Writing practice: English

Recently updated with a great testimonial from one of my clients, here's the web page for the group I supervise.

Funny part is, my client didn't write the testimonial. He wrote a paragraph which was useful as a rough outline; I think he didn't have much time to spend on it but wanted to give me something to work with. Regardless of his intent, it was enough for me to rewrite, and when he saw the result he was more than willing to have said it.

Writing practice: /bin/sh

Customer Service and Support (my department) is responsible for the network printers used by undergrads living in the dorms. We use the commercial version of CUPS. I didn't know this until recently, when my manager asked me to intervene because we're getting lots of complaints about the printers and I'm the only other Unix guy around. The most frequent problem is that the CUPS daemon stops processing incoming requests and the print queue. It's not stuck waiting on memory or disk, and the CUPS vendor hasn't figured it out for us yet. Meanwhile, since lpstat hangs when cupsd is wedged, I wrote a script to run lpstat, and if it doesn't return in a reasonable amount of time, restart cupsd. Sound basic? It was. But nobody had done it, and I hadn't written a shell script in a while.

At the beginning of last week, my relatively new manager had only hearsay to suggest that I'm an effective writer and handy with Unix. By the end of the week he knew the rumors were false.