Ok, I know I don’t normally post about “non-technical” stuff, but this is one that EVERYONE should read. At least, everyone that is required to help solve problems of any sort, especially Network admins, IT Managers and Staff, and Support folks at a minimum, if not all engineers and just about everyone else. This post is about Troubleshooting. Yes, I know, a boring topic, but one that far too many of us have forgotten the basics of. We all solve problems in our daily lives, and as a result we tend to think that we are good at it. Well, the truth is, we aren’t good at troubleshooting, especially when it comes to solving complex problems (e.g. networking problems, IT issues where someone brings the machine in and says “it doesn’t work”, etc.). But by practicing and some basic fundamentals, we CAN be good at troubleshooting.

The Nerd Guru has an excellent Introduction/Refresher on Troubleshooting and it happens to be an entertaining read as well (with a site named “Nerd Guru” would you expect anything less than at least one summarization of the plot of Start Trek II to make his point?).

One of the most important things to do BEFORE you actually start any real troubleshooting is to define the problem. The most common mistake I see when people are trying to resolve some issue is that they don’t take the time to articulate exactly what the issue is in the first place. Here is an example:

User: “My computer doesn’t work.”
Admin: “What did you do to it?”
User: “Nothing.”
Admin: “Liar, you must’ve done something.”
User: “Really, I didn’t. I came in to the office, sat down, and tried to use it, and it isn’t working.”
Admin: “Ok, I’ll come to your cube and take a look.”

Notice anything wrong there? The first question the Admin asked should have been “what exactly do you mean by that?”. If he had, the User would have told him that he couldn’t log into email because it didn’t recognize his password. By narrowing down the problem the Admin could have resolved it remotely, without having to actually visit the User’s computer. By not asking any questions about the exact problem, the Admin not only wasted a bunch of time, but will also be pretty angry when he gets to the User’s computer and realizes that the computer is fine and the User’s password just needs to be reset. The Admin will leave thinking the User is an idiot and the User will be thinking that the Admin is a condescending jerk.

The point is that before doing anything else, you need to take the time to identify what the problem REALLY is. A good reference that makes this point pretty well and gives you some example questions to ask is Cisco’s System Troubleshooting Methodology. This is a very useful guide even if you don’t have any Cisco gear.

If you aren’t convinced about why you should spend some time taking a quick refresher on troubleshooting, I highly recommend you take a look at The Universal Troubleshooting Process. This site makes an excellent case for why you should define a troubleshooting process and practice it regularly, and it gives you lots of tips on troubleshooting and troubleshooting methodology. Brushing up on troubleshooting will save you time, money, and effort, and will make you look smarter and harder working in the eyes of your colleagues.

Links:

Troubleshooting Techniques [The Nerd Guru]
System Troubleshooting Methodology [Cisco]
The Universal Troubleshooting Process [Troubleshooters.com]

Lifehacker has a link this week to the UC San Diego’s Beginner’s Guide to the Vi Editor. I highly recommend that if you read it, the first thing you do is mentally replace all occurrences of Vi with Vim. Vim is Vi iMproved, and it is an awesome editor once you get comfortable with it. Spending a little time to learn Vim can have a significant gain on productivity and performance when you are doing any sort of text editing. I use Vim for just about everything, from note taking to web design (in my opinion there is no better IDE for HTML and CSS).

Once you get started, I also suggest you go here and print out the Vim cheat Sheet, which will help you remember things until you build the required muscle memory to really fly. They also have an excellent 7-step tutorial based on cheat sheets of slowly increasing complexity.

And another great beginner resource is the Vi Survival Guide. This is a good crash course in getting started with Vi, and it includes some advanced usage too.

• UC San Diego’s Beginner’s Guide to the Vi Editor [Via Lifehacker: Learn to use Vi]
• Vim Graphical Cheat Sheet and Tutorial
• Vi Survival Guide

I found this one via that venerable treasure trove of productivity and enlightenment, Lifehacker.

