Not really too terribly much to report, other than that I’m a few hours into the first overnight of the semester. It’s not really too exciting, other than the fact that there were a few calls at the very beginning. By about 1:30 a.m. though, the lab completely emptied out except for myself, and one person who was a regular last year. For now, I’m just listening to Pandora at a low volume, and typing on the blog. I didn’t think it would be this slow, or else I would’ve brought the copy of The Simpsons Movie that I recently bought. The other big news is that sweeps are over and that this week, we’re starting our normal schedules for the semester. My schedule is pretty great, just four classes, which I think works out to a “full” course load. I say “full” in quotes because for me, full is actually much closer to 18-20 units, and the university defines a full course load as 12 units. Once again, I’ve got all Tuesday/Thursday classes, so I’ve got Monday available for photography, sleeping, and I have a pretty full work-day on Wednesday. Friday/Saturday are, of course, available as time for Megan. Other shenanigans for the overnight have included some updating of my Oracle Calendar. The reason I must do this is because I thought it would be a cool idea to create my calendar in Microsoft Outlook, then when I realized I needed to port it over to O-Cal, I thought it would be cool just to export the V-Cal file. Although, what I didn’t bargain on was the fact that Oracle Calendar has very terrible handling of import/export files. So it imported my nice set of auto-repeating events as individual events, all of which had the label “busy.” Sweet. At any rate… I suppose I should eventually lock the doors. It did not get as busy as I thought it would.
Mel and I are at the RA Resource Fair, waiting to tell the RAs how wonderful we are at the helpdesk.
Our little table sign was done the wrong way, so she has gone back to the office to print new signs.
Before we present though, we are being fed lunch at the Hot Spot. How exciting. Also note that the university now officially refers to The. Du as “The Dube.”
At lunch, we saw an amazing sign about utensils.
The actual fair went well, the RAs were very attentive during our spiel, and had a lot of good questions. At the end of the fair, Mel and I brough
t a bunch of baloons to the office, thus bringing much cheer and merriment for all.
You may or may not remember my recent discussion about my priorities in a knowledge management system. Yesterday, I discussed them with some of my supervisors, and they agree that ultimately, we would like to end up with a system for knowledge management similar to what I described.
Unfortunately, right now just isn’t the time to implement that system, and for now, our giant Word doc will have to do. Although, that doesn’t mean I am not going to work toward bettering what we’ve got.
Really, what I mean by that is the train manual is so terrifying and ugly, that I’m re-doing the whole thing from scratch. Because the document is meant for printing, having everything in outline form is both a blessing, and an absolute mess.
What I’ve done so far is added headers and a table of contents, a nice title page, and I’m working on unifying the formatting. After that, my task is making sure everything from the existing training documents, as well as un-gathered information from the ACHD Wiki and the old KB get moved into this new document.
Even though it’s not where I ultimately want to be with our documentation, the trick to making this generation of our documentation work will be to get excited about it, and most importantly, to just start working on it, using it, and improving it.
One of the things I have always been interested in is the management of knowledge. Things like knowledge bases. (Really, I like any sort of database, but a KB just happens to be a really cool and useful implementation of a database.) Naturally, when I became student manager at the helpdesk and got the opportunity to help affect how our organization stores and refers to information internally, I was pretty excited.
And then, I went on vacation and forgot about the project.
Although, I’m ready to get back to work, and one of the things I want to do pretty quickly is figure out what I’d personally like to see for the future of our internal knowledge base system.
Our requirements, as I see them, are basically as follows:
- Anyone in our office needs to be able to edit or add articles.
- Retrieval of this information needs to be very quick.
- The system needs to be searchable, preferably by full-text.
- We would like to easily be able to print a copy of the entire manual.
- We need to keep this information synchronized between thirty or so people.
- Some sort of categories or tagging by keywords would be great to help filter search results.
Unfortunately, a few of those requirements seem to be very contrary to one-another. I don’t think it will be possible to really create a system that everyone can edit, that will be easy to keep updated printed copies of. I also don’t think it’ll be easy to have a printable document that will be quick to access on the computer.
Now that I’m back in Flag, I am going to be spending the next few weeks researching and implementing a new solution for knowledge management at the helpdesk.
One of the “sad” events this summer is that I’ve got to head out and go back to Kingman tomorrow. In all reality, I’m pretty excited about this, but it’ll be the longest time I’ve been away from the helpdesk since I started here in August last year. So now, I’m working “just a few more hours” to help fatten the last paycheck a little bit more before I get back in mid-July.
Tonight’s project is to gather all the stuff I want to take with me to leave at dad’s house, and anything I think I’ll need for my project at the high school, and for my trip to Michigan. So far I know I’m bringing the Lenovo R61i and the D300 stuff, along with the MyWD hard disc, which I use for imaging and multimedia. I’ll probably also toss the color calibrator and the rechargeable batteries slash recharger(s) in the photo-backpack too.
Just for good measure, I think I’ll bring the A21m, for some NT4 action, and maybe the PowerBook 520s, so I can swap in the good hinges on the 520c, and get some of my own software installed on it.
Anyway… Just a few more hours of work before I leave the helpdesk until July.