Microsoft Planner can be so perfect if it had a few extra things. But for now, there’s PowerShell
I want to love Microsoft Planner. But there are some things it has in it that just confound me. Rather, I should say it has omissions that confound me and make me question its usability.
For the uninitiated, Planner is a user-friendly project management tool designed for teams to collaborate and stay organized. Planner helps users create tasks, assign them to team members, set due dates, and track progress visually on customizable boards. It’s not a full and formal project management software, like its older sibling Microsoft Project, which is way more robust and suitable for complex projects with intricate timelines and resource management. Planner is more accessible; Project is more involved. Still, Planner excels at promoting collaboration, task management, and maintaining an overview of project activities, making it ideal for smaller teams and less complex projects.
Here’s a perfect example for Planner that we’ve rolled out at my company: organizing all of the activities and tasks around what it takes to bring a new employee onboard and for their first few months on the job. It’s a perfect solution for that, because there are different buckets of tasks, a deadline for those tasks to take place, and different people responsible for those tasks (be it IT, HR, or the new employee’s manager). Instead of having these tasks live in a spreadsheet on someone’s desktop, they can now live in a collaborative environment.
Sometimes we get it wrong. The rollout went about as well as it could go. I’m still frustrated by the fact I had to manually deploy the print client to our users and that the software wasn’t any sort of identity- or directory-aware. Getting a executable file that’s coded in the installer for each user? That’s not nice. Requiring administrative permissions to install that? Go away or I shall replace you with a very small shell script.
What ultimately doomed the rollout for me was that we had users who had sporadic and random issues. There were no common threads among those who had printing errors (other than, presumably, they were trying to print and the day ended in y), so troubleshooting was next to impossible.
Since printing’s kind of a mission-critical task where I am, we made the decision to abandon Hive and go back to MF. And I’m fortunate that I have supportive management and colleagues who understand that sometimes, you get it wrong.
Today marks a year since I moved to Minnesota. In this special edition of The Friday Five(-ish), here are some photos from the past year
Today marks one year since I boarded an airplane headed from Phoenix to Minneapolis to start a new chapter up here. In this special edition of The Friday Five-ish, here are a few photos from my first year up here.
21 April 2022: The last photo taken on the ground as a Phoenix resident, from a Delta 757 getting ready to scream down Runway 25R at Sky Harbor
21 April 2022: On climb out from Sky Harbor
21 April 2022: This photo of the downtown Saint Paul skyline seems even more prophetic
11 May 2022: Not quite three weeks in, and severe weather’s already on the menu. A line of severe thunderstorms and embedded tornadoes rolled through Minnesota that night
21 May 2022: After converting it from a storage closet, my office at Meda becomes my own. Photos from Phoenix adorn the walls
15 June 2022: Minneapolis-henge in downtown Minneapolis
18 June 2022: And there was arts. The Bach Roots Festival presented the Saint Matthew Passion
16 July 2022: The International Day of Music in downtown Minneapolis culminated with the Minnesota Orchestra playing outdoors at Peavey Plaza, and whose concert concluded with Mussorgsky’s Great Gate of Kyiv accompanied by pealing bells from six downtown churches
30 July 2022: City House in Saint Paul – a converted grain elevator is now a lovely outdoor restaurant
19 August 2022: The St Paul Saints!
29 August 2022: And the Minnesota Twins from a perch way up on high
21 October 2022: When I got tickets for this concert, the appointment of Thomas Søndergård to succeed Osmo Vänskä as the Minnesota Orchestra’s music director hadn’t been announced. The first of 3 Minnesota Orchestra concerts I attended this year
5 November 2022: The Twin Cities chapter of the American Guild of Organists organized a “pipe organ crawl” of five instruments of the late Minnesota organ builder Charles Hendrickson. Here is his III/46 op. 51 (1979 from the Church of Saint Mark in Saint Paul
14 November 2022: The first of the many many inches of snow. Driving in it wasn’t fun at first, but it became pretty okay
2 December 2022: My apartment in downtown Minneapolis had this view on most winter mornings
31 December 2022: It was wonderful to be able to take a trip back to Phoenix over the end-of-the-year holidays. The sun sets on the wild ride that was 2022
1 January 2023: While back in Phoenix, I got got to see
20 January 2023: After a few false starts, I finally have a place of my own over in downtown Saint Paul. I have expansive views of Lowertown, the Mississippi River, and St Paul Downtown Airport
3 February 2023: This is the coldest temperature I saw this winter. Thank goodness for good winter clothing and lots of layers!
