Host a Windows 7 Launch Party. WTF?!

Today, technologically speaking, is a momentous day. Windows 7 is being launched and will be replacing the much maligned Windows Vista. To celebrate the occasion, Microsoft suggested that individuals host launch parties. It should be needless to say, but Microsoft’s marketing people dropped the ball again.

They posted a series of videos to help teach people how to host a launch party. You can see one of the videos below. The video is six minutes long and if you watch the digital clock in the background, you will see it move back and forth through time. If you do a Google video search using the terms: windows 7 launch, you will find a host of cheesy launch party videos created by/for Microsoft. The videos look like MADtv skits, but they are the real deal.

THE REAL DEAL


The videos are so cheesy that it would seem almost impossible to make fun of it, but someone did. Checkout the clever parody below. . .


Having run Windows 7 (and being a Mac head), I can tell you that my experience was far better than with Windows Vista. It is different, but was far smoother in my experience.

It worked!

Cool. The posting worked and went off without a hitch. Not entirely sold yet, but definitely pleased.

Windows 7

I loaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate onto the Windows partition of my iMac yesterday. The process was fairly simple thanks to the directions that were provided by SimpleHelp.net. I was somewhat lucky and everything appears to have gone off without a hitch.
What I am doing now is experimenting with some of the software that is a available for Windows 7. This posting (if it works properly) will have been scripted and posted through Windows Live Writer. This work is being done, in part, for the preparation of my machine to be demoed at the college’s next Geekapalooza event. I do not mess with the plumbing an OS, so I cannot speak to being extensively knowledgeable about such issues, but I do find that Windows 7 has delivered thus far – accessing my personal network was a cinch (I had troubles in the past using Vista to connect to my home network). I am also a fan of the redesigned taskbar. The new taskbar delivers some Mac OS X dock-like functionality, but delivers some nifty Vista features such as the window preview pane. Overall, it seems much snappier than my Vista-based machine in my office.
Despite being a Mac person for the last 10+ years, I am pleased with this new Microsoft OS thus far (a whopping 2 days – for which some people are smirking and thinking, “Give it time, give it time.”). I do love to get my hands on a new OS and give it a spin. I definitely foresee myself using the Windows 7 OS, which is not to say that I have given up on OS X, especially with 10.6 due in September, but I do see it a great complement to my existing home setup. Cheers, from my not yet abandoned blog.

Of Classes and Calendars, etc....

CLASSES
Well, Hell Week has been booked (October 29th-November 5th) - 8 classes with 250+ students divided amongst them. This is the title that I have given the Health Studies (HST) 210 orientation to APA citation style classes. Not that I dislike teaching in classroom environment, but teaching the same thing time-and-time-again gets a little boring. Thankfully the more confident students try to take me/the citation method to task - this makes for some enjoyable debate/discussion. Over the last couple of years, I moved the presentation from overheads to PowerPoint - which was interesting for 5 minutes. Now it is time to try something new.

If time permits, I hope to employ our new Classroom Performance System (CPS) software for the APA sessions. It is a lightweight student response/feedback system, but hopefully it will make things more interesting for the students and myself.

To compound things this year, my regular history and political science information literacy sessions will overlap at the same time. Thankfully, nothing conflicts, but it will be a hectic week with some classes beginning at 8 a.m., while others begin at 6 p.m. on the same day - it is all over the board this year. It should be interesting. After the manic pace of this week, everything else for the remains of the semester will look extra mundane.

CALENDARS
I have been trying to deliver a more robust display for the libraries' hours. To this end, I have employed Google Calendar to deliver this service. By using Google's Calendar API, I embedded the hours for the Vera Bracken and Brooks Campus libraries in our site. You can preview the Vera Bracken Library's calendar by clicking here, and the Brooks Campus Library's by clicking here. This is not quite the final product, but is the direction that I would like to go in.

I am exploring other options for delivery and hope to employ a locally housed/maintained calendar service, but that is a larger project for another day.

OPAC & COMMUNITY STATIONS' WALLPAPER
I also modified the desktop wallpaper for the OPAC and community access stations. The wallpapers are variations on the preexisting generic student version that I created. The colours and text have been modified to display their differentiation from one another. You can view samples of each below (click on each thumbnail for a larger image):

Generic Student Wallpaper:










OPAC/Research Station Wallpaper:










Community Access Station Wallpaper:

Assorted Computer Woes

As some of you are all too well aware of, we have been dealing with some minor computer related annoyances of late. The issues that I have collected and been given answers for are as follows:

OUTLOOK ACCOUNTS. *ONGOING*
Some of you have been getting a security warning from your Outlook e-mail accounts (the non-Web version). The issue regards the issuing of a security certificate. The certificate is for the webmail.mhc.ab.ca address, but the actual server name is accio.mhc.ab.ca. The warning is the consequence of the security certificate and the server having two different names. Computer Services (CS) is working on a solution, so do not be alarmed.

