Let me guess. Printed out and on your desk in the smallest font visible to man's naked eye is an excel spreadsheet with all the phone numbers of your unit listed. It's likely right next to a $500 Cisco Voice-over IP computer phone. To dial a number, you'll break out the bifocals and painstakingly use your finger to line up to the right number on the spreadsheet and punch it in manually on the phone fatfingering the dial pad 10% of the time. Sound familiar?
Wouldn't it be nice if that $500 computer phone could geterate an easily navigatable directory that was as up to date as the listings in the Call Manager? Well, thats exactly what we had in mind when developing the Dynamic Phone Directory (DPD).
CAT5E is expensive. Our unit would go through several boxes during exercises or deployments just making 20-30ft long patch cables to support, most of which was only used during that mission only to be bundled up and taken to post recycling afterwards (cause we're environmentally friendly!). Not only monetarily is it expensive, but time wise, it was taxing. A well trained installer can terminate a CAT5 cable in about 4 minutes on average. To wire up 8 drops, it takes one installer working about an 45 minutes after taking into account running the cable properly.
Enter the InstaDrop system. This DIY project provides 8 drops of re-usable cable to a TOC, cuts that 45 minute installation time to about 5 and in the long run saves you green: green cable, green money and green environment (not that I'm a hippy or anything, blood does more to make the green grass grow).
Problem: It's all hands on deck getting equipment on the Commander's hand receipt lined up, in the hall way or out in the motor pool, in LIN order followed by NSN order along with all of it's BII. This is done in large part to minimize the time it takes for the Commander conducting the inventory to flip through the many printed out pages of his property book and find the item being inventoried. To save a few hours of his time, we spend a few days doing this work to prepare.
Solution: Wouldn't it be nice if we could just have that hand receipt on digits, scan a bar code, automagically search the document and highlight it? Well now you can! Introducing the Search And Highlight Excel (SAHE) xlsm document!
With computers, usually the simplest answers are the hardest to find. For example, for the past several months, my home's domain time has been off by a couple hours. The task of fixing it was put on the back burner because I didn't know the simple answer to it and when I finally got around to trying, I simply couldn't find the answer.
As with most things in a computer, it came down to a stupid checkbox being checked.
Problem: A Hyper-V Domain Controller had the wrong time and kept resyncing to the wrong time