Paul Nilsen has done a great job with this extremely short screencast that shows you how to automatically apply color to incoming email in Microsoft Outlook. Although it is a little light on written instructions (the kind you could print out), this task is so easy a short screencast might be just enough. Maybe I’ll ask Ryn to write about it in one of her upcoming articles (she may already have this planned for the Outlook series we are currently in, I don’t know). Paul has done a great job with this screencast, the production quality is very high. I’m going to have to learn how to do some of the things he does with Camtasia, because it really takes the recording to the next level. Warning: this one has sound, that some people have commented is LOUD. I think Paul has fixed the problem, but I didn’t notice a problem in the first place.

Paul Nilsen’s Lifehacker Short Screencast [Via Lifehacker]

This is the second article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

Today I am going to write more about Outlook calendar. If you recall, last time I discussed how to check availability of your co-workers and how to use the Label function for you appointments. Today we are going to learn three more tips, and I promise you, it is just as exciting (seriously, you’ve got to knock it off with the eye-rolling):

• How to change colors in the calendar (this is different than the Labeling)
• How to add holidays to the calendar
• How to add multiple time zones to the calendar

This is Part II (of how many, I still don’t know) in a series of articles about using some of the features in Outlook.

Coloring Your Calendar

If you read Part I then you know that I am a color freak. I’ll repeat that I like color EVERY WHERE (maybe if you’re good, I’ll post some picture of my house – bring your sunglasses). So, you might already have guessed that when I first discovered you could color your calendar, I about flipped!

This is how you do it:

1. Open Tools>Options
2. From the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options.

(I got a little over-zealous with the arrows.)

And guess what happens next? Are you sitting down? The Calendar Options window opens! (Look, mister, if you don’t get excited about the small stuff, what’s the point of living?.) From the Calendar Options window, select a color from the Background Color drop down menu.

And finally, click OK. Now look at your calendar. Isn’t it be-a-u-tiful? (I tell ya, I’m jumping up and down for you even if you are not.) Here are some examples of colors to choose from:

Adding Holidays

Are you the kind of person who is constantly forgetting Columbus Day? Or, [insert higher power here] forbid, Valentines Day (now, that’s bad, isn’t)? Well, if you are, Outlook Calendar can save you.

(Ok. Wait. Hold on - this is an aside. In trying to write this, I added holidays for Turkey to my calendar. And then I tried to get them out. And NOW, I’m stuck with Turkish holidays, in a screen I can’t get out of and I, I, I HATE MICROSOFT!!!!!!!)

(Five minutes later: I figured it out. I’m ok. I think. I’m recomposing my “I love Microsoft” face. Ready?)

From the Calendar Option screen, click Add Holidays.

(I tried turquoise-patterned arrows this time.)

From the Add Holidays to Calendar dialog, you can add holidays from countries ranging from Algeria to Yemen. You can see that I have United States holidays added. To add holidays, select the country (or countries) of which holidays you want on your calendar, and click OK. They are added to your calendar.

Now for the sad part – removing holidays you don’t want. It’s not just sad for us; it’s sad that Microsoft is so stupid they make you remove holidays in a painful way. (Did I just type that?? I’m supposed to have my happy face on.)

Let’s say you wanted to add the holidays from Turkey (what did I say about eye-rolling? GEEZ!!). And then, three seconds later you decide you don’t want holidays from Turkey. You’d think you could go back the Add Holiday to Calendar dialog and uncheck Turkey and click OK, right? Nope. Wrong.

To remove holidays, open View>Arrange By>Events.

Then, using the CTRL button, select all the Turkish holidays. Click Delete when done. And oh, by the way, you don’t just remove a holiday once; you have to remove multiple years. (Yeah. I know. Even *I’m* rolling my eyes now.)

(It doesn’t make as good of a story, but it is possible to click the Location column and then use SHIFT button to delete all the Turkey holidays in one fell swoop. Actually, fooling around with sorting your events/holidays in various configurations is sort of fun if you had nothing to do.)

One good thing about this feature is that if you do want to remove one or two specific holidays, like Flag Day, you can go in and edit your holidays.

Using Multiple Time Zones

Do you ever have meetings with anyone that lives in another time zone? Do you sometimes forget the time difference and schedule a meeting that for you is at 9am, but for your friend is 6am? Do they every call you and say “What the #$%@ are you thinking?!” Once again, Outlook calendar comes to the rescue. You can add time zones to your calendar and see your friend’s time zone before you send an invite.

