Crazy how much things change in just 10 days or so. Northwestern closed to
campus to everyone but essential personnel, and even those people have to get
approval to come to campus for specific tasks.
Thank goodness we’re a big research institution with gobs of bandwidth. We
were also in the process of shutting down our old VPN and moving everyone to
another one, so we’ve delayed shutting down the old just to ensure that the
support folks in all the schools and departments don’t have to deal with
training their users. Plus the extra insurance is handy.
The central IT department last year started a “Flexible Fridays” program where
people could work from home on Fridays, so that has been great practice for us
at least. I personally never took advantage because i live 4+ miles from the
office, and I don’t have a dedicated workspace at home with big external
monitors. Plus I hate to admit it but I still have 3Mbps/384Kbps DSL service
at home, and that’s just not conducive to video chats and stuff. Since we all
moved to WFH this week I’ve just been using my phone on the AT&T cell network
(conveniently there is a small cell site right on the pole outside my house)
for any video calling.
Tons of scrambling this week to get people’s ACD queues reconfigured and remote
clients provisioned. Plus 99% of the campus at this point has been migrated to
fancy new Cisco phones over the past few years, but hardly anyone was using the
Jabber soft client. Until now. Actually most people are just getting by with
forwarding their office phones to home/cell phones or using the Cisco Single
Number Reach feature to do simultaneous ring to multiple phones. Jabber is
what we tell people to use if they need to make outbound calls that appear to
come from their University numbers.
On the personal front……my sister go sick but turned out not to have COVID-19
thankfully (after her test came back negative, it was open season again, so I
asked, “So what do you actually have? Besides Bossy Older Sister Disease?”).
My parents are being idiots. Most people I know are reporting the same about
their parents, so I don’t feel too alone there.
Now IL is on a shelter in place order, but like most of those there are a ton
of holes for various activities. Stupid human nature - I was fine staying in
the house all week, but as soon as they say I _have_ to stay in, I wanted to go
out. Order went into effect at 5pm today, so this afternoon I took both cars
out to top up with gas. And now hunkered down.
--
Julian Koh
kohster@xxxxxxx
