Facebook asks, “What’s on your mind”, at 5:30am this morning?
Insomnia – maybe.
Acid reflux – nope, not this “morning”.
Tinnitus – definitely a yep.
Take your pick.
My pal Rick went to the State Fair Grounds yesterday for “Half Price Books” book sale. All books were $2 or less. He picked up twelve books for $20. Guess I’m going to get my butt over there this morning and see if I can pick up a handful or two.
[heckler in the back: “As if you really need more books!”]Rick told me to take one of those sustainable grocery bags to carry my choices in while shopping, makes sense to me, but I think I’ll probably need two bags. I read somewhere someone asked if they could bring a child’s wagon into the event building (under the Grandstand if I remember correctly). While I still have Lailah’s wagon in the garage I think that is pushing it just a little bit – getting in the way of my fellow book shoppers.
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Well, other than that, I guess I don’t know much.
[well, that’s not very truthful…]Its been a very, very quiet week at . All project/team work efforts are on hold for next several weeks until a “Senior Leadership Team” decision is made regarding moving to a new software platform/application (in “The Cloud”). This is the same exact product/vendor/application decision USPS was making in summer/2014, with the result of my taking my sabbatical that Fall since I was just contracting with USPS and I knew they weren’t about to spend $$ to train outside contractors when they could just train their own people in house on the new software platform.
Fortunately this isn’t the case this time, since I’m not contracting any longer, but am a FTE.
The four person team that supports Remedy/ITSM, and in fact the small department of a dozen people are in limbo at the moment. The entire dept. has been in the process of learning and converting all of its current ITSM reports (more than a hundred of them) over to a new “Smart Reporting” tool for the last 6-9 months – which, said project can now be best described as a huge waste of time/effort. But, I did get to learn a new reporting tool (which, of course, isn’t a transferable skill since it was a Remedy tool/product).
But we’re proceeding as if the decision has already been made, and the team has been spending our “downtime” during the last week or two, reading lots of online documentation, and watching as many U-Tube videos on this new vendor’s product as we can (boy, it’s a gargantuan application, having dozens of modules/sub-applications). This vendor has been doubling their revenue each year for the last several years, increasing their customer base by getting perspective clients to move off of the “older” data center based Remedy/ITSM applications onto their (in “The Cloud”) product (requiring zero datacenter presence).
This vendor’s applications have a user interface that can be customized (by the customer) using JavaScript, which I “learned” while at Saint Thomas, but haven’t used since. However, ’s previous philosophy with Remedy/ITSM was to try as much as possible to keep the application code as much as out of the box as possible. i.e., we haven’t done a “lot” of custom changes to the current application, mostly integration work, moving data into ITSM from other apps, or extracting ITSM data and sending it to other apps. Because of this “out-of-box”, no application customization philosophy for the current app, I don’t see the team doing any “heavy” customization on the new vendor’s application either, at least, in the beginning (first two or three years?).
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Well, it’s daylight here finally. Looks like it’s going to be a gloomy day. Got lots of stuff to do around the house, and/or going to the HPB book sale will keep me busy, or I could just jump back under the covers for an hour or so, just for a short nap, since I woke up WAY TOO EARLY this Saturday morning.
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“Winter. Is. Coming.”
