Incompetant IT Staff



  •  I'm currently attending a local community college (that was recently dubbed a state college, but whatever). For a while now, I've suspected that the IT staff responsible for maintaining the already horrid website was absolutely incompetant. After a flurry of IIS placeholder pages being the only content on the site, they rolled out a new version and my suspicions were confirmed. Take a look using Firefox, then try IE and any other browser you have around to see the totally minor things that simply don't work correctly in Firefox (like a simple menu).I haven't actually tried it in IE myself, but a friend tells me the top menu doesn't work correctly in IE, either! Oddly enough, it seems to work fine in Safari. A choice quote from the same friend: "Microsoft technology, if written poorly, works better in Apple environments then it does in its native environment."

    <font size="3"></font>

    Viewing source in various pages next links to local files, random garbage, and overall disgusting... everything. My favorite part is the entire staff's lack of understanding of the GIF image format. Watch the top banner on the main page to see what I mean.



  • I'm sorry, I lost my lunch due to all the terrible animated GIFs, so I didn't get very far.



  •  Incompetant: They will not compete.



  • @dhromed said:

     Incompetant: They will not compete.

    Yes.



  • Site seems to be SharePoint 2007.

    Ugh...



  • At first I thought the text on the right was "FAIL registration now open"



  • @sli said:

    "Microsoft technology, if written poorly, works better in Apple environments then it does in its native environment."
    The grandma chequer seams too have bean written buy Microsoft two.



  • Am I the only one who finds irony in the OP's spelling of incompetent?



  • @jpaull said:

    Am I the only one who finds irony in the OP's spelling of incompetent.
    Since two other people already mentioned it, I'd say you're not alone. Personally, I liked the use of "then" in place of "than" in the quote. Muphry's Law bites again. It probably bit me somewhere in this comment too (I hate being bitten in the comments). Feel free to search for my mistake. Don't forget to ridicule me for it.



  • <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft SharePoint" />
    <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
    <mso:CustomDocumentProperties>
    <mso:PublishingContactPicture msdt:dt="string">, </mso:PublishingContactPicture></mso:CustomDocumentProperties></xml><![endif]-->
    

    Well, there's your problem.



  • @jpaull said:

    Am I the only one who finds irony in the OP's spelling of incompetent?

     

     

    Here is a link for kicks:

    http://www.romanceclass.com/miscr/LoveDtl/61459



  • @Helix said:

    Here is a link for kicks:

    http://www.romanceclass.com/miscr/LoveDtl/61459

     

    o.O  

    Is that supposed to be some kind of inside joke or an advertisement for your site?  Maybe I'm just stupid.



  • @amischiefr said:

    @Helix said:

    Here is a link for kicks:

    http://www.romanceclass.com/miscr/LoveDtl/61459

     

    o.O  

    Is that supposed to be some kind of inside joke or an advertisement for your site?  Maybe I'm just stupid.

    We're in the same boat here.  And if it's stupidity on our part, this boat is doomed.


  • Incompetent IT Staff

    I would think one would expect this sort of thing at a local community college.  Most of the competent academics prefer to work at larger institutions, such that they can reach more students.  As such, community colleges tend to have more of those who can't teaching than universities.

    (Note: I've spent a fair amount of time on community college campuses - before around 1996 or so, they were basically the only places that offered free Internet access.  Also, while their teaching staff may not be the best, they're a lot better than nothing, and the courses for hardware platforms one doesn't have at home generally also give access to said hardware platforms.  Finally, a disproportionate amount of my industry certifications were taken at test centers on community college grounds.  I probably have spent close to half as much time on community college grounds as I have on university grounds.  I have thus far met *one* highly skilled, competent technical staff member who worked at a community college. He wanted to be an instructor, but they only let him do that part time, because they needed someone to run the machines.  I've met dozens of competent university staffers and teachers.  Of course, this is not statistically significant data, but it is suggestive.)

