So yesterday at work, I killed my computer. I recovered it this morning. but because recovery could cause loss of data, I backed the box up first yesterday... Everything was still on the hard drive, but I deleted this tiny little partition that was needed to boot.
Last week we got a laptop in from a former sales associate. I don't know if I should laugh or feel insulted. He decided to "wipe" his hard drive before sending the company laptop back. One that he had his username, password, and EBAY account information taped too.
Anyway, I said last week I could recover it. One of the help desk people came over today and said that she was told to give it to me.
30 seconds after booting the thing with a USB Key with Linux (Knoppix) Installed, I was staring at the guy's data. Stupid users...
Seriously though, if you're going to delete your data, at least make it a challenge to get back. Do what I do, at least whipe the partition out. Deleting one boot file, not even worth the time really.
I started recovery on the laptop, but the fans were not running and it overheated. So I've re-did the boot with an external hard drive attached, and well the usb was faster to boot.
Showing posts with label users. Show all posts
Showing posts with label users. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Saturday, November 22, 2008
hmm... time for the weekend review
Like most weeks, I don't remember most of them, but this is my first weekend off in a month. So I burnt it so far, at my computer. Muhahaha.
Here is what I remember that's worth it (most of the week is a blur).
Tuesday, I cooked. 2 tofurkies, with the oil and soy sauce baste. I cooked them on a bed of red potatoes, onions, and carrots. I also made cranberry sauce. yummm...
Wednesday I over ate at the pot luck.
Thursday, I went to Martial Arts. It was good. I liked it. My endurance level appears to be one of the highest ones there. Which is a little sad. I'm basing this off of people moving away from me in free fighting, while sucking wind. I'll be breathing heavy, but they are sucking wind.
Fell pretty bad too. Landed on my elbow pretty hard, buy my knee much harder. It's still bruised. I had a hard time walking Friday. Of course, I had to walk all around the building, which did help it some, even if I did limp most of the time.
Thursday it snowed. I fell on the ice outside, before going to class. Wasn't that bad in that case, just had one leg go out from under me, and was able to turn it into a kneel, before crashing. I tend to do that a lot when I fall on the ice. End up in a one knee kneel. The drive home sucked, once I got near the airport, went to a complete stand still.
Earlier Thursday, the director emailed me about a wireless access point showing near his office. They're pretty paranoid there about that stuff. I really don't care too much myself. To a point. Once a month I walk around with a laptop, looking for wireless access points. I'd much rather have a better tool, that finds the non-broadcast SSIDs too, but it makes them feel good. Anyway, it looks like someone set up a new access point across the freeway and we're getting bleed over. One troublesome thing though. Thursday during the quick initial scan. I found one that really did bother me. It was an ad-hoc peering point called "Free Public Internet". Ad-hoc networks are computers without a router, that can access each other no problem. Lets just put it this way, it is a bad thing to find. Turns out it was on the CFO's laptop. A VERY BAD THING. Basically anyone could sit out in the parking lot, or even across the freeway (with a directional antenna, which can be made with a pringles can), connect to the computer and get files from it.
I get to do a computer security class in a few months. It's for the Executives and the Sales people. Should be fun. I'm going to write the manual from scratch.
Friday, wandered around, then spent the majority of the afternoon at my desk being bored. Could have done some other stuff, but didn't feel like it at the time.
Today, I had fun. I set up some neato computer stuff, GnuPG, and the ability to encrypt my google email. (Encryption is good, it prevents people from reading what they are not meant to be). The way it works, you make a key pair. One is public, one is private. The public one you share. The private one you hide. When they want to send you an email, only you can read, they encrypt it with your public key, and usually sign it with their private key (because you're public key is public, anyone can get it and say they are so and so, but signing it with their own private key means it's from them). As long as you have their public key, you can read the message, after decrypting it with your private key, and can confirm it's from them, by checking they're signature against their public key. It sounds harder than it really is. Which is probably why so few use it. It took me all of 30 minutes to get set up.
I also looked up the details on creating a spice mister. Going to make some capsaicin oil to try with it in a few weeks.
I also got caught up on some tv. Watched about 4 hours of it today. About all I could stand. Read a lot of neat stuff on the web. Instructables and Life Hacker rock.
Only other thing of note, was I got the Ultimate bond, 42 discs. 21 movies (Doctor No through Casino Royal, minus Never Say Never Again). I finally saw Casino. It was decent. I look forward to seeing Quantum now.
