"We need an icon for swine flu on the internal patient track-o-matic."

Wow.  Never have I been so productive.  Let the wards be filled with little cartoon piggies. 

It's entertaining watching the story emerge from the (garbled) details of a helpdesk call.  "Mai printer is borken!", for example, becomes: Dr Moustache decides that the default password on a device is silly, and changes it; he also changes the default accounting code, thinking they're the same. He goes skiing in Whistler before telling anyone (it won't matter, after all, only he needs to know).  The accounting code, having changed, now causes all prints to be dropped as from a mismatched account - hence the user's call - and we check the server-side accounting widgets before attending, only to discover this admin password change.  To reset the password requires a suppliers' engineer to visit, which is covered on our support contract -- except that the contract hasn't been paid, and the person who can pay it off, he's waxing his skis and 'tache up on the Big Red Express in the lovely fresh powder until the new year.

Users.  Love 'em.

The mood at work is a'changin - we have many bike riders among the on-call IT crew and the on-call pack is a huge, gruesome albatross (big, heavy old laptop, a sack of magic string, phone and more magic string, pager, docs, it's the weight of a medicine ball with none of the joy.  We're after a change.

Our on-call needs are simple and generic: get called, get online, and VPN onto the work network, then use Remote Desktop to piggyback around from server to server.  3G or wifi is needed to get online without suckage.  We need to be able to run the Cisco VPN client, which is available for Windows / Mac / Linux.  Some of the options we're thinking about:

1. A Windows smartphone.  Not used one myself, but IIRC there are flisters who've been using things like the Nokia Communicator and its descendents for ever.  Can they run full-fat Windows apps these days? 
2. An Asus EEE or similar little netbook.  3G is the issue here, I think. 
3. Can you bludgeon the Cisco VPN client into working on an iPhone?  I know there's Remote Desktops for it... The boss is a sucker for shiny objects (and so am I).

Input welcome!

I work second-line support.  I rely on the Helpdesk to log calls, deal with the chaff, and send me reasonably intelligble problems which are within my remit to fix. 

It's naughty-file-police season again and a landmark has been passed: for the first time, home movies are responsible for more naughtiness [1] than ripped music.  User-created media content finally has more weight on my servers than non-user stuff; even after we strip out the holiday and wedding movies (and the babies, and puppies, and cake-candle moments, dear gods the warm fuzzy banality of it) the rest of the user-content is a big thick wodge of data.  Of course if it's simple to video your puppy on your mobile, it's just as simple to video a knee arthroplasty and use it as a teaching aid.  Or to record a dull presentation for later cramming.  Rich multimedia content is now officially mainstream.

However, users have no idea of file size.  None whatsover.  "It's just a couple of pictures" is a common and honest response to "your AVIs are ginormous and bloated, you hideous time-wasting harridan".  What's 25Mb between friends?  What's, er, 6Gb in the worst case? (great holiday though, you should see the photos of those giant tortoises)  Icons don't present the impression of file size.  If you wanted to scale them to reflect file size, you'd have to use a log scale just to keep it sane, and it would still look absurd.  A "thing" is a "thing" is a "thing", whether it's a saved email or a Word document or a picture or a movie; saved emails are often the worst, all fat with embedded Powerpoint hunky firemen. 

Frankly, with storage generally cheap and huge, I think this is a good thing.  Freedom to play invites new ideas - users wouldn't have thought about videoing their knee arthroscopies if they hadn't first done Kitteh's First Snowflake beforehand and for this reason I continue to like our no-quotas approach.  So bring on the buckets of storage.  But... can I have some more disks, please?


[1] Methodology: report out all likely file types, eg MP3, MPG, AVI, and the like.  Eyeball the list.  Slap the sinners, give them a grace period, then delete the files.  Traditionally, one gets 60% "oops sorry!" 20% "how did that get there?" and 5% "how dare you peek in my private files?" with the rest non-responding.