    At my university, one day I went to report a problem with the quota system.  My account was listed as being over quota, despite the fact that I'd basically emptied it.  'du -sk ~' showed I was using 48k, 'quota' claimed that I was using 2656k (as I had been during a recent server software upgrade).

    I went to report it, and was kind of surprised to find myself bumped up the reporting chain.  Note that this was in the early '90s, and most trouble tickets were resolved by the first person to touch them.  Eventually, I was sent to talk to one of the sysadmins.  Said sysadmin initially couldn't understand the problem, and declared I needed to remove files.  I tried explaining how 'du' reported I wasn't using that much space, and he didn't know what 'du' did.  So I suggested that he run 'ls -laR' on my home directory, as there were few enough files there that I felt he'd be able to see even with that overly verbose output, I wasn't using over 2M.  He refused, on the grounds he wasn't familiar with those ls options.  After it became clear I wasn't leaving until my problem was solved or he punted to someone who would'a reamed him for being incompetent, he grudgingly looked up 'man du', to find that I wasn't telling him to use it as some clever ruse to have him crash the system.

    After running du, and seeing the output, he went back to saying, "but quota says you're over your space usage."  I indicated that I *had* checked to make sure that most of the files I'd removed had a link count of one and were not in use before I removed them.  Having not convinced him, I suggested that he try to run 'find /homeb -user tgape -print' to verify that all of my files were in my home directory.  Again, he wasn't familiar with the options.  Worse, he wasn't actually familiar that find *had* options; he was only familiar with using its "fast find" version (basically the same as locate, except this was written before locate, and it merged the functionality into find, rather than having a separate, longer name.)  Again, he waited until it was clear I wasn't going to leave without the problem solved or handed off, and then he bumped my quota to 2656k "just until this problem's solved."  Of course, my quota wasn't ever reset, making it pretty easy for me to remember.

    The problem was that the daemon which was supposed to monitor disk usage wasn't running - it needed a minor tweak due to the upgrade.  This problem wasn't even assessed until about three weeks later, when I encountered the #2 sysadmin and asked him about how the fix was coming on the quota system.  It was the first he'd heard about it, despite the fact there were over a dozen people who had reported it.  Some of them had gotten quota bumps to whatever space they had been using at the time of the server software upgrade; a few had not been so persistent, and so had learned to work out of /tmp space.  (Note: on these systems, /tmp space was cleaned periodically of files over a day old, and the system logout script ran a 'find /tmp -user $USERNAME -exec rm -rf {} \;'.  The latter could be circumvented with using 'kill -9 0' to log out, but that was something they needed to get into the habit of doing.)



  • @bstorer said:

    @amischiefr said:

    @Helix said:

    Here is a link for kicks:

    http://www.romanceclass.com/miscr/LoveDtl/61459

     

    o.O  

    Is that supposed to be some kind of inside joke or an advertisement for your site?  Maybe I'm just stupid.

    We're in the same boat here.  And if it's stupidity on our part, this boat is doomed.
    On the ship too, but I did notice this:
    <I>this site is for amusement only - professional advice is not being rendered</I>
    Still, I don't get it and I'm not planning on wasting useful brain cycles on this.


  • @tgape said:

    I would think one would expect this sort of thing at a local community college.  Most of the competent academics prefer to work at larger institutions, such that they can reach more students get paid something halfway decent.

     

    FTFY.




  •  oh god so much blinking...gives me a headake looking at it. Whoever designed that page should be shot!



  • @jpaull said:

    Am I the only one who finds irony in the OP's spelling of incompetent.

    @TarquinWJ said:

    Since two other people already mentioned it, I'd say you're not alone. Personally, I liked the use of "then" in place of "than" in the quote. Muphry's Law bites again. It probably bit me somewhere in this comment too (I hate being bitten in the comments). Feel free to search for my mistake. Don't forget to ridicule me for it.

    LOL....Yeah I love it when a post with misspellings and grammar errors tells us how stupid other people are



  • @ogilmor said:

    @jpaull said:
    Am I the only one who finds irony in the OP's spelling of incompetent.

