Next Website Project

This is my next project at work. I’m helping another department on campus redesign, organize, and brainstorm about their new website. Above is the snapshot of the current website. There’s lots of orphan pages in addition to that.

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Customer Service Training

For the last week, I’ve been taking this “Customer Service Training for Technical Support Representatives” online course every night. It wasn’t exactly the most fun thing to do on your weekends and weeknights, but I finally finished today! I got 100′s on all my tests, and am now certified.

We’re having a trainer come in on Thursday to finish off the training. I’ll be reviewing the material again tomorrow night.

Dell replaces displays on nine notebook models

Here are some quotes from Dell’s blog regarding the vertical line problem.

Here’s what we’re doing: for affected systems, Dell is offering to replace any LCD that develops a vertical line within three years of purchase, at no charge for parts and labor. Also, Dell will offer refunds to customers who paid Dell to replace defective LCDs with this issue.

To summarize the key criteria:

• This potential issue applies to Inspiron 9200, 9300 and XPS Gen 2 models only
• Only these three systems shipped from Nov. 2004 to October 2006 are potentially affected

other systems that are potentially affected. All of these shipped between December 2004 and December 2006:

• Inspiron 6000 and 8600
• Latitude D800 and D810
• Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M60 and M70

Sources:
Yahoo News

http://dellverticalline.com/

4.9.2007 – Dell’s blog about Inspiron 9200, 9300 and XPS Gen 2 models

6.19.2007 – Dell’s blog about Inspiron 6000 and 8600
Latitude D800 and D810
Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M60 and M70

Flash Not Working in Firefox

Ever since I upgraded my flash player a few days ago, I was not able to view any flash content in Mozilla Firefox! It worked in Micrsoft Explorer fine though. All I would see in Firefox was this image that said “Adblock.” I googled, and found this. Looks like it’s the Adblock plugin that needed to be upgraded as well. :) So after installing Adblock, the problem is fixed. :)

0x800300fd in Microsoft Program

If you ever get a “0x800300fd” error in a Microsoft program — Outlook, Publisher, Word, Excel, etc. Try this:

Step 1: Open up MSIE
Step 2: Go to Tools -> Internet Options
Step 3: Under Temporary Internet Files, click on “Delete Files…”
Step 4: Close the troubled program. Open again.

Hopefully that should fix the problem.

Fix FAX Machines?

Someone called and asked me if we fix FAX machines.

heh… no, we don’t. Unless it’s connected to the computer, we’re not touching it. ;)

Microsoft Outhouse

A work ticket was submitted saying this:

Problem: e-mail goes down while I’m trying to use it

Microsoft Outhouse dumps me out at least once a day while I’m trying to use e-mail. I can usually get back in almost immediately, but this is very annoying. Please give me back Eudora, or at least fix Outhouse.

MS Outhouse eh? *giggles* You’d think people would at least know what the software is called, let alone figure out how to use it. *shakes head*

Broken Projector

An interesting thing did happen today. The boys all went to the other library to redo the machines there, so it was just the girls over at the office. Someone calls and says the projector wasn’t working in the classroom. I’m pretty clueless on projectors… so I asked my coworker to come up with me and maybe we can figure out something between the two of us. So we got into the class and sure enough, nothing was on the screen, but the projector was making noises. She was feeling around the thing to find the on/off switch… but no luck. Then I asked one of the librarians how they usually turn off the projector. And she kept waving the remote around and said… “like this,” as she constantly pressed the button. From that moment, a thought just popped in my head. I didn’t see a signal or light from the remote to the projector, so I whispered to my coworker, “maybe the batteries in the remote are dead.” She thought it was a good idea, so we replaced the batteries, returned to the room, and I tried pressing the button again. Sure enough, the screen was blue and a moment later, the computer desktop was showing up on the projector screen. Wow. hehe I guess it was simple after all. And we didn’t have to walk around like idiots, not knowing how to fix it. *grins* And I still have no idea how a projector works.

Typical Phone Conversation

A phone conversation at work today:

Staff Member: I can’t find the CD-rom!!
Co-worker: It’s in the CD-Rom Drive.
Staff Member: oh.

