Further education: Codeacademy.com

If you've been on the "Support" side of things for a while and want to start edging into the "coding" side of things, check out Codeacademy - It's a rather nifty "interactive tutorial" site that will get you nicely grounded in string-oriented coding with JavaScript. In keeping with the times, it also provides scores, badges, and other things to boast about on FaceBook and other social media sites.

I've been very "results oriented" in my coding experience - only soaking up as much knowledge as I need to get a specific task done for a specific project. This site has helped shore up the basic concepts of programming, which will make it easier for me to create my own projects.

Two thumbs up.

Tools: A (cloudy) place for your stuff

If you haven't heard about DropBox yet, I'll be happy to tell you about it. DropBox is a free online "Cloud" storage service which provides its users with 2GB of free storage space, and can be accessed through the web or via an App for most operating systems (Windows, Mac, Unix, iOS, Android, etc).  I've found this very useful for porting installer programs, data files, online manuals etc from place to place.

The 2 GB disk allocation is free - you can pay for up to 20 GB of online storage.

The other cool thing about it is - if you refer someone to DropBox, you can get a bit of extra storage for yourself. So..  if you're interested, feel free to click any of the links I've made in this post and sign up for some free storage space.

Scavenger Hunts

Life is more manageable when approached as a scavenger hunt, rather than a suprise party.

- Jimmy Buffet

Technical Support is, by its nature, a reactive job - it's very hard to be proactive in an environment where your purpose for being there is to "fix things".  In my experience, there are two ways to approach the situation:

•  a never ending series of emergencies which require immediate, adrenaline-laden flurries of frantic activity to fix whatever was broken (and try and prevent that from happening again); or
•  a series of interesting challenges which can be overcome with enough research, questioning, and learning (and can then be documented so you can recover gracefully 

I leave it to you to decide which way leads to less stress and irritation at your customer base.

 (and yes, we're back on line - your humble blogger got himself a new contract gig and has been, well, busy doing tech support - we'll get more info and useful tools out here shortly)