Your Name: Chelsea Bingiel

Today’s Date: 2009/1/23

Day(s) worked or described: T W Θ

Total hours for week: 8

The School: Murray

Kind of Work: Tech general

This week was mostly random maintenance, some of which turned out to be a little frustrating and fruitless.  For Tuesday, I arrived at 8:30 and worked on getting some laptops set up to view the inauguration with projectors.  Connecting the two was not the hard