Monday, February 19, 2001
Unraveling a mystery
Connections
Contract for athletic director renewed; Dooley to retire in 2003
Greek Park housing concepts under discussion
Newsmakers
Special ed prof named director of School of Professional Studies
The past remembered

Campus Closeup
KIM MOIR
Systems Support Specialist
Workstation Support Group
University Computing
and Networking Services

TIME IN CURRENT POSITION: Fifteen months.

JOB DESCRIPTION: “Basically our group does support for centralized services on campus that run on Unix servers—Arches, WebCT, DNS, FTP—that everyone on campus tends to use.
“We take care of problems, conduct software upgrades and make migration plans for a new hardware or software and then test it to make sure it works.
“If users have a problem they can’t figure out, they’ll come to us and we’ll look at that. Also, we provide support to other campus departments. For instance, if someone believes their machine has been hacked into by an outside party we would go over to their building and reinstall their machine so it will be more secure.
“We also develop Web applications for departments on campus. For example, Bert DeSimone and I created the application for the university’s master calendar that allows people to submit events listings electronically.”

A TYPICAL DAY FOR ME: “We usually have a lot of system messages from all the machines we support. So I go through my mail first and see if there are any problems with the machines. Also we get requests from other departments to come and look at their machines.
“Nothing is really typical—I might spend some days at a client’s site fixing a machine or other days writing an application.”

MOST REWARDING PART OF MY JOB: ”Fixing a problem that I’ve been working on a long time. Also everyone at UCNS is really great to work with—they’re very helpful and willing to teach you things. All the people in other departments I’ve worked with are very helpful and happy to see us.”

MOST CHALLENGING PART OF MY JOB: “Sometimes the vendors we deal with are pretty uncooperative about fixing things.”

IF I WERE NOT DOING THIS JOB, I’D MOST LIKE TO: “I really like traveling but that costs a lot of money. It’s not really practical so I’d probably just be working at a different company doing the same thing I am right now.”

OFF-THE-JOB INTERESTS: “ My husband, Steve Astels, and I moved here from Canada so he could do post-doctoral work in the math department.
“We’ve been hiking in some local state parks—there are some really great trails we’ve been visiting. Also we’ve been going around to little towns all over Georgia because we don’t know much about it, kind of like tourists, I guess.”

MY FAVORITE TYPE OF MUSIC: “I’m pretty open and like a lot of different music—except country. Probably my favorite group is the Canadian band Tragically Hip. I also like going to the classical music concerts at the Performing Arts Center.”

A BOOK I’D RECOMMEND TO OTHERS: “Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong, a student in the 1970s in Canada. Of Chinese descent, she moved to China during the cultural revolution to study at Beijing University.
“When she went to China she believed that Communism was wonderful but later realized how repressive it was to the people. It’s a pretty interesting book.”

THE PEOPLE I ADMIRE MOST: “I respect my family a lot because they have a strong work ethic and that rubbed off on me.
“I also admire the late, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. He did a lot of things for our country. He instituted a policy of bilingualism and multiculturalism. He also repatriated our constitution from the British.”

ISSUES THAT CONCERN ME MOST ABOUT TODAY’S WORLD: “One is that a lot of care doesn’t seem to be taken for the environment, and it is a finite resource that we need to be careful with.
“It also bothers me that intense media scrutiny discourages very inspiring people from running for political office. I think that’s a big loss.”

—Jocelyn Newman
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