Posts Tagged ‘work’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

eProductivity and GTD

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Ok, I’ve never been a big fan of Lotus Notes, especially since we were stuck on version 6 for so long.  For a couple years, I took an Outlook break, and I’m also hooked on Gmail.

The upgrade to version 8 is a huge relief.

My good friend Toby put me onto the book by David Allen, “Getting Things Done”, which is a productivity system that really seems to work.  During my stint with Outlook, I started using the GTD add-in, and loved it so much that the idea of giving it up when I moved back into the Lotus world was a real bummer.

Then I found eProductivity, the GTD solution for Lotus Notes.  It is a replacement of the standard mail template.  I have installed it on my company laptop, without having any special privileges (or permission), and I have had no problems at all with replication or interaction with other corporate applications.  This is a significant statement considering the standard of our IT deparment, and the quality of our internal applications.

Luckily for me, I was an early Beta tester of the 1.x version, and just recently was selected for the 2.x Beta program.

Anyone who is interested should check out the Getting Started Video, and then download the trial template.  They have done a very good job of the trial template – it will copy a sample of your inbox, and guide you through the GTD process of emptying it.

Tags: , ,
Posted in General | 1 Comment »

When is NaN.NaN.NaN?

Friday, June 4th, 2010
When is NaN.NaN.NaN?

When is NaN.NaN.NaN?

Trying to select the ‹ or › results in the pop-up calender dissapearing, and the curious “Not a Number” date appearing.

Summary: it is not possible to enter a date using the pop-up calender  for other than the current month.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in General | 1 Comment »

SAP Warning

Friday, June 4th, 2010
Do you want to proceed?

Do you want to proceed?

When logging on to do submit some expenses, I was asked about the Transaction CO Through-postings from F1, and about how they were locked.

You better ask yourself, ”Do you want to proceed?  Well, do ya? Punk?!

Update: Turns out that this means that month has been closed.  It remains to be seen what that means for my expense claim.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Word trying to raise the dead: Attached templates from servers long gone.

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

So, after the IT department failed to upgrade Lotus Notes remotely, they came to my desk, and ran Microsoft Update.  Manually.  And installed about 40 updates.  Why hadn’t these been updated already? Don’t ask.

Some of these updates were for Office, and naturally, something went wrong.  All of a sudden, Word started hanging when trying to open documents.  Google found some forums, which lead to this article

Documents that have attached templates take a long time to open in Word 2002 and in Word 2003 …

So the solution is unplug from the network, and run a Macro, cutting and pasting into it every directory in which you may have documents with attached templates on non-existent servers.  Oh fun.

Not to mention that I also dislike VB, especially VBA, and trying to research recursive directory search code requires the internet, which is disconnected because testing the VBA macro will hang.  Nice.

Oh, and by the way, the AutoOpen macro? Yeah, it runs after the templates have been loaded, so no good trying to write a macro that fixes this only when you try to open this document.

Dear Lazyweb: write me an app that searches all my computer for Word files, detects an attached template beginning with “\\” and replaces it with “Normal”.

Tags: , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Considerations for Jet-Blast

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

When looking at the FAA Advisory Circular 150/5300-13 to see what the rules are about installing equipment next to a runway, I found this little gem:

A jet engine operating at maximum thrust is capable of lifting a 2 foot (0.6 m) boulder, located 35 feet (10m) behind the airplane completely off the ground.

That’s a big boulder!

Tags: , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Quality of RFP documentation

Friday, April 9th, 2010

You can expect a wide range of quality for RFP documents.  Sometimes, they are an imaculate document with perfect section and page numbering that is consistant throughout.

Other times, they are a collection of photocopied, scanned, hand annotated monsters, with sections numbers from different conventions, and pictures like this:

Airport with sensor locations

This is a map of an airport, and on this map are the location of existing sensors which are to be replaced as part of the RFP.  Take special note of the 22 sensors and 9 RPU cabinets, and from this map, calculate the cost of

  • sensor cabling,
  • data cabling,
  • power cabling,
  • trenching,
  • obstruction light placement,
  • a thousand other things.

Now go and prepare a fixed price quote.  Oye.

Tags:
Posted in General | No Comments »

Lotus Notes Fail: Importing ICS files

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

This is supposed to easy, and I guess it is with v8, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. In fact, this kind of thing typifies my entire Lotus Notes experience. ICS files are common file format for calender entries, and have been around since forever, and Notes can’t import them, which is doubly weird since Lotus was involved in defining the standard.