I live in California, but I have regular meeting with a co-worker in New York. In order to make sure I don’t schedule something for her after 5:00pm, I want to add the time zone on the east coast. From the Calendar Option screen, click Time Zone.

From the Time Zone dialog, you see that my current time zone is already entered, but in order to add a time zone I checked the Show an additional time zone box and filled out the information. Then I clicked OK.

And then my calendar looked like this:

I can see that if I want to schedule a meeting with my east coat friend before 5:00pm, I’d better schedule it before 2:00pm my time. Ok, that is a little exciting, right? I’m sort of jumping up and down again – still not quite recovered from the Turkish Holiday thing. Next time: I’ll write about something in Outlook other than the calendar (aren’t you ready?).
This is the second article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

Karyn Goldstein was given the nickname Ryn when she was 16-years old. (We won’t say how old she is now.) She is the lone technical writer at Network Physics. She likes dogs, a lot. More than most. She’s been in the technical writing industry as either a writer or manager for 10 years. She’s trying to write a novel. She will be contributing articles like this one regularly to the site.

I found this tool the other day while reading a post on Lifehack.org titled Top 20 Free Applications to Increase your Productivity. Top ## lists seem to be all the rage these days, but you probably won’t see a lot of them here at It’s Not The Network because there are just too many lists out there already. Instead, I will try to highlight a few really great applications for you and tip you off to those, so you don’t have to dig through each and every Top list to make the determination for yourself about what is good and what is fluff (although the ones at Lifehack are usually pretty good).

Anyway, back to the tool: ReplacEm is a great tool for Windows that allows you to find and replace text in multiple files simultaneously. While this might not seem like a big deal to some, once you realize you need it, you will be really glad to know about it. The first thing I did it was to replace the old Google Analytics tracker code in about 50 different files on another website that I help manage. This was something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but I just never got around to looking up the proper syntax to use sed to replace the right string on the FreeBSD server the files live on (and of course for testing and debugging the replacement over and over again until I refined my syntax to the point where it actually worked for replacing a multi-line string). Instead I simply copied the files to my Windows machine, used ReplacEm, verified that the change was what I wanted, and copied them back. What was going to take me around 30 minutes took about 5, once I had the right tool. Later this month I’ll do a short tutorial on how to use this tool, but I wanted to start spreading the word now, cause this one can be a real time saver.

ReplacEM [Custom Fit Software via Lifehack]

I am. I love multiple monitor setups. I have for a long time. At one point I had three 21″ monitors and a 14″ laptop all in a row, and I loved it. These days, I’ve ditched the humongous 21″ CRTs for a single 24″ Dell LCD aside my 15″ MBP, but sometimes I really miss the wide open space of that massive 4800×1200 desktop. I’m using a Mac most often these days, and it is amazingly intelligent when it comes to switching back and forth from dual monitors to the single laptop screen, but back when I lived in Windoze land, I would occasionally get some weirdness when I switched from dual monitor more to single monitor mode, and an application or two would get lost off the edge of the screen. At the time, I usually futzed around with things for a while until either giving up or successfully performing the magic keyboard and mouse incantation to get my screen back, but if only I had had this article at the time, I would’ve been much happier and had much more reliable results. Craig at Codejacked has done an excellent job of showing you exactly what to do to rescue your application from the purgatory that exists where your second monitor should be.

For those of you that are unsure about joining the dual monitor club, there is plenty of research out there that clearly shows that using two monitors will make you smarter, taller, stronger, thinner, and more productive (ok, ok, only that last part about being more productive is true). The NY Times had an article last year about how wonderful they are, and if you google “dual monitor productivity” you’ll get a ton of hits expounding on how great dual monitors really are. It shouldn’t be hard to convince your boss to kick down for an extra head when there is so much evidence that says he will get more work out of you if he does (and he’ll make you happier too, which always helps).

And when you are ready to make the join the dual monitor club, PC World has a good little how to on getting it done.

Dual Monitor Search-and-Rescue (Windows) from CODEJACKED

The Virtues of a Second Screen - NY Times

How to Set Up Multiple Monitors - PC World Video

P.S. Later this week I’ll be posting some additional tips for multiple monitor setups, including my favorite, which controls multiple PCs from the same keyboard and mouse on multiple monitors. And I WISH my desk were as clean as the one in that photo, but that’ll never happen.