Technical support in 3 stages ( not easy )

There are three stages to the technical support process. Follow these for good service delivery. See if your supplier follows theses critical stages on your next call.

• Knowing.
• Understanding.
• Predicting.

Knowing is about getting a good picture of the situation, gathering the evidence, logs and environment. Knowing is more than just the technical aspects of the situation. Registering the impact of the issue on the customer and consequences of the issue is as vital. That will be the driver for the pace of intervention.

Understanding is built buy pulling the knowledge from the gathered evidence and placing that along side a detailed insight to the environment in which the situation arose. The situation could be a PC failure, Data centre outage or a car that won't start. Unless there is good understanding, technical support is just Googling, "been there done that" and guess work. Lets not pretend a lot of tech support can be done with just a browser, research and good set of documents but moving beyond first line take understanding of product, environment and the interactions that bind them.

Predicting is vital to the technical support process and is more than just guess work. Based on a clear knowledge of the problem, an understanding of what changes can be done to vary the situation, prediction will provide the answer. Sometimes that prediction is based on hard logic and sometimes a combination of intuition and research but you can be sure that the techs that can effectively predict the outcome of their recommendations close more cases first time. Predicting, at it's best, is as near to science as tech support comes. A few experiments may be needed to set the direction but that last interaction along the lines of "This *will* solve your problem" is a thing of beauty. The "will" is emphasized because if you get a "could", "should", "might" the outcome is not certain.

Cheers

Gannett

eBay is a warehouse.

My mate Pete reckons that eBay can be used as a warehouse to store your less used stuff. The idea works on the principle that everything is for sale on eBay so what ever you need you can get. If this is the case why bother storing stuff that you may never need again ? Sell it now and if you should ever need it again just buy it back. Chances are that you will sell more than you ever buy back so the whole idea can be self funding.

The same can be said for storing books, Why bother storing them when you can use Book Moocher to free your house space ?

The cost of storage is the difference between what you get for selling the item and what you have to pay for getting it back. Sometimes that storage fee is money to you when the "value" of the item has gone down.

I can see what he means - Great thinking Pete.

Cheers

Gannett

There is always one...

There is always one...
Who claims too many outrageous expenses,
Grabs all the best bits from the buffet,
Spoils the Aprils fools joke, before others have time to be tricked.

Today that numpty showed his colors, don't you just want to give em a right slapping.

Gannett

Overclocking is the new hot-rodding

Back in the days when you could improve a car using a set of spanners and a trolly jack the craze for Hot rodding was all over the streets. These days the testosterone filled teens ( and other geeky enthusiasts) overclock their PCs instead. There are many similarities, both activities are all about getting the best performance from what starts as commodity equipment; both interests involve a combination of detailed information, home engineering, trial and error tuning, and of course those manly pursuits of bragging and racing.

The purchase of carefully selected bolt-on goodies from RipSpeed, Demon Tweeks has been replaced these days by Corsair and Zalman specialities. "Throwing a rod" has been replaced by a catastrophic meltdowns as the cost of getting it wrong. Unlike racing on the public road to compare performance, Lan parties and folding teams are where system performance are compared and debated.

My first overclock in 1992 was pushing a Mac IIsi from 20Mhz back to the 25Mhz the motherboard was designed for. A hardware hack described here. These days pushing cpu clocks from 2.8Ghz to over 5Ghz ( 5000Mhz) is not routine but possible.

The pattern for both hot rodding cars and overclocking PC follows the same levels, use stock parts, get the best replacement parts, swap out the weaker parts with reengineered parts, buy or build exotic replacement parts. Tweak tune and adjust at each level to get the best performance and discover the weakest link.

The common fascination of tweaking and tuning, pushing a set of carefully assembled kit up to and beyond the meltdown limit joins the hot rodder from previous generations to the PC overclocker of today.

Cheers

Gannett

Addition to the folding farm..

I like to fold and I just installed a gtx275 in an ubuntu normally smp folding box. I also followed this guide to set up the necessary "windows on unix" wine environment.