When you use the “Import…” option, you get this dialogue:

Import Document Dialog

Import Document Dialog

Not a good start really. Nothing in the “Files of type” selection that make sense, so stick with the default “Structured Text”.

Then, you get this dialogue, with a selection list in the middle with about 200 entries in it.

Import Dialog - Select Form

Import Dialog - Select Form

Most of these entries have helpful names like:

  • R5 Compatibility Form
  • Setup MiniView
  • Switcher Form for Calender
  • Switcher Form for Folders
  • Switcher Form for To Do
  • To Do

(Ahh! That looks familiar, we must be getting close to real options, oh wait, what’s this….)

  • $$View Template for Calender
  • $$View Template for Threads
  • $$View Template for TodoByCategory

Anyway, you get the idea.  After about 80 mouse clicks, I found an option “Calender Entry” which seems the obvious choice.

Hit OK, and a the screen flickers, and …. nothing.  Ok, check the date that the calender entry was for, and …. nothing.

Oh well, write off the last 5 minutes as a total waste of time, try to not curse this confounded software, and add the entry manually, which deep down, you knew you should have done in the first place, because lets face it, nothing works like it should with Notes.

(Someone pointed out this link (via this one), but it only talks about sending calendering information via email.  It doesn’t help my import an ICS file.)

Tags: , ,
Posted in General | 2 Comments »

DIY router upgrade (aka IT department workaround)

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Lifehacker – Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router – DIY.

Funny, I had this draft post hanging around for a while, and then I came across this exact router configuration at work.  Turns out it was easier, faster and cheaper to buy 2 routers, flash the new firmware, and set up a point-to-point wireless connection into the staging area than it was to rely on the company’s IT department to do it.

They wanted to charge thousands of euros for a similar solution.  Thousands.   Seriously, the staging area is in the next room.

The IT department is actually outsourced to another company owned by the same parent company.  They offer shit service at a high price, and using them is mandatory.  I can’t say their name, but I say that it rhymes with this:

Tags: , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

The new workplace: hours

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Oh dear.

It has not been a good week for moral.  Let me summarize:

  • There are flexible hours.  The start time is between 8:00 and 8:30, and the end time is between 5 and 5:30.
    “The aim is to combine the employee’s right to manage their time freely with respect to their responsibility to a full workday.”
  • One hour for lunch, between 1:30 and 3:30.  Feel free to pass out from hunger before then.  The cafeteria will be closed until 1:30.  Vending machines only sell junk food.
  • Employee work time is calculated as the time between swiping-in and swiping-out of your building.
  • Since you will be considered to be working if you are inside the building, you must be in the building between the times stated above.  That is, you must enter the building between 8:00 and 8:30, and must not leave before 5:00.  Since there is no overtime, you should probably therefore leave before 5:30.
  • Any time you do not follow the above rules, an “incident” will be recorded.
  • Working in other building in the campus does not constitute “working” unless you have a “good cause”.
  • You are allowed 30 minutes a day outside your building.  Any longer is considered an “incident”.
  • All “incidents” are logged in “the system”, and employees must attend to each one and provide justification for their absence.

The main driver for this is stated as:

[The new workplace]  represents the social model that [the company] wants for their employees, which enables greater compatibility between work and personal life. …. For [the company], it is important that all the benefits of [the new workplace] have a positive impact on our employees, customers, suppliers,
shareholders and investors.

Or, put another way:

We want you to have a healthy work/life balance.  And even better, we have determined what that balance will be for you, and we are going to make damn sure you get it, whether it works for you or not.

Or, perhaps this:

To make sure that you get balance in your life, we will be tracking and penalizing you if you don’t follow our plan, because we don’t think you can be trusted to make the right decision for yourself in this whole  ”work/life balance” thing.  Actually, we think that because we under-pay you, you would probably slack off and work less.

Doesn’t that sound a bit like “this is going to hurt me more than you”?

Tags: ,
Posted in General | 1 Comment »

More Firewall weirdness

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Ok, not weird, just crap.

This link is blocked: http://www.rotronic.co.uk/content/humidity_feuchte/index.php  The resulting page said it was in the “pornography” category.

Out of frustration, I typed in “Dirty Sex Sluts” into Google and selected the first link.  Can you guess what happened? I wasn’t blocked!  Boom! Full-on porn right there, on my screen, in the middle of the cube-farm!

And yet, I’m told that I can’t have the RDP port opened between internal offices on an intranet because of security concerns.  Right.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »