With the start of every new semester, we have a overwhelming wave of machines that for countless reasons need our attention.  Most of the time it’s the same ol’ same ol’ with each of them, but sometimes we find little surprises of joy.  There are my favorites from the past month.

PimpJuice. I was pretty proud that I knew this was a real song when no one else did and sang it to the students in true Nelly-fashion. Click To Continue Reading…

I’ll hook you up with better pics when my ‘office’ area is decorated…

Late, late, late Friday night Zac and Victoria arrived on my doorstep for a weekend full of introducing her to our favorite places in Flagstaff and hanging out with all of our friends.  Amazingly enough after her 60 hours in Flagstaff, none of our ‘eccentric’ friends had caused too much of a scene, and Flagstaff had a new fan.  Of all of the pics we took over the span of three days, these are my favorite.

Sometime on Saturday Zac asked me if I would mind taking a picture of Z and V together to prove that they had ‘dated’.  Victoria wasn’t too pleased that he had phrased the question in the past tense.  “Don’t you mean dating?” she asked.

The story behind this picture taken from inside my car involves a man stumbling across the road before passing out, my friends and I convinced he was dead, Joe playing ‘tough man’ and giving relationship advice, Zac trying desperately not to laugh, and the rest of us laughing til we cried.

Zac’s always been photogenic.  I’m not too sure Victoria was that impressed.

My new office is almost done!  Paint touch-ups, a good vacuuming, and locks on the doors and my work-sweet-home will be ready to go.  Since I came to campus eight years ago, this white board has remained unchanged  Those dry erase markers have kept their color even if they have lost their meaning after all that time.  Now that my new room has been built around it, it’s time for a therapeutic cleaning.

While working side-by-side with one of my new students…

New Student: Went and saw Death Race last night.

Laurel: Oh, really?  How was it?

NS: Horrible.  It was terrible.

L: Seriously?

NS: Yeah, I’ve heard better dialogue in adult films.

How do you respond to that?

Does this look like a diaper bag? Could I carry it to work with my laptop without looking silly? Because I’m kinda in love with it. Help!!!

A few weeks ago in preparation for the fall semester my students workers and I roamed the halls of more than a few of our dorms mapping out the signal strength of wireless on campus.  Somewhere on the third day, I found this sign on the door of a RA.  These words are the reason that I’m writing two weeks worth of blog posts on this Saturday afternoon to post date for the days that I won’t have a second to put words to page.  They are why I plan on spending more hours at work than at home, and why my loved ones and friends knows that I’ll be ‘unavailable’.  It takes something like 1200 hours of work by thirty student workers and four full-time staff to do what we plan to do in the next four days, and when it’s midnight and I’m just walking in the door for the first time in 16 hours… this is the purpose and passion I’ll cling to.  Pretty cool, huh?

If you’ll be patient with me, I’ll soon explain the joys of what this week has in store for my life, and the controlled chaos that has become my close companion. Until that time, you’ll have to settle for a little geek humor in the form of a video I plan on using in my training workshop tomorrow morning if I can find a way to be up by 6am.

In case you haven’t noticed August is quickly approaching and for me that means fall semester hell week move-in week.  There’s nothing like having to hire 20 new student employees and have them trained and ready to face the masses in less than 72 hours.  It truly doesn’t help that the university here is booming like never before, and they’ll be over 600 more freshman living on campus than last.  Three weeks from today my student workers move back into their dorm rooms and will (hopefully) arrive at my desk with eager minds and smiles on their faces.

More than just teaching technology, much of my job is working with personalities, preaching about customer service, and team building.  When I was in Canada last month one of the sessions I attended introduced an enviroment-based personality profiling system (DiSC) that specializes in building teamwork..  Much like other personality profiles, DISC focuses on a four quadrant (dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness) behavioral model used to examine the behavior of individuals in their environment or within a specific situation. It’s composed of 28 questions that unlike many exams are hard to skew or choose your own personality because it asks you to rank your most and least personal characteristic out of four seemingly similar choices.

Growing up as a gifted kid with parents who were educators, I’m no stranger to evaluative tests and profiles.  I know what True Color (green-orange), Winnie The Pooh character (owl), and Myers-Briggs Type (entj) that I am and have even taken the time to observe those around me and categorize them into profiles from these exams.  Not because I need them to be a Tigger or a Blue personality, but because 9 times out of 10, having a clue how people naturally react builds teamwork, reduces tension, and helps me get the most out of my team.  So this fall, I’ll be asking each of my coworkers and student workers to not only take the exam but take a deeper look into how they can use the strengths of their personality to help the team and identify their needs and weaknesses and work on them.  Heck, I even asked my parents, brother, and people not in my department to take it so that I could determine if it was as accurate for others as it was for.  Surprisingly enough, everyone but my dad was spot on, but I blame the ADD.

