top o' the mornin'®

[earendel]

Things have been hopping in our office - between trying to gather data about our ability to "absorb" (i. e., spend) money from the stimulus plan and working on disaster relief-related matters (again, mostly data calls about capacity) I've been rather busy. That's a good thing - I'd much rather have lots to do than not much. All of the activity has pointed out another flaw in the outsourcing of our IT support, however. On Monday someone from the Sacramento district came to help as part of the emergency mobilization and needed to access our contracting database in order to work. In the old days, this took about half an hour at most - the supervisor would make a call, I'd make a call, and the user would be added. Now, however, the "most efficient organization" requires a formal request, which has to be acted on in a series of steps - a "serial" rather than "parallel" approach. It took almost two days to get the employee added.

And on the home front my computer decided to start acting stupid - for some reason it wouldn't recognize the video card that is installed - or rather I should say it tried to recognize it twice. The second time the system reported an error and defaulted back to a generic VGA controller, which made it impossible to do much - most games won't play and even trying to surf the Web results in slow, jerky screen scrolling. This started Tuesday, so I spent all that evening trying to diagnose and fix the problem, with no results. So I bit the bullet and took it to my local Buy More and let the Nerd Herd take a look. I stood for at least an hour while the tech went through almost the exact same things that I had done (which made me feel good about my skills) with the same result. So he installed a Nerd Herd diagnostic program and ran it, finding some "issues" that couldn't be resolved without some serious effort. So my PC is now in the hands of the Nerd Herd. I just hope the one who works on it is like Chuck. I'd even settle for Morgan, but definitely not Lester.