is helpfully labelled with an "H" and a "C". But i never really achieved the level of "flow" which made Hot or Cold at all relevant.
It was early though, and all of this was pre-coffee, so i was as polite as i can be at Very Early in the Morning o'clock, as i queried the person at the front desk about exactly how one conjures forth water from the tub. Apparently i had the correct idea, and he said he'd have someone take a look at it.
But until then, i'm kind of smelly, because i'm from Texas, and we're too cheap to afford hotels with reliably running water, please to meet you!
If there's no water by tomorrow morning, i suppose i won't have to worry about introducing myself to anyone.
Or perhaps i'll just go and use the heated pool. And why you need a heated pool in the desert, when it's 93F outside, i'm not sure. Perhaps to help get clean because you don't have running water in your room.
And for some reasons there's 1/2 a dozen pictures of Marilyn Monroe in the lobby.

"Comprehensive Customer Support" (by this guy from Bb)
Not nearly as many people here as in the Duke presentation.
I think this is basically going to be "Here's all the ways we've improved our tech support so it doesn't suck. (as much)"
"I am a customer service nerd."
"I had the honor of seeing Jeff Bezos speak."
Hmm.. apparently someone with a Bb golf-shirt is taking pictures. I don't remember signing any sort of consent form about having my image used by Bb. I wonder what the legality of using it for advertising is.
Well, no one really slammed him.. A very well behaved group, all things considered.

"Growing Pains in the Enterprise Environment: Lessons Learned" (Some people at Duke)
The people making this presentation (Amy Campbell and Neal Caidin) are CIT, part of Duke's Library.
They have been using Bb for 4 years.
They have 8 machines. "Relatively high powered HW" hmm...
Their automated course creation sounds a lot like ours. (Snapshots from flat files.)
I appear to be the only person in this room wearing shorts and a T-shirt. (My Far Side "Midvale School for the Gifted" t-shirt. It seemed apropos.) The forecasted temperature for today, here in the desert, is 93F. This seems like shorts weather to me.
Campbell is talking a lot about needing to improve reliability and convince the administration types that this is a "mission critical" system.
Hmm. that's cute. The graphic for the "support model" slide has a graphic of 3 silhouette people, stacked vertically, feet standing on shoulders. But it kinda looks like the guys on top are taking a crap on those below. Or maybe that's just my subjective interpretation.
They have a very similar composition of support staff for Bb. Their (central) IT group sound like sysadmins. These people sound like our CIT group. Interestingly, it would appear Duke has more staff committed to their Bb installation than we do. ("We're Texas, and we're cheap!") Caidin is noting that Duke's IT group didn't want to install the application. (Just handle OS and hardware.) Lucky bastards.
Attendees are now discussing other "Enterprise" issues. Sounds like a lot of these people have issues with Peoplesoft being the dominant store of human information on campus, and dealing with that, just as we have issues getting data from UT's homegrown stuff.
"We need to not irritate our system administrators so they are happy to work with us."
Have not gone to Bb6. They feel that the upgrade took too long.