Just for fun, I figured I’d share my results with you.  Scarily enough, the results are pretty spot on, but for any of you who know me or work with me, you didn’t need me to tell you that.

It’s been exactly two weeks since the carpentry/telecomm/electric guys began work on my new office/student worker space at the university, and everytime I walk out of my current office and see the progress they’ve made I feel giddy inside. Our fingers are crossed that we’ll be moved in by mid-August and before I have 6,000 students move back on campus expecting support. Of course, there will be countless photos taken of the new space once I’ve moved in with all of my McFarlane figurines and music posters, but for now I thought I’d share the construction as of today.

(Those random pieces of white tape are the remnants of Cory’s body outline in the right-hand corner of the photo. I really need to post the pics of that process here soon.)

I’ve been back from Canada for almost two weeks now, and let me just say it was the best ResNet conference I’ve been to.  Fredericton was absolutely gorgeous, and its citizens were the most friendly hosts I’ve ever experienced.  I had the chance to attend some really thought-provoking sessions and feel more prepared and enthused to begin another fall semester.  There’s just something to be said about getting to spend five days with two hundred people who do the same work you do, experience the same issues, and just understand.

While I was there I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with old ResNetters and network with new ones.  I had more seafood (good, real seafood…not the stuff you get in Arizona) than I thought possible and even spent an afternoon on a boat whale watching.  However, due to the fact that the fog was so thick you couldn’t see anything in front of you, we didn’t get to see any whales, but we did get to see puffin, bald eagles, and harbor seals.  Plus, I got to hold sea urchin and a sea cucumber!  Once a biologist, always a biologist.  I could tell a hundred stories, but for now you’ll just have to settle for pictures.

Pictures of Fredericton:
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Click To Continue Reading…

I should probably be ashamed that I’m admitting this to the intarweb, but the guys that I work with have finally introduced a game they play to me that I enjoy playing. I’ve tried World of Warcraft (lasted less than three weeks), watched them play countless pc games (while they should have been working), and listened to enough Rifts tales that I know that royal-frilled is a type of dragon, but none of these can hold a candle to Heroscape. Imagine a Risk-like strategy game where instead of controlling an army you get to play with comic book superheros, ninjas, robots, and mythical creatures. Yeah, I could definitely get into this game, plus the guys let me bake cookies between sessions. What a perfect balance of Laurel!

My favorite character – Captain America

It’s that time of year again. Time to pack my bags and travel to some random North American university to hang out with three hundred fellow education geeks and play the game “Who’s the biggest nerd in the room?” This year’s ResNet Symposium is being hosted by the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada, and it should be an awesome trip. For those of you who may not be familiar with ResNet, it’s the group of IT professionals on university campuses who provide support and education to students on their campus. It stands for Residential Networking and is my primary focus within our campus.  Once a year, hundreds of ResNetters journey to meet up, discuss new ideas, share strategy, and work to build a support network between their schools.

The next six days will be quite the whirlwind.  My boss and I fly out of Phoenix this morning and arrive in Fredericton at midnight tonight.  We’ll be in conference sessions Saturday am through  Tuesday pm and fly home on Wednesday just in time to be back at work Thursday morning.  The area we’ll be staying near looks to be absolutely breathtaking, and the weather looks perfect with a few rainy moments.  Beyond conferencing, I get to go whale-watching in the Bay of Fundy. Yay!

My bags are packed (pink, of course), and my passport is itching to be stamped. Just as a heads-up, I won’t have cell phone service from this morning until Wednesday afternoon, so if I don’t respond, please don’t be offended. Email and Twitter will be my primary forms of communication. Don’t fear, I’ll still be blogging!!!

Notice something new on my desk?!?! Oh yeah, you’re correct.  That is a brand-spankin’ new 20 inch iMac for work. I’ll be boot camping it on Monday. Sweet!

I left work 20 minutes early yesterday because as soon as I walked into my new office (Daddy’s house as I lovingly refer to it) I started breaking out into hives and having an allergic reaction to something around me (or stress).  Oops!!  After a quick stop at Sam’s Club to grab the needed supplies for a pancake breakfast Saturday morning, I arrived home to do nothing but shower and wait for my skin to chill-out.  My roommate had mentioned that I had received a package that afternoon.  Sitting on my kitchen counter was a large green box addressed to me from ProFlowers.  Not expecting such a package, I was delighted and overwhelmed to find the sweetest card from Zac and 18 gorgeous pink, red, yellow, and white with pink-tips roses.  No matter what’s going I’m going through or dealing with in my life, there has never been a time where I could say that I was unloved, and that simple fact makes any mountain climbable and any heartache survivable.  Thanks, bff.  Love you, too.