I could have sworn I wrote about this years ago. When I looked for it the other day, however, I couldn’t find it, so here goes. I love the fact that Google Chrome has combined the search and address bars into one cohesive unit. While it does, on occasion, mean that I search when I mean to enter an address, that is preferable to having that piece of monitor real estate split into two.
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State of the Blog 2019
I am, for the fourth year running, writing a retrospective article for the summer. These are meant to be the summer counterpart to my end-of-year roundup series, which means that some information will be duplicated across the two series of posts.
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How to run a PowerShell script
As has been the case so many times before, this week I’m bringing you the direct result of a customer request. The customer in question needed to know how to run a .ps1 script. As you may or may not know, double-clicking the script defaults to editing the script. At any rate, here’s how you do it:
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Educate yourself on phishing today!
Email has long been a vector for more or less targeted attacks such as virus attacks, phishing, and spearphising. In my years of working in IT, I have seen a number of examples of this, including one which in effect took down most of the fileshare in a corporate environment for as much as a week while we were restoring from backup.
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MS Office: Pin items
Many companies, my employer included, uses spreadsheets on a more or less consistent basis in order to track such things as vacation planning and KPI reporting. For me, as an employee, keeping track of these spreadsheets can, from time to time, be a bit annoying. Much to my surprise, at some point in the past few years, Microsoft added a pin item feature to MS Office.
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iMovie: Change project resolution
I’ve been using Adobe Premiere pro for a while now, but am finding that I can’t really defend the cost of Adobe Creative Cloud. While having multicamera support has been very nice, the product quite simply is cost prohibitive for me, especially as it really only offers a single feature I need; the ability to sync clips based on their audio. For my needs, iMovie will suffice.
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Who is the typical OU student?
As you may or may not know, I graduated from the Open University with a B.Sc. last year, and attended a frankly pretty amazing graduation ceremony in March. In a conversation just after that, someone asked me “So, who is the typical OU student?” When I simply answered “Yes”, they were a bit confused, and asked me to expand on that.
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Understanding our metrics
Last week, I defined the three KPIs I believe are what you need to understand how well your support department is operating. Defining them, however, is just part of the job; if you don’t understand what they are telling you, you might as well not bother measuring at all. Let’s look at each in turn:
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Key metrics for support departments
Metrics – often referred to as “Key Performance Indicators” or simply “KPIs” – are a necessity, regardless of your field. If nothing else, it’s nigh impossible to say anything meaningful about performance without them, and improving the performance is turned from something quite achievable. to a Sisyphean task.
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Three dimensions of business
I hold that any successful business venture must operate on three levels; the operational, the tactical, and the strategic. These dimensions must also be kept in mind when making plans. There is nothing revolutionary in the underlying ideas, but I think it is worthwhile to define the terms, to bring about a (more or less) unified understanding of them.
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Hiring for attitude
I have previously written about my frustration with always requiring experience when hiring. Now, I’m not saying that requiring experience doesn’t have its place – it certainly does. What I am saying is that listing it as a requirement should be justified by the needs for what the successful candidate will be expected to deliver, and that employers need to think long and hard about what they must have from their new employee, and what they can take the time to teach.
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