22 February 2023: The week of snow and blizzards. But doesn’t Mears Park look like a scene from a snowglobe?
3 March 2023: One last look from my patio of my now-former downtown Minneapolis apartment. It was a great place, and I definitely miss my neighbors
17 March 2023: After a few years in storage, my bike is ready to go again. Lowertown Bike Shop in downtown Saint Paul’s Union Depot upgraded the components on the bike so it’s the newest vintage bicycle in Saint Paul
1 April 2023: A no-foolin’ April Fools snowstorm dumps 8 inches of snow in downtown Saint Paul
1 April 2023: And later that night, it’s time for a concert back with the Minnesota Orchestra in downtown Minneapolis
18 April 2023: Play ball! The first of many Saints games this year, and when you’re four blocks from CHS Field, of course you’re going to go a lot
A return of the Friday Five and some of my observations on PaperCut Hive, a software stack I’m currently deploying
Where I work, we’re almost complete with a migration from PaperCut MF on-premises to the fully cloud PaperCut Hive product. For the most part, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s gone and how it supports some of our organization’s transition goals to less on-premises. But there are some things that have been some definite head-scratchers in the process.
1. There’s no migration. That’s right: there’s no migration. Any data or user provisioning settings in MF don’t transfer over. You’re starting from scratch. Do you have RFID badges for your employees that they use to authenticate to the copier or MFP? Gone. Custom scan locations? Gone. While I’m thankful that I have a small number of colleagues and they have been more patient with me than I deserve, imagine if you have to have hundreds or thousands of employees re-authenticate on the new system. At least it’s a one-time only process.
2. There’s an app, but you don’t need it. PaperCut makes a big push to have users download their app for print management. I have issues with making people download company software to their own personal smartphones. Thankfully, even though PaperCut makes this push, you can ignore them.
3. Communicate early, often, and concisely. One of the questions I received a lot was about why we were doing this and how this would affect them. Fortunately, by planning the deployment, I was able to say that except for two initial tasks, everything would remain the same. And I told them why this change was being made, which was to support our organization’s future technology stack.
4. If you have multiple copiers/printers/MFPs, don’t move everyone over all at once. Keep both printing systems running in parallel so that you don’t have to sweat it having some users unable to use the printers and you have to rush the migration. By having some machines on the new system and some on the old system, you don’t have to be so aggressive in moving everyone over.
5. What automation? What year is it again? There is no way to use automated tooling to deploy PaperCut Hive software to our colleagues’ computers. To install the software, I had to go to each machine, download the unique software that PaperCut generates for each user, install it using my administrative credentials, and go on. That worries me, because that means the software is not directory aware and also means that I can’t include it in a base deployment configuration. While I’ve heard that this may change in the future, had I known this limitation, I would have postponed our deployment until later.
Those are some of my observations about this. It’s been received well by my colleagues, but some of the initial challenges made for a fun week.
Are we standing at the front door to a blogging renaissance?
Back in October, I put some thoughts out on LinkedIn about the future of social media and if we’re headed toward a renaissance of the blog. Given the public agita about the current social media landscape and the associated issues regarding content moderation, ownership of those platforms, and bullying and minimization of minority communities.
Personally, while it had been festering for some time, I finally pulled the plug on my use of Twitter. While I had been using it for 15 years, it felt to me like it had run its course and was far more noise than signal. And, to be absolutely fair, the whiplash changes to that platform under its new ownership helped push me to making this decision. It doesn’t feel like a huge loss for me.
The heir apparent to Twitter seems to be Mastodon, but I’m not sure if I’ll go on that. Not because I have issues with that tech stack – it sounds fantastic and totally dismantles the so-called web3 notion that anything decentralized has to have blockchain technology and some sort of transactional monetization to work – but because I’m not sure if I need to be on that. You might recall my essay on Five for the New Year 2023, in which I said one of the things I’m going to work on in 2023 is limiting digital distractions. It’s also why I want to spend my time in this world, and not some digital “metaverse” world that is definitely totally happening* at some point in the future.
I’m therefore led to make the following bold proposition: One of the major moments in the changing of the internet from independent communities to being controlled by a handful of social media companies was when Google killed Google Reader ten years ago. Instead of a choose-your-own Internet that was based on what you wanted to read from the sites and sources you chose, social media companies sucked us in to their sites and subjected us to their algorithms and rage. If you wanted the latest news from major news organizations, you are left to the whims of the social media networks whether they’d even allow it, or if the platforms were even telling publishers the truth. And that all led to the advertising dollars going to the websites that got the most views, which were not the traditional journalism outlets and newspapers, but rather internet content farms.
I digress. This isn’t about my views on the internet, but on blogging specifically and my proposition that blogging will see a renaissance in 2023. I realize my blog is a special case, because this is not a revenue-generating operation for me. With platforms like WordPress still out there, and even with some free or relatively inexpensive, there’s no barrier to entry.
