Wednesday 07/14/2021
Started the day with a walk; felt fine.
Then for a couple of hours before lunch I played catch-up. Paid a couple of bills. Filed some papers. Mainly, read and editing texts from my critiquing group in preparation for meeting them Friday.
Afternoon, had a couple of meetings regarding the ERF. The Event Reservation Form is how anybody wanting to host an “event” reserves a time and a place and any necessary support. The organizer fills out an ERF requesting the room, on the date and time, and any arrangement of chairs, any catering, any A/V support.
The ERF has been a paper form, a bit more complicated and about as readable as a 1040A, forever. A few months back a couple of people put together an online ERF, a fillable form that when submitted, generates PDFs that it emails to whoever is concerned. Today I met with Lennie and Pam to talk about finishing that project, bringing out of “beta” status. We identified some problems with it.
Fortunately, and only very recently, Lennie has gained write access to the platform where the ERF was built. This milestone meant that she had gained the trust of the staff IT people. (Justifiably so, as when Lennie retired she was managing the IT department for all the Stanford Libraries. Think she can handle a WordPress site?)
One problem was the list of people who receive a PDF when an ERF is submitted. It was badly out of date. I took that as a task, and went to my favorite staff person, Kim The HR, who was able quickly to identify the proper addressees for the various things. If the form requests chairs and tables to be arranged, for example, that goes to Housekeeping. And so on.
In the evening I spent some time with STIP-IP. I am just finishing up one of its more complicated programs, executing it for the first time and picking off the initial bugs. Rather to my surprise, the first bug I found was not mine, but one that has existed in this widely respected textbook since 1981. I found a bug in Brian Kernighan’s code, hahaha.
Codgerville 