So I have an idea...

[Psychoholic]

I was playing with skinning the site the other day (after the upgrade) and I really like the look of having an image in the background instead of boring white. I need to go through and tweak on some of the text so it will show up better in some areas but that will come with time.

Then I had an idea.

Why don't I dynamically generate the background? What I can use is the image gallery pictures that are over a certain size or resolution. The interesting part is that it stores the images in either a .picture format, or I could use attachments with the .attach suffix.

Then I thought, if I'm going to do that - what I can do is pull from all the attachments out of the database, exclude the nsfw stuff and generate a daily random pic from the galleries and attachments (probably just the galleries to start with) and set that as the background.

Might even have it update the forum (this is oddly the hardest part) with who/what/when the picture came from with a link to the gallery. Gathering all of the data from the script should be pretty easy, but I haven't really thought too much about how to pass it through to the api:

http://members.vbulletin.com/api/

Anybody want to help with this? Maybe I should just make a 'wallpaper' section of the gallery and have people upload really nice pics into it?

[Psychoholic]

So I discovered that I can have it auto create posts with an RSS feed - so I could just have a script generate a RSS feed of the backgrounds and all the data I want to use, move the file like I want and you'll have the info about the pic if you want it.

Now, back to my actual job.

[v8nightmare]

you wanna do what with the who?

[Psychoholic]

So lemme explain my situation right now.

I'm knee deep in corporate strategy and turning my IT strategy into a tactical plan for the next 3 to 5 years. In 2 weeks I have to deliver my IT strategy to the CFO and field a bunch of questions about how does my strategy help align with the business (using the COBIT and ITILv3 methods) and gain maturity to our processes relative to the Gartner or Mckinsey operational maturity models (if you are interested:

Gartner:

http://confluence.arizona.edu/confluence/download/attachments/2461798/introducing_the_gartner_it_iInfrastructure+and_Operations_1479621.pdf

McKinsey:

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/bto/pointofview/pdf/moit11_survey_f.pdf

Cobit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBIT

ITIL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

)

Being an IT Manager is more than just making sure people get a mouse and an email account when they start...

To keep myself from going completely batshit crazy while I do this - I write code and database queries (for some reason this helps my brain deal with pretty abstract concepts) so I can do a better job of laying out my plan.

A lot of this isn't specific to IT though - it's at least worth the read to think about the operational efficiency and maturity of where either you work or in your personal life and how well do you have your processes organized and laid out (mostly applies to business). It's neat shit (if you can get over the volume of text). I'll happily discuss and field any questions.

[Guest]

yes, but have you done your SWOT analysis?

[Guest]

and determined your critical success factors?

[Psychoholic]

We do the SWOT when we do vendor and application selection usually and when we reach a fork in the road of which anything to do. Usually ends up in some kind of weighted matrix of cost/benefit modeling and then determine what we want to do using that. And for CSF - we use the phrase 'What does done look like?' (from David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology).

It sounds silly, but it's actually pretty interesting when you start getting into it.

[Hoodlum Rocky]

Cutting thru the deep bullshit, i think the random back ground pics sounds pretty cool.

[Mohawk Freak]

Cutting thru the deep bullshit, i think the random back ground pics sounds pretty cool.

That would look cool, oh crap my VCR is eating the tape!

[msc0nduct]

I like the background you chose. I would so live there..

[Morella]

I don't know anything about technical stuff, I'm just a stupid truck driver.

But I do like nice pictures.

[Psychoholic]

Bah. any interest in helping without the auto-post script? I did discover that can get it to auto post from an RSS feed - so I probably could just dump my output to XML and let it pick that up.