    @TarquinWJ said:

    Since two other people already mentioned it, I'd say you're not alone. Personally, I liked the use of "then" in place of "than" in the quote. Muphry's Law bites again. It probably bit me somewhere in this comment too (I hate being bitten in the comments). Feel free to search for my mistake. Don't forget to ridicule me for it.

    LOL....Yeah I love it when a post with misspellings and grammar errors tells us how stupid other people are

    Wait, you've been here since 2006 and only have 55 posts and haven't caught on that Muphry's Law is becoming a TDWTF meme? Ok, no it isn't, but still. ALSO, I didn't find anything wrong aside from that in Tarq's comment, so ... try again.


  •  Isn't ogilmor simply agreeing with what the quoted users were saying? My sarcasm detector didn't fire.



  • Perhaps my sarcasm detector is wired a little too tightly this week? I did decide to work from home today so as to avoid many of those at the office, so the fault could very well be here.



  • I just figured out at least one reason the site doesn't render right in Firefox. It chokes on the following in psc_style.css:

    .psctitle
    (
    	background-repeat:no-repeat;
    	background-position:left top;
    	display:block;
    	padding:175px 5px 0px 115px;
    	}

    If you don't see it... look more carefully at that opening curly brace. Because it isn't one.



  •  @tgape said:



    I would think one would expect this sort of thing at a local community college.  Most of the competent academics prefer to work at larger institutions, such that they can reach more students.  As such, community colleges tend to have more of those who can't teaching than universities.



     

    Actually I'm going to a community college right now and the Instructors seem to be

    1 working full time and teaching on the side becuase they want to keep up with new things in their feild and/or like students

    2 people who just finished thier master's degree

    3 Instructors from the nearby university.

    So, speaking in broad terms, either they are exactly the same people, or they have a unique mix of enthusiasm and/or real world experiencethat can be missing in a university.   Maybe I'm just lucky, but that has been my experiance.



  • @Chame1eon said:

     @tgape said:



    I would think one would expect this sort of thing at a local community college.  Most of the competent academics prefer to work at larger institutions, such that they can reach more students.  As such, community colleges tend to have more of those who can't teaching than universities.



     

    Actually I'm going to a community college right now and the Instructors seem to be

    1 working full time and teaching on the side becuase they want to keep up with new things in their feild and/or like students

    2 people who just finished thier master's degree

    3 Instructors from the nearby university.

    So, speaking in broad terms, either they are exactly the same people, or they have a unique mix of enthusiasm and/or real world experiencethat can be missing in a university.   Maybe I'm just lucky, but that has been my experiance.

     

    I hate that whole arguement of: "they didn't give me any real world experience, they suck."  If they were teaching you real world experience it would be a trade school, not a college.



  • @drachenstern said:

    @ogilmor said:

    @jpaull said:
    Am I the only one who finds irony in the OP's spelling of incompetent.
    @TarquinWJ said:
    Since two other people already mentioned it, I'd say you're not alone. Personally, I liked the use of "then" in place of "than" in the quote. Muphry's Law bites again. It probably bit me somewhere in this comment too (I hate being bitten in the comments). Feel free to search for my mistake. Don't forget to ridicule me for it.

    LOL....Yeah I love it when a post with misspellings and grammar errors tells us how stupid other people are

    Wait, you've been here since 2006 and only have 55 posts and haven't caught on that Muphry's Law is becoming a TDWTF meme? Ok, no it isn't, but still. ALSO, I didn't find anything wrong aside from that in Tarq's comment, so ... try again.

    Ummmmm....my post was in support of tarq.  I alluded to the OP's spelling errors, not tarq's.  and yes I know what Murphy's law is.  and no I don't post here that much... sosumi.



  •  Hey, it could be worse. The W3C-Validator found only 128 Errors and 49 warnings. That's peanuts for HTML generated by some M$-Tool...

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.polk.edu&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0#result


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