Oh and I think I'm going to push and try to sell the idea of encrypted IM clients at work this week to the upper management.
Here is what I remember that's worth it (most of the week is a blur).
Tuesday, I cooked. 2 tofurkies, with the oil and soy sauce baste. I cooked them on a bed of red potatoes, onions, and carrots. I also made cranberry sauce. yummm...
Wednesday I over ate at the pot luck.
Thursday, I went to Martial Arts. It was good. I liked it. My endurance level appears to be one of the highest ones there. Which is a little sad. I'm basing this off of people moving away from me in free fighting, while sucking wind. I'll be breathing heavy, but they are sucking wind.
Fell pretty bad too. Landed on my elbow pretty hard, buy my knee much harder. It's still bruised. I had a hard time walking Friday. Of course, I had to walk all around the building, which did help it some, even if I did limp most of the time.
Thursday it snowed. I fell on the ice outside, before going to class. Wasn't that bad in that case, just had one leg go out from under me, and was able to turn it into a kneel, before crashing. I tend to do that a lot when I fall on the ice. End up in a one knee kneel. The drive home sucked, once I got near the airport, went to a complete stand still.
Earlier Thursday, the director emailed me about a wireless access point showing near his office. They're pretty paranoid there about that stuff. I really don't care too much myself. To a point. Once a month I walk around with a laptop, looking for wireless access points. I'd much rather have a better tool, that finds the non-broadcast SSIDs too, but it makes them feel good. Anyway, it looks like someone set up a new access point across the freeway and we're getting bleed over. One troublesome thing though. Thursday during the quick initial scan. I found one that really did bother me. It was an ad-hoc peering point called "Free Public Internet". Ad-hoc networks are computers without a router, that can access each other no problem. Lets just put it this way, it is a bad thing to find. Turns out it was on the CFO's laptop. A VERY BAD THING. Basically anyone could sit out in the parking lot, or even across the freeway (with a directional antenna, which can be made with a pringles can), connect to the computer and get files from it.
I get to do a computer security class in a few months. It's for the Executives and the Sales people. Should be fun. I'm going to write the manual from scratch.
Friday, wandered around, then spent the majority of the afternoon at my desk being bored. Could have done some other stuff, but didn't feel like it at the time.
Today, I had fun. I set up some neato computer stuff, GnuPG, and the ability to encrypt my google email. (Encryption is good, it prevents people from reading what they are not meant to be). The way it works, you make a key pair. One is public, one is private. The public one you share. The private one you hide. When they want to send you an email, only you can read, they encrypt it with your public key, and usually sign it with their private key (because you're public key is public, anyone can get it and say they are so and so, but signing it with their own private key means it's from them). As long as you have their public key, you can read the message, after decrypting it with your private key, and can confirm it's from them, by checking they're signature against their public key. It sounds harder than it really is. Which is probably why so few use it. It took me all of 30 minutes to get set up.
I also looked up the details on creating a spice mister. Going to make some capsaicin oil to try with it in a few weeks.
I also got caught up on some tv. Watched about 4 hours of it today. About all I could stand. Read a lot of neat stuff on the web. Instructables and Life Hacker rock.
Only other thing of note, was I got the Ultimate bond, 42 discs. 21 movies (Doctor No through Casino Royal, minus Never Say Never Again). I finally saw Casino. It was decent. I look forward to seeing Quantum now.
Oh and I think I'm going to push and try to sell the idea of encrypted IM clients at work this week to the upper management.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Users
So while reading LXer last week, and I came across a blog post about "Blockhead Users" and New Years resolutions. At one point she said:
"A sizable number of humans have devoted their lives to erecting barriers to learning anything new. You can see it when you talk to them- when something as simple as "click this button" produces a glazed expression and drool, you know you've lost them forever. Of course they'll waste hours of your time complaining about how stupid computers are."
She is wrong. Yes she maybe an author (she has at least 2 books published by O'Reilly, that I know of), and can get her point across, but that doesn't mean she's qualified to teach non-technical users new concepts.
I've have done user training. I've even been paid for it. From the beginning creating documentation, to the end, standing in front of a group of users showing the slides and telling them what to do. I've also insulted users behind their back, and openly to their face. Heck I did it in this blog. (Most users can't even use email consistently). However when you are training users, you have to leave your prejudice behind. And it's not just a case of you're prejudice you have to over come. You have to be better than the other IT people that have been condescending to the user, and the user's view that all IT people are condescending pricks (not that we're not).
