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Staff MacBook - Restart reminder

 Staff:


As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the quality of service we provide, we wanted to make you all aware of an update that we are pushing out to all staff macbooks in the near future. Experts have assured us that the possibility of this update being the harbinger of a technological apocalypse are vanishingly low. Their strange insistence upon the fact that they were human experts who like to do human things like eating food and sleeping and compiling data was a bit out of the blue, but other than that they seemed very trustworthy. When we asked who, exactly, they were... well, they sent this as proof:
notarobot.png

I, for one, trust that face implicitly. That's someone who knows their stuff! And the tie! So dapper.

Red flags aside, we ARE pushing out a policy to staff devices that will serve as a helpful reminder. This update will regularly check the uptime of your device. If the uptime exceeds 14 days, a dialog box will pop up, letting you know how long your computer has been running without a restart, and give you an option to either restart immediately, or wait.

For most of you, this will be completely unnoticed, right? I mean, it will only pop up if your computer hasn't restarted in over two weeks, and that can't be more than a couple of us, yeah? This is like one of those universal things we all do... restarting computers regularly, always reading the entire terms of use before clicking the "Accept" button, untying and retying our shoelaces everytime we put on our shoes... right? Right?!? Why are you all looking away like that? 

Ok, I'll avoid asking for a show of hands on who can't remember the last time they restarted their computer. Mostly because then I would have to raise my hand, and then it would make typing this message inordinately more difficult. Luckily this update will serve as a non-invasive reminder.

Now, I used to think correlation implied causation. Then I took a statistics course. Now I don't think that. Are you implying that taking the course changed my mind? Rookie mistake. In any event, we have noticed several projection, sound, and connectivity issues that we have seen increasing over time, particularly in our new staff Macbooks that have gone long periods without restarting. This update is an attempt to alleviate that (without implying causation of course)

Should you select the "Restart Now" option when it comes up, be aware that the default login screen for staff is just a blank Username and Password field. Don't be alarmed if your username or profile picture doesn't appear! Simply type in your credentials as usual to log in. If you cannot remember your login credentials, you can reach out to technology staff for help finding or resetting them as the need arises.

For those of you who suffered through reading this in its entirety, thank you! For a "Too long, didn't read" Version:

TLDR: Staff devices will remind you to restart if it has been running more than 14 consecutive days.

Thanks again and reach out to us at technologyteam@crprairie.org for any questions!!

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