REFERENCE E-MAIL ACCOUNT. *RESOLVED*
The Outlook account at the Information Desk will not be moved to the Exchange server or updated to Outlook 2007. Reference e-mail will have to be accessed via Outlook Web Access (OWA; https://webmail.mhc.ab.ca/owa). At this time, however, the account cannot be accessed via OWA. A similar situation occurred for the Audiovisual and Interlibrary Loans accounts, but has been resolved. CS is looking into this issue.

RELAIS FOR INTERLIBRARY LOANS. *ONGOING*
The ILL department has been experiencing an issue with accessing their Relais ILL applications via the network folder. Every time they try to access the application, they are prompted with a security warning about an unknown publisher. The application can be accessed after acknowledging the warning prompt. It will, unfortunately, continue to annoy - it is a Windows XP issue, and CS cannot resolve this matter.

I think these are the major issues to date. Anne has made me aware of a problem with our shared catalogue with the U of L. I will be communicating the anomaly to them today. *RESOLVED*

As with most computer related annoyances, these are grin and bare it situations. Oddly enough, I am using Windows 200o and its related Office package (both of which are much older than anything that the rest of you are using) without any issue. Sucks to be the rest of you using Windows XP.

ID Computer & Wireless Woes

STAFF ID MACHINE

We are having some issues with our designated staff photo ID machine. It appears that the image/profile has become corrupted. The consequence is that previous system settings have been lost and cannot be reconfigured to our original specifications. Computer Services did inspect the machine and managed to restore our POISE connections, but little else. They will continue to explore the issue.

Here is what you CAN do:

• issue staff ID cards
• view student information in POISE
• shut down and log out via Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Here is what you CANNOT do:

• issue student ID cards (of any sort - standard and intern)
• shut down and log out via START menu
• retain changes to settings that you made

Start-up Issues:

• warning about corrupt profile
• camera tries to reinstall itself (not required)
• unnecessary icons on desktop (cluttered)
• clutter in PhotoID Production module - all windows (including card previews) are open

While at the station, I was sifting through the drawers and discovered a bundle of "Dec 2007" stickers. We are getting some students in for the Fall Semester and they can be issued these stickers now.

WIRELESS NETWORK

The entire wireless network is down across campus. The cause is still being determined. This is not uncommon considering the campus wide power outage over the previous weekend, and the unexpected power outage that we faced from last night's storm. Computer Services continues to investigate, but no time has been given for completion.

General Update - Bowker's Book Analysis System & Computer Systems

We made some progress in the Bowker's Book Analysis System. It has been at the low end of my priority list, but the system seems to be working. Thanks to their technical support staff for locating the error of my ways - I did not manually enter the .csv extension to the files that I was naming. At any rate, the Medicine Hat Campus's AV, Circulating, Reference, and Complete LC [Medicine Hat and Brooks Campuses] collections holdings have been uploaded and processed. They are ready to be sifted through by the librarians.

I am not a huge of fan of Excel 2007, but it did come in handy when creating a CSV file for Bowker's. You really have to love it when it goes from having 65,536 rows of information that can be addressed to 1,048,576 rows. This will make next year's inventory a breeze.

Most of the issues involving the Millennium LIS have been resolved. There are a few minor issues still, but they will be cleaned up in short order. We should see little impact on library operations.

Speaking of "impact" - staff will be preparing to "pull the plug" on computer systems in the library this afternoon. We will have to unplug all electronic machinery in preparation for the annual power outage that we were initially led to believe was last weekend. It would suck to return Monday morning and discover our computers fried from a power surge; it is good thing that we are so conscientious.

First IT Professional

Information technology (IT) people sometimes get a bad rap about being discourteous, but there are cases when they are very patient with some of us. View the following video and see how the IT professional first handled a trouble call: [NOTE: Press the play button, otherwise you will be redirected to the clip's YouTube page.]



Thanks to Reni for bring this video to my attention.

Goodbye LibraryBurner Folder

For the last 3 years-or-so the LibraryBurner folder that sits on the desktop of the Vera Bracken Library's patron computers will soon become defunct. There are two principle reasons for this: (a) the Phoenix server that it sits on is dying and a replacement is not expected in the immediate future, and (b) students will have personal storage space on the network that can be accessed via personal computer logins - this negates the need for the temporary storage that LibraryBurner offers.

With personal logins, the need for the generic logins that are currently being used by students and community members is also at an end. This means that the logins that are currently used (i.e., dropin_XX, libinet_XX, and reference_XX) will be gone. Library management is coordinating with Computer Services to determine how community patrons will be served under the new scheme.

Other network storage folders that are used by staff will be unaffected. So the Relais application that is housed on a network folder will be untouched. The latter is the biggest relief for myself - I was not looking forward to having to reinstall Relais and I am sure the ILL staff was not keen on retesting the configuration.