Technical users are the easiest to teach. They have a grasp on the general concepts already and you can usually move through the training quite quickly. The are also the ones that IT people aren't condescending towards. Because they know the techies have a back ground and don't automatically go into condescending mode.
Non-technical users are a different breed. One thing I've noticed, is that there are 2 types of non-technical users. The ones that are willing to learn, and the ones who think why should I learn if I can get someone to do this for me. The ones whose eyes glass over and drool, surprisingly enough are not the later group. However most IT people, even without realizing, turn on the condescending factor to 11.
A few years ago, I had a chance to really see this in practice. I was working part time at a local college in the research department. Believe it or not, it was a computer based job. The job was to write customized database reports based on user requirements. They had been trying to teach the users how to run those reports for a few years, instead of slowing the department down by running the reports for the users. I offered to re-write the training documentation, and since the director of the department was a professor on the side he did most of the classes.
One of the reports I worked on collected gpa data and classes, for scholarships for students taking history classes. The person that needed to work the report has a PhD in History, and studied a few languages besides her native tongue of English.
So I called her to let her know the report was done and ready for review. She asked us if we could run it off because she didn't know how. I said I would this time, and I'd show her how to for future use. I printed off a copy of the user training manual, and walked across campus to her office.
The first thing she said was, why should I learn to do this, I have other things to do. I replied so did my department. A department of 5 people, 2 full time, 3 part time. If we had to run all 300+ reports in the system for the users, we wouldn't have time to write new reports. We wouldn't have time to do anything but run reports and run around campus to deliver them. Then she went into how important she was. She had a PhD. Spoke multiple languages, and the like. She was tired of condescending technical people who think the users are stupid because they spend their time learning things other than computers.
That brought me up short. I never said she was stupid, I knew who she was from friends and actually had respect for her. I didn't think I was coming off that in a you are wasting my time manor. So the next words out of my mouth were "what languages have you studied?" I don't remember the list now, but one of the languages she said was Spanish. I do know that none of the ones she said were any of the languages I had studied at that point. I said I've studied 4 langs, trying to impress her I was more than just some pc head. Her immediate response was computer languages don't count. Of course I had to laugh at that point, and told her I studied French in high school, Korean, Japanese and Czech on my own, and was going to be taking Spanish the following term at U of M. If I counted the computer languages I'd be up around 15 or so.
We ended up stopping and talking for a bit. I didn't have the time to, but training a user meant I would have the time to do other things later. So I made the time. She went through the documentation quickly said it wasn't condescending like the ones she was used to getting were. I said I had hopped not since I wrote it for educated people in a college environment.
She did apologize for the rudeness at the beginning. One of the part time IT people came over to help her with a computer problem earlier in the term, and she was still miffed at the way the guy treated her. It started off as ok do this, oh you don't know how to do this, then you have to start by going to the bottom of your screen and clicking the start button. Ok you've done that good, next, etc etc etc.
Users eyes glass over and they drool, because they're people and have better things to do than listen to people who assume they have an IQ of 2. If you see the glass over look starting, then maybe you should stop and re-think the way you're coming across to the user. Are you talking like an adult to a child, or are you talking like a learned professional to another one in a different field.
Of course that doesn't mean that there are not users out there that don't want to learn. However their problems go beyond not wanting to learn computers. My mom is a good example. My mom will go as far as taking notes when showing her how to do something. She will do it step by step as you show her, while putting down what buttons and in what order to push. However wait a week, and she'll call to do it again, because she doesn't feel like reading her notes. They're not important enough, and the person she's calling can do it faster. She does it with cooking and other things too.
The point is, if you do want to make users better, treat them like humans. Expect them to know somethings, or have at least the ability to put clues together to move on. I've found that if you do expect them to know something they don't, and your treating them like humans (not nice, but non-condescending) you'll find they learn a lot better. Rick Cook showed this in Wizardry Compiled.
"A sizable number of humans have devoted their lives to erecting barriers to learning anything new. You can see it when you talk to them- when something as simple as "click this button" produces a glazed expression and drool, you know you've lost them forever. Of course they'll waste hours of your time complaining about how stupid computers are."
She is wrong. Yes she maybe an author (she has at least 2 books published by O'Reilly, that I know of), and can get her point across, but that doesn't mean she's qualified to teach non-technical users new concepts.
