Our friends over at GeeksAreSexy recently posted a review of the “10 steps to a better IT support process.” There’s probably not a lot of information there for people who already work in IT, but it does a good job of giving people outside of IT a picture of what the IT helpdesk has to go through.

“When users call for support, they usually feel helpless and may sound irritated over the phone. Always be polite towards them.”

And while there are always going to be technical support issues stemming from user error or hardware failure, these tips underscore a very important lesson. By the time the problem reaches the helpdesk, you’ve already got a ticked-off end-user.

And if that’s your first, last, and only method of finding performance problems, you’re leaving the important troubleshooting to the end user. The end user doesn’t have training in network performance problems, and even if he or she did, they wouldn’t have the information in the network’s performance because they don’t have either the tools or the access to see the network problem from the datacenter’s perspective.

Registration for the ninth annual NetQoS Symposiumis now open.  If you’re familiar with Symposium, you know it’s where we have educational sessions, engaging speakers, hands-on product labs, and tons of networking opportunities.  Er, that is, people networking.

Symposium is great for broadening your understanding of how to use our products to monitor and manage your network performance.  While basic operation is simple, there are little subtle tricks of the trade that you might only pick up from our instructors or your peers.

Furthermore, you’re able to voice your ideas outto your peers and get critiques from the experts in the field.  We love this peer feedback too – a customer notices a problem that they have, another customer suggests a solution, and we have a feature that we might want to add to the roadmap.

And this year, you will also hear how the NetQoS products are being integrated with other CA products like eHealth and Wily.

You’ve probably heard by now about how Google, in retaliation to unauthorized intrusion into Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents by what they believe is the Chinese government, Google has decided to stop working with the Chinese government and stop filtering the Google search results for google.cn, which could lead to pulling out of China completely.

The last time anyone as big and influential as Google had to pull out of China due to pressure from the communist government, they formed Taiwan.

It’s becoming such a huge deal that the U.S. State Department is getting involved.  Hopefully this won’t escalate into full-out nuclear warfare between the two countries.  At least not till January 26^th, when I arrive in nuclear-free New Zealand.  Although that’s not likely to happen, considering that the United States owes China so much money that China can’t afford to have us default on the loans…

The Mattel Corporation, makers of Barbie, have produced an online poll asking people to vote on the next occupation of “teenage-fashion model doll” Barbie. Choices are “Environmentalist,” (although a doll made entirely out of plastic might be a poor spokesperson for this career), Surgeon, Architect, News Anchor, or, drumroll please: “Computer Engineer.”

Seriously.  Go vote for “Computer Engineer.” Whether you believe Barbie’s influence on young girls to be positive or negative, you cannot deny that there is an influence.  And Computer Engineer will go a long way towards correcting the “Math class is tough” version of Barbie.

But of course, Barbie wouldn’t be Barbie if she didn’t come with accessories.  In addition to the usual computer engineer accoutrements – laptop, pocket protector, jeans for crawling under desk, sneakers for getting around quickly, and a collection of slightly witty t-shirts (especially appropriate would be this one, for “self-rescuing princess”), may we humbly suggest the following: