22 March 2001
ITPs at BS-Us
Help us locate this girl's father
My good friend Dave finally solved an email problem he's been having today. Dave works at a major state university. He recently decided to take one of those work-related sorts of classes that we should all take for professional-development purposes (note those hyphens, my lovely friend Evelynne!) but rarely do. Big State University (or just BS-U for short), in its ultimate wisdom, issued him a student email account. Problem: apparently the pop mailbox for the student email account was the same as the pop mailbox for his work account, so the master mail routers were dropping email in both places (two separate servers, I guess). The student email account quickly filled up, and therefore every time one sent Dave email, a message bounced back "User has reached disk quota, message undeliverable, blar blar blar." Mind you, Dave WAS getting these emails on his work account, but ANYONE who sent him mail got a message that made him look like someone who didn't know how to use email, when all he did was sign up for a friggin' professional development class!
The ITPs, of course, had been no help for.... several months now, I guess, since the academic semester began. After all, it wasn't like someone was stuck on the moon! Persistent man that he is, Dave took time from work today to call the ITP help lines.... Here's an excerpt from Dave earlier: "On my second call of the day to the HelpDesk, the guy said, 'Well, I could help you, but my computer just crashed. Can I call you back in five minutes?' As if that was supposed to instill confidence in me..."
Somehow, Dave prevailed and managed successfully to change his settings so that the lovely "disk quota" message is gone. And he's proven to me that ITPs at universities -- where one would think there would be plenty of hardcore computer science/computer systems folks running around -- are no more impressive than ITPs elsewhere. Of course, I think Rune had pointed that out to me before, but it never hurts to gather more evidence of these things.
* * * *
I really like The Groobees (currently my favorite band, but these things change so frequently that I don't even bother to update the favorites), but I don't think their performance last night was one of their best. The Satellite was damn near empty, making the venue much more tolerable than usual but probably hurting the band in terms of feeding off the crowd. We bailed after the first set because it was a Wednesday night and we are "adults" now (something I've tried to avoid, but, alas, to no avail) and have to do morning things. Blar! Anyway, another bootleg to add to the growing collection.
[Posted @ 09:11 PM CST]