I've have done user training. I've even been paid for it. From the beginning creating documentation, to the end, standing in front of a group of users showing the slides and telling them what to do. I've also insulted users behind their back, and openly to their face. Heck I did it in this blog. (Most users can't even use email consistently). However when you are training users, you have to leave your prejudice behind. And it's not just a case of you're prejudice you have to over come. You have to be better than the other IT people that have been condescending to the user, and the user's view that all IT people are condescending pricks (not that we're not).
Technical users are the easiest to teach. They have a grasp on the general concepts already and you can usually move through the training quite quickly. The are also the ones that IT people aren't condescending towards. Because they know the techies have a back ground and don't automatically go into condescending mode.
Non-technical users are a different breed. One thing I've noticed, is that there are 2 types of non-technical users. The ones that are willing to learn, and the ones who think why should I learn if I can get someone to do this for me. The ones whose eyes glass over and drool, surprisingly enough are not the later group. However most IT people, even without realizing, turn on the condescending factor to 11.
A few years ago, I had a chance to really see this in practice. I was working part time at a local college in the research department. Believe it or not, it was a computer based job. The job was to write customized database reports based on user requirements. They had been trying to teach the users how to run those reports for a few years, instead of slowing the department down by running the reports for the users. I offered to re-write the training documentation, and since the director of the department was a professor on the side he did most of the classes.
One of the reports I worked on collected gpa data and classes, for scholarships for students taking history classes. The person that needed to work the report has a PhD in History, and studied a few languages besides her native tongue of English.
So I called her to let her know the report was done and ready for review. She asked us if we could run it off because she didn't know how. I said I would this time, and I'd show her how to for future use. I printed off a copy of the user training manual, and walked across campus to her office.
The first thing she said was, why should I learn to do this, I have other things to do. I replied so did my department. A department of 5 people, 2 full time, 3 part time. If we had to run all 300+ reports in the system for the users, we wouldn't have time to write new reports. We wouldn't have time to do anything but run reports and run around campus to deliver them. Then she went into how important she was. She had a PhD. Spoke multiple languages, and the like. She was tired of condescending technical people who think the users are stupid because they spend their time learning things other than computers.
That brought me up short. I never said she was stupid, I knew who she was from friends and actually had respect for her. I didn't think I was coming off that in a you are wasting my time manor. So the next words out of my mouth were "what languages have you studied?" I don't remember the list now, but one of the languages she said was Spanish. I do know that none of the ones she said were any of the languages I had studied at that point. I said I've studied 4 langs, trying to impress her I was more than just some pc head. Her immediate response was computer languages don't count. Of course I had to laugh at that point, and told her I studied French in high school, Korean, Japanese and Czech on my own, and was going to be taking Spanish the following term at U of M. If I counted the computer languages I'd be up around 15 or so.
We ended up stopping and talking for a bit. I didn't have the time to, but training a user meant I would have the time to do other things later. So I made the time. She went through the documentation quickly said it wasn't condescending like the ones she was used to getting were. I said I had hopped not since I wrote it for educated people in a college environment.
She did apologize for the rudeness at the beginning. One of the part time IT people came over to help her with a computer problem earlier in the term, and she was still miffed at the way the guy treated her. It started off as ok do this, oh you don't know how to do this, then you have to start by going to the bottom of your screen and clicking the start button. Ok you've done that good, next, etc etc etc.
Users eyes glass over and they drool, because they're people and have better things to do than listen to people who assume they have an IQ of 2. If you see the glass over look starting, then maybe you should stop and re-think the way you're coming across to the user. Are you talking like an adult to a child, or are you talking like a learned professional to another one in a different field.
Of course that doesn't mean that there are not users out there that don't want to learn. However their problems go beyond not wanting to learn computers. My mom is a good example. My mom will go as far as taking notes when showing her how to do something. She will do it step by step as you show her, while putting down what buttons and in what order to push. However wait a week, and she'll call to do it again, because she doesn't feel like reading her notes. They're not important enough, and the person she's calling can do it faster. She does it with cooking and other things too.
The point is, if you do want to make users better, treat them like humans. Expect them to know somethings, or have at least the ability to put clues together to move on. I've found that if you do expect them to know something they don't, and your treating them like humans (not nice, but non-condescending) you'll find they learn a lot better. Rick Cook showed this in Wizardry Compiled.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
