My place to play around with IT, Harry Potter theory and fanfic, and writing.

Harry Potter Character Combatibility Test created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Luna Lovegood You are Luna Lovegood. You daydream and often seem to be drifting off into your own world. You have very strong opinions that many agree are not logical. You place a lot of faith in these beliefs. Possibly, you see more than what meets the eye. You are very accepting of others. You may have only a few close friends because you refuse to sacrifice your opinions and true self for social graces. Luna Lovegood 88% Severus Snape 81% Remus Lupin 75% Albus Dumbledore 72% Neville Longbottom 63% Harry Potter 59% Hermione Granger 59% Bellatrix Lestrange 53% Draco Malfoy 47% Oliver Wood 47% Sirius Black 47% Percy Weasley 44% Lord Voldemort 34% Ron Weasley 34%

Your results:
You are Spock

Spock 77% Beverly Crusher 75% Will Riker 75% Geordi LaForge 60% Jean-Luc Picard 50% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% Deanna Troi 45% Chekov 40% Uhura 40% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 35% Mr. Scott 30% James T. Kirk (Captain) 25% Data 25% Worf 20% Mr. Sulu 0%

You are skilled in knowledge and logic. You believe that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz...

I found the original meme at mothwing's LiveJournal. It starts out: 
* Name a fandom you know I know and I'll tell you:

However, since I'm only knowledgable on ONE fandom, that would be rather pointless. So I'll just fill in my answers for the Harry Potter fandom and ask for yours. Or you can go on with the meme in its original form:

crocky_wock said that she thought Harry lacked empathy in another community we're both part of, and it got me to thinking.

Computer support is everything from what kind of computer you're given (if any) to someone to fix things when they break to someone to write a custom macro or bit of code for you.

Do NOT sign into your Live Journal account if you want to remain anonymous!

( Look at the poll )

We're seeing a "sea change" in IT for the small business or organization.

It used to be that if you wanted to use technology, you had to do it yourself. Want to share files? You need a fileserver, so you need someone who knows how to run one. If you can't afford someone like that, even on a part-time or consulting basis, you do without. Want email? You need an email server, so you need someone who knows how to run one. And so on.

Then, things got to the stage where it was no longer a question of whether you needed to share files or have email, it was how you were going to do it. A modern business can no more not have email than they can not have a telephone number. And that applies to a lot of other technology besides email.

And lo and behold, there are options now. You don't have to buy the hardware and software and hire the technical expertise, in order to have email. There are all sorts of outsourced options, ranging from free online email services to "renting" email boxes on an Exchange server. And the same holds for most of the other services.

In most cases, for organizations of a certain size, moving from inhouse hardware and software to purchasing what they need as services will save money and more importantly, improve functionality and reliability every time.

But now, what do you do with the people who used to run and maintain the hardware and software?

"Seduce your users." 

David Sampson calls it seducing your users. He's talking about how he introduced new technology to British American Tobacco.

His ideas are different from standard big company "best practices." 

 

Okay, this is totally off the IT topic.


Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

This is wrong, of course. There are no INTPs in any of the HP books.

eWeek recently listed their Worst Data Breaches Ever, 17 security breaches starting in 2005.

Almost half ( 8 of 17) were because people were keeping sensitive data on their laptop or other digital storage devices, or printing it out on paper. Another three were caused from insecure use of the internet. People failed to encrypt sensitive data, or uploaded sensitive data to public sites.

Only one case was due to deliberate employee theft.

And another five cases were caused by people hacking into the organization's back-end system.

So, this obviously means that IT needs to keep tighter control over laptops, USB drives, etc. Right?

What is the purpose of metatags in the context of LiveJournal articles? The usual metatags are mood (linked to an icon), location (linked to a map) and music (the only LiveJournal metatag that appears to be free-form). I'm not used to thinking about what my "mood" is or how I feel. Could quotes serve a similar purpose? I think I'll play around with using Snape quotes from Harry Potter as a metatag -- probably I'll have to put it in the "Music" metatag location. I've uploaded the quotes in jpg format in my Scrapbook. Here they are in text format.

You probably have an application that the people in your company use for sharing and managing correspondence and documents.

1. It automatically stores everything in database format and datestamps the creation and modification date of everything touched by it.
2. Everything stored in this database can be searched by keyword, if people use them, or simply searched, period.
3. Everything in this application is on a server that is backed up regularly - people have to take specific action to move anything from the application to their hard drive, a USB drive, or anywhere that is not backed up.
4. You probably have a web access version of this application so people can access anything stored there from any laptop with a browser and an internet connection.
5. Oh, and did I mention this application tends to play nice with both Mac's and PC's?

You're probably also nagging the people in your company for using this application too much. You encourage them to remove messages and documents they still use to their hard drives, CD's, USB drives, or somewhere else on your network. That isn't structured like a database. That requires special software or even hardware to access from outside of the company, let alone on a non-company laptop. 

You know what I'm talking about: email.