TFRL T-Shirts!!!

Continuing the tradition of bringing TFRL T-Shirts to HighEdWeb, I will once again be... uh bringing, uh, TFRL T-Shirts to HighEdWeb.

These are custom shirts, designed specifically for the conference and available only at the conference. If you want one, the only way to get one is to get it at HighEdWeb. 

Sadily, the rising cost of CafePress has forced me to charge $30 per T-shirt... and trust me, I'm not making any money on the deal. I wish I could give them away, but that's just not realistic is these times of budget cuts.

There are two designs:

Design 1 is available in either black or 'cinder' (I'm calling it brown).

And:

Design 2 is available in black, dark red, navy, military green, red, royal blue, brown, charcoal or kelly green.

Don't ask me why one shirt has two colors and the other has a bunch. Cafe Press forced me to use two different t-shirt products for each design. 

I haven't ordered any T-shirts yet. If you want one, let me know ASAP. Tweet me (@tonydunn), email me, or leave a comment. 

Who Said You Get Vacation?

Why am I always the last one to find out things? I just learned yesterday that Prophead is leaving today for a vacation in the Caribbean. Who said he could do that? And how does he afford that? I took a week in Oregon - which is literally next door - and it wiped me out! How does he get to go to the Caribbean? huh? Tell me!

Bastard.

I hope he gets sunburned.

BTW, if you don't know what movie the last panel is a reference to, then you should be ashamed of yourself. It's the closing scene from literally The. Best. Movie. Ever.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

On the plus side, it's one less email that they will have to deal with.

I'm not sure what's wrong with us, but for some reason we can't get the whole 'communication' thing right. We either over-communicate, beating issues to death with meeting after soul-crushing meeting, or under communicate, barely letting people know what's going on, even when it affects them directly.

We need to work on that. I think I'll send out a meeting notice.

P.S. Thanks to Prophead for tweeting the idea for this strip.

You Have Workflow!

Workflow. People still ask for it occasionally. We pretend to ignore them in almost every case. "Workflow? What's that?" "Ohhh, the CMS doesn't do that. Sounds cool, though. Sorry!"

The fact of the matter is that workflow sounds wonderful to anal retentive micromanagement types, but the reality of workflow is an endless string of relentless emails requiring action on every trivial change. And no one, not even the most dedicated micro-manager has time - or the stomach for that.

For the few poor souls that we activated workflow for in our CMS, none of them lasted a week before they surrendered under the mountain of approval emails. We don't even offer it as a service, except when it is needed to keep certain people at arms distance from doing harm to our home page. For them, they think that workflow is what everyone goes through. Little do they know that we have consigned them to a special hell - the one reserved for child molesters and people who talk at theater*.

Workflows suck for all involved. Don't use them except for those rare cases where they actually make sense. Just don't. No.

*This is a Firefly reference, mostly directed at @Robin2go, who was going to present on Google Wave at HighEdWeb - before Google killed Wave, that is. Now she's going to present on the ephemeral nature of technologies. 

I'm Not on a Horse

Yep, this is happening today, as you read this. And yes, I'm somewhere (hopefully at home) making sure the upgrade went smoothly. 


This isn't the funniest cartoon ever, but it's appropriate given the library recarpeting project that is disrupting everyone's lives. But hey, new carpet, right?

"I Told You So"

I love saying I told you so. It's my favorite phrase. But for some reason people don't seem to appreciate it when I say it to them. I haven't figured out why. Anything that gives me that much pleasure must give other people pleasure too, right?

Anyway, this hasn't actually happened yet (first day of school isn't for two weeks), though Jack Jefferson did warn me about doing upgrades during the busiest week of the year. But I have no idea if he's the 'I told you so' type. He doesn't strike me that way, so I'm not real worried.

Oh, the upgrade? Piece of cake. You'll see.

Cha... Cha... Cha... Changes

OK, so this one apparently requires a lot of disclaimers, at least according to Prophead.

See, my boss is the change management guy on campus. My little one man content management unit is under him more as a fluke than anything else (no one else would take me - go figure).

So criticizing our change management processes could be seen as "non-conducive to career advancement". But that's not really what I'm doing here, no matter how it appears. Though there was some confusion as to where our CMS upgrade fit in the change management process (don't ask), none of that confusion was my boss's fault. Mostly, the confusion was due to my ignorance of the process, and the fact that I've done everything possible up to now to ignore such things. Well, unless I buy an AK47, now I'm going to have to start paying attention.

And, of course, no one can prove that any of this actually happened... unless Prophead logs our IM chats.