<strong>Your Name:</strong> Ben Hyman
<strong>Today’s Date</strong>: 2008/4/17
Reporting on most recent week
<strong>Day(s) worked or described</strong>: T, Th
<strong>Total hours for week</strong>: 5.0
<strong>The School</strong>: Canter Middle
<strong>Kind of Work</strong>: Tech General
<strong>Main Report or Narrative</strong>: On Tuesday, I briefly helped Ms. Jackson by providing her with a username/password list, and passing along some typing tips. I also took another look at 207, and discovered that the middle computer (2nd from the right) works now, but has a bad network card. Either I jostled something while peaking inside, or it's just gone bad. I'll have to take a look for a PCI network card in one of the spare computers next Tuesday. 

Lastly, I retrieved the spare computers from Ms. Washington's room (3 CPUs!) and Ms. Harris' room, did some quick inventorying, and checked to see 
what could be redistributed and used, etc. There's now some spare equipment in the teacher's lounge - 4 empty CPUs, a monitor, and a few peripherals. I was also able to run some quick memory testing on a few of the RAM modules I had found earlier. Unfortunately, all of them were bad :-(.
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Thursday was RAM day! Having forgotten my screwdriver on Tuesday, I was unable to get at the RAM modules in a number of the spare computers I'd found. I finally got at them, and was very excited to discover a number of extra modules. Before you get your hopes up, they were all bad ;-). I suppose that's as much as can be expected from computers lying unused in teachers' classrooms - that's probably why they were unplugged in the first place.

However, I <em>was</em> able to use one set of spare modules to get E4 working, and the other memory problems in the lab seem to have disappeared! An interesting note: I know of a RAM module that definitely worked in the Windows 98 computer it was in, but later failed (i.e. the memtest CD I had picked up errors) on a Windows 2K computer. Since I've mainly been using the memtest CD to judge whether the RAM is good or not, it's possible that there's not a direct correlation between the computer's ability to use the RAM, and whether or not memtest picks up errors. It's also possible that Windows 98 is less finicky about these things; I think I'd like to do some more testing. Mitch, can you shed any light on this?

I also provided Dr. Conlan with the name of the type of cable she needs to get the whiteboard working, since she's going to a training session on Monday.

Out of curiosity, how goes it with Drupal? Also, what's the status on asset disposal?

<strong>Remaining issues</strong>
<ul>
<li>Network card in 207</li>
<li>Locating spare peripherals around the building</li>
<li>Correcting SMS on bad computers as picked up through compliance website. I believe this will also fix the computers that don't have the critical patches.
<li>Ms. Spector's blog</li>
<li>Sending Ms. LaCour directions for the financial-record-keeping software.</li>
<li>RAM testing</li>
<li>Making sure the descriptions on computers C3, E1, and E5 are okay.</li>
<li>Finding display drivers for E5/others.</li>
<li>Possible memory issues in room 106</li>
<li>Editing the theme for this site. That may not be something I can do too well at Canter, or at least not without my laptop.</li>
<li>My hope for DeepFreeze is slowly dying, hehe! ;-)</li>

</ul>

<strong>"Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics."             - J.R. Oppenheimer</strong>

-Ben Hyman