I’ve been at this for well over a decade now, and I think I quite like it. In 2023, it takes a renewed interest with more frequent essays and columns, and frequent photography. The best part? It’s mine. Not Meta’s or Twitter’s.
With a new year comes a new way of thinking about things. Here are five thoughts as we stand at the doorway of 2023…
Happy New Year to everyone. Let’s hope that 2023 is less chaotic than 2022 was.
In the spirit of a new year with new beginnings and new possibilities, I’m offering five things I’m going to work on in this New Year 2023. I’m hesitant to call them resolutions, but that’s probably what they are. Rather, I look at these as things I’m going to be deliberate about in this new year, and hopefully beyond.
Disable the electronic distractions. In the course of an average week, 72 hours is not dedicated to work or sleep. That’s less than half of the hours in a week! In that 72 hours, that includes errands, cooking and meal preparations, home chores, hobbies, learning, and also everything else that has to happen. And, now that I’m in a different city from friends and family, it means I have to be more deliberate in when and how I connect with them. One of the things I noticed toward the end of 2022 was that I was on my phone a lot. I’ve deleted all of the social media apps from my iPhone, instead accessing them in the browser on my computer. I’m going to work next on tuning the focus features on my iPhone, making sure that I only get the notifications that are important to me and engage on the spaces that are important to engage. With apologies to Mastodon, I probably won’t go there.
Automate this blog. No, I don’t mean turning over the authorship keys to some AI software to write whatever it feels like. Rather, I mean finding ways to automate photo posts. I’ve taken quite a few photos of my new city, and trying to find a way to post them without me having to think about it. I have a few thoughts on that, but I’m wondering if WordPress is capable of handling it. That’s a whole different thing…
Get back into the piano practice habit. When I moved to Minneapolis, my baby grand piano went into storage in a climate-controlled facility in suburban Phoenix. The rationale was that it wouldn’t have fit in my interim apartment I have in downtown Minneapolis, and I only want to move the instrument once. Now that I’m settling in to a new space that isn’t that apartment, I’ll get my piano back. It’s been a long year without it, and I can’t wait to have it back. It’s worth investing some of my ~72 weekly hours in! Now, to get back to working on Debussy’s Suite bergamasque…
Throw caution to the wind once more… It was a tremendous leap of faith to move up to Minneapolis to take this position at Meda and the epitome of throwing caution to the wind. I’m not saying I’m going to leave Meda to move again – there’s so much left that we can accomplish together at Meda – but I’m thinking of doing something out of the ordinary. Getting involved in winter sports? Flying lessons? Finding an entirely new hobby? This will be fun to see how it progresses.
As this New Year 2023 is not even one day old, these are some of my initial thoughts. I’ll be writing more on these subjects throughout the year, not to mention sharing some of my photography. And if there’s a post that pops up that seems out of the ordinary, then you’ll know what I’m being asked a lot.
About a decade ago, the Phoenix architect Taz Khatri gave the urbanist Yuri Artibise an “exit interview” of sorts. I adapt the formula here
About a decade ago, the Phoenix architect Taz Khatri gave the urbanist Yuri Artibise an “exit interview” of sorts after he left Phoenix for British Columbia. While the original post has been lost, the internet doesn’t forget, and they’re on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
As it’s been a few months now, I guess I should fill in my blog readers (all four of you) of some major news
As it’s been a few months now, I guess I should fill in my blog readers (all four of you) of some major news. In April, following a whirlwind recruitment process, I joined the staff at Meda, the Metropolitan Economic Development Association, in Minneapolis. That meant that I had to relocate from Phoenix, the up-until-now subject of this blog (and the only place I’ve called home) to Minneapolis, in somewhat great haste.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll highlight some of my adventures in my new city, share some observations and photography, and some thoughts as I can about being back in my element – IT within the nonprofit realm.
In this installment of The Friday Five, it’s time to dust off the slides and update A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix
Back in April 2019, I prepared and delivered my lecture, A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix. The lecture spanned the past 1,500 years of midtown Phoenix history and included a survey of Midtown’s buildings. The thesis of that lecture is that the abrupt end of World War II in August 1945 caught Phoenix and Arizona leaders by surprise, thus setting up developers to build a new city that fit what they wanted. That was the North Central Avenue corridor, which is what we now call midtown Phoenix.
In the two years since that lecture’s creation, there have already been a few things that need revising as Midtown’s changed or as recent scholarship has found new details. In that spirit of continuous improvement, and also because it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, here’s my Friday Five of revisions to A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix.
A quick content warning: One of the items contains news and subject matter that may be distressing to Native Americans. As a courtesy, the content of this point is after the jump.