*hangs up*

Network is down!

Yesterday, I was helping someone with their computer in this one department. She needed an Admin to login to finish the Netscape 7 install. Suddenly, the network went down for 2 minutes. The moment it went down, I heard all these shouts, and the whole department groaned — funny to see people stop working like that. The the next moment, I heard people yelling at me telling me the network is down. *hides* By the time the person I was helping logged in, the network was back up. Goodness, these days, nothing gets done if there’s no network. It’s scary to think what would happen if the network was down longer than 10 minutes!

My Keyboard is Locked

Lady: How do you unlock a keyboard?

Coworker: What?

Lady: How do you unlock a keyboard? Mine seems to be stuck.

Coworkers:You can’t lock a keyboard…

Lady: Well, apparently mine is. *pounds on the keyboard*

Coworker: *goes and check* Your computer crashed. Just reboot it and it’ll fix it.

I just went, “huh?” when she said her keyboard was locked. I didn’t know it could do that. :)

My Important Files!

Yesterday at work was pretty hectic. Our power died at 4am in the morning, which caused the switch to all of the servers to not work. My co-worker was trying to fix it since 6am that morning. I came in at 8:30am and he asked me to call every department to confirm that the network is back up and they should reboot their machines.

Even with that advice, not everyone listened. We got numerous calls after saying “this program doesn’t work..” or “my computer crash,” etc. Even without me calling them, you would think they know how to reboot their machines before calling our office first.

There was also this one lady who called. She sounded so frustrated and demanding too. Lucky me, I picked up the phone call. She said that her computer kept ‘eating’ her files. And these were very important files. And in my mind, I thought, “then why is it only saved on a floppy?” I just tried to calm her down. She asked us if she could move the computer in front to the where her office is, which is a bit of trouble for us. We’ll have to redo the machine, redo the Operating system, etc. But it sounds like all she needs is a new floppy drive? Or a better solution, a zip drive. Zips last a lot longer than floppys. But then again, they also have their network drive, which is backed up every nite. The soul purpose of the network drive IS to save those IMPORTANT documents. And that is even simpler to use, no disks are necessary. So what’s the lesson we should learn? Back up your files to as many places as you can. :)

What’s my login?

Al picked up the phone. Someone called the other day frustrated and said they couldn’t get into the machine. Sometimes, when one of my co-workers work on the machine and turn it off at the end of the day. And the next morning, when the people turn it back on, the login defaults to ‘administrator.’ So what’s the situation here.

Al walked her through it. Put in this login, and your password. Apparently they don’t remember what the login was. That’s really something you should pay attention to by the way. :) So Al guessed what her login was and told her to use that and type in her password. Still can’t login. So Al’s thinking that the login was wrong… maybe there was an ‘s’ at the end. So he told her to try again.

My other co-worker heard this, so she said, “I’ll just go over and help her. I think I know what the problem is.” A while later, my co-worker comes back saying she spelt her login wrong. For some reason, she kept putting a ‘t’ instead of a ‘v’. Well, if you don’t know how to spell your own department name, I don’t know what to tell you.

Can’t Add A Record!

Well a funny thing happened the other day. I got a phone call at work and someone was panicing that she couldn’t edit a record on her telnet session. Hmm.. what could be wrong. I was going to go over but she went on and on saying she couldn’t email me or enter a trouble ticket. So I thought… maybe she kicked her network cable again. I told her I’d be right over in a minute.

Well, that was my mind set as I walked over. She probably just has a loose network cable. I got there and she showed me her problem. She was trying to type numbers into the record but it wasn’t work. I looked at the numlock key and just wanted to burst into laughter. I just quickly pressed it and asked are you sure you can’t edit the record? And she typed the numbers again and it worked! She just looked at me in amazement and said, “what did you do?!” And I just said… well, your numlock was off.

Then she got really embarassed and said, “well, I just wanted you to come over here so I could say good morning to you.” I wanted to start laughing, but I went on asking if she can surf on the net and check her email. Sure enough, she could. I got the feeling she told me she couldn’t so someone would fix her problem ASAP. You know… everything is an emergency to everyone. Everything is high priority. o.O?