Things that were different for my install ...
1) The mobo I have has built in Nvidea graphics chips (non-foldable Gforce 7100) which caused the Nvidea graphics drivers to be installed at Ubuntu installation/upgrade time.
2) Also because of 1, I needed to make some adjustments in the bios to put the pci-xpress card as the first graphics head and the onboard as second. This is so I can try out the new card and only have to plug in one monitor.

I would suggest that you test the graphics cards and adjusted system for cooling/stability using fancy screen savers, some games etc. Also using the temp sensors.

The step "wine notepad" does two things. Firstly it does indeed create some directories for the wine environment. Secondly it shows that your wine environment works correctly by starting the building accessory application notepad.

I also saw the permissions message on ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/cudart.dll
easilly fixed with a
chmod +x ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/cudart.dll

Looking forward to doubling my ppd with the gpu client, just hope it doesnt melt the PSU &| mobo.

I won't know it it actually works until someone plugs in the Stanford folding server room back in again (power outage today). Currently waiting for both SMP and GPU units now.

Cheers

Gannett

As a manager should you ensure that a new employee has all the equipment on his desk that he needs to do his job. I.E. phone and pc ?
For ; makes a good first impression. Jump starts productivity.
Against : Gets new employee to traverse and become familier with company internal support systems. & Missleads new emp that he has joined an efficient organisation.

TV evolves - the next moves

It's all change in the world of TV. The move to digital broadcasts has indeed been the catalyst for further changes and mutiple alternative delivery channels ( well over the internet ).

Having been one of the hard done by 2002 vintage Tivo fans in the UK who watched the USA incarnation move onward with features and functionality I have longed for some PVR catch up time. Well it's all happening now.

Having pioneered public free internet delivery of catch up missed TV on the Player service. The BBC is now making this great utility available on multiple platforms. The trailblazing video on demand catch-up service BBC iPlayer service moves out to Playstaion, Wii and soon Freesat HD.

Media centre software is a popular developer flavor, with Mac+FrontRow, Xbox+XBMC, PC + Media Centre as well as multi platform Plex all fighting for sofa based eye balls. Just having a player with codecs just doesn't cut it any more. The brilliance of the iPlayer is to brand the delivery player and not just the content. Where ever iPlayer turns up that's a dime to the BBC.

Tivo comes back to the UK as the set top box for Virgin Media. It is possible for a product to be launched both before and after the market window that Sky+ has saturated ? This may be a play for Virgin to break out of it's cabled getto. Get a great box out there and people will buy it for the service not just the wire it comes down.

The outsiders are Fetch TV service offers more than just iPlayer incorporating true video movies on demand into a set side box and UK Telco giant BT Vision TV on demand offering.

With PCs and Macs with humble USB sticks reaching for the airwaves along with YouTube going premium there is, as always, more TV than hours in the day.

Gannett

Warning the lair of "Stavros Cujo" is here.

This is a bad dog. I was on a bike trip near Athens and crawled up the hill to visit the "best cave in the balkans" at Σπηλια Κουτουκι Spilia Koutouki - Koutouki Cave - Cave Koutouki A cool and dreamy place cut deep into the limestone rocks with impressive features and formations. After the sub-terrainaian break I headed down the near by track for some down hill mountain bike fun. As I approached the junction above I was set on by two dogs who, snarling and barking went for me big time. "Stavros Cujo", above got his teeth on my shorts and ripped them, just grazing my leg, while his mate went for my feet. Luckily the shorts I had on where baggy and not the usual cycling lycra and I was moving at speed outpacing them after a scary 30 meters. Stopping to take the photos and wash the graze, I went on somewhat shaken.

Now I like dogs including Rotties and Dobes but I have never been so shaken up as having these two try and get my ass. Later research revealed that according to PubMed "During the decades 1961-1970, 1971-1980 [Rabies in Greece] cases were reduced to 3009 and 242, respectively, while no more cases in man occurred since 1970. Vaccination campaigns of dogs, besides the low prevalence of rabies among wild animals, resulted in its eradication from the country."

Now that was a bit of a relief.

Gannett