Well as some of you may know I was working at DET (Department of Education and Training) IT area, and most of it was very interesting.
The first two days were lame:
Day1: Write out the features of Microsoft Office and Burn a CD.
Hey guys, I’m just about to get my CCNA I am more qualified than you! ;) :p
Day2: Sit in the help desk and listen to calls coming in about problems that the schools maybe having.
Hey guys, its school holidays no one is around.
*goes out for a smoke* :p
Day3: Well this was better. Sat in "Computer Support" and worked out how to change the hardware abstraction layer (aka hal) in windows. This is the thing that handles the hardware. It’s like a layer that sits between the software and the hardware, some Microsoft thing. It’s meant to work on any platform too (but that is never going to happen).
Day4: Went to their content management people. Talked at lot about XML and how it is good for interoperability. For example a moderator between two different databases that need to talk to each other.
Later that day I went to networking. Got to play around with some funky Cisco wireless stuff and talk about VPNs.
Day5: Went to the "NT SERVER TEAM". Listened to how they and the Novell team always fight about operating systems, funny stuff. Also talked about what my options are after leaving school.
Anyway it was very interesting. 40,000 email accounts about 40million emails a month. IT is a very specialized area. For example how a server gets setup:
1) Operations team install server into the rack and provide power
2) Networking team sets up routing and gives it an IP address
3) NT server team setup windows
4) Content management people do website
So if you worked in the NT server team you have NOTHING to do with the network. Need an ip address? Ring networking. So in a big company like that you really only do one thing. I was always under the impression that you’d do a range of things. Nope.
Yeah.
Copyright © Michael Dale 2004.
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Very cool stuff. You know what's even cooler? This is the first news item you've posted that I actually discovered using my ticker! How cool is that?! Hehe, hey, that's powered by XML as well! ;)
1: Comment by J. - Sun, 18 Jul 2004 21:22:04 EST
hehe nice stuff. I got an email telling me that someone replied ;)
/off topic
Good to see you have a favicon on your site now :)
2: Comment by dale - Sun, 18 Jul 2004 21:24:06 EST
Nice to know someone had fun-ish. The place I was at sucked so much I even got sick (actually sick not fake-sick). So lame. I did nothing and read 2 books. Most of the ppl didnt even know I was going to be there until the day they had me. Nobody had anything for me to do other than 'browse the 'net' which i couldnt do anyway without a user/pass for their proxy. Thanks for nothing University of Sydney.
3: Comment by ucosty - Mon, 19 Jul 2004 03:17:39 EST
Hey are you sure your numbers are right? 40,000 accounts at 40,000,000 emails a month is 1,000 messages per account… that's a LOT, especially considering so many teachers DON'T use email that much. Do those numbers include intra-school communication (internal), or is it just stuff that goes outside of that school to the outside world? Even spam I wouldn't have thought would push the number that high! The official numbers on the percentage of spam of overall email traffic at the minute is about 30-40%, isn't it? That's still leaving 600-700 messages per teacher per month! That's kinda big…
4: Comment by Josh - Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:51:01 EST
Yeah that is about right. It's large, although it includes internal mail. The more interesting thing is that they get more virus' in emails than spam. Strange huh!
5: Comment by dale - Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:53:57 EST
That's probably because they're a bloody Outlook shop, I bet!!!! ALL THESE YEARS!!!!!
*cough*
It's far more satisfying NOT to say "I told you so" and watch people squirm as they anticipate it being said…
6: Comment by J. - Mon, 19 Jul 2004 20:06:49 EST
Sounds like you had a blast Dale. Nice!
7: Comment by S. - Mon, 19 Jul 2004 21:51:29 EST
urls become clickable
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[quote]place text in a quote[/quote]