Tenth salon: Interesting places

[jenett]

Welcome to our tenth discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend to come along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) You can find previous ones in my salon tag. Please take a quick look at the reminders at the bottom of this post, too.

Since I am about to go on vacation, you are about to get two weeks of vacation related questions out of me. The first, today, is "Talk about somewhere awesome you've been" (which could be the place you live, or somewhere you've visited, or hey, because we're flexible about reality around here, a fictional world that you willingly get lost in over and over again.) Why is it awesome, what makes it fascinating to you, and what would you tell other people to pay attention to?

(A brief note that I am busily making computers behave like good little computers today, and then have that 'I should do laundry so I can pack' thing tonight, so I may be slower to pick up on threads than usual, but I'll be in and out.)

Quick reminders

- jjhunter did a great guide to following conversations here on Dreamwidth. Also a roundup of regular Dreamwidth events.
- If you want to post anonymously, please pick a name (any name you like) that we can call you - it makes it more conversational and helps if we have more than one anon post.
- Base rule remains "Leave the conversation better than you found it, or at least not worse". If you're nervous about that, I'd rather you say something and we maybe sort out confusion later than have you not say something. (I've heard from a few people who worry they're going to say something that's going to be taken weirdly. If it helps, I am usually around and if there's a thing you'd like to get out in the conversation, but you're not sure how, feel free to PM or email or IM me, and I'll nudge the conversation that direction.)
- The FAQ still has useful stuff, and I added some thoughts about getting conversations going a few weeks ago.
- Comments tend to trickle in over the course of a day or two, with a few nearly a week later: you might enjoy checking back later if you're not tracking the conversation.

Comments

Awesome explanations

[jenett]

Entirely on a different topic, but hey! We can do that here. I am spending today replacing our extremely elderly downstairs computers with somewhat less elderly computers. (Which means that all of our machines are now running Office 2007 rather than 2003. Yes, I know it's 2013. This is what happens when you are at a public university with flat budgets for the past several years.)

Anyway, we have patrons, who, like library patrons in many places, are entirely incapable of reading the sign that says "We're working on these machines today: please use the upstairs lab" and who walked right by and started trying to use the machines that are not yet set up.

So, my intrepid co-workers found our Caution tape, have put it up around the downstairs carrels, and we have mutually decided that our story is that one of the computers bit someone and they all have to be rabies tested.

Re: Awesome explanations

[witchchild]

No chance of getting open access software running on it?

Re: Awesome explanations

[jenett]

No - there's a huge amount of resistance to us trying Open Office or anything like that. (My understanding is that they had it on machines a while before I started and there was Endless Misery about it.)

We're going to hit issues next year when they sunset XP entirely, but we have a lot of patrons who get exceedingly upset about anything other than Windows Like They're Used To.

We're hampered by the fact that while I maintain the library computers, we're limited in what we can do by what campus ITS does - so while I might like the idea of shifting to a Linux distribution (it'd take a lot of learning for me, but, y'know, I can learn stuff), there'd be no external support for it at all, and that's problematic.

Re: Awesome explanations

[witchchild]

*sighs* isn't our profession grand?

Re: Awesome explanations

[jenett]

Well, I can't exactly blame people for not wanting to have solutions for tech issues that rely on having a me. (I mean, I like that I'm needed, but it's a problematic long-term solution.)

Just, it is limiting in what we could do.

Re: Awesome explanations

[silveradept]

Which is too bad. Although, a lot of the major distributions have become almost plug and play in managing things, and they're very good at not going kerflooey. Still,I can understand having a university that does not want to drink the cost into learning how to troubleshoot Linux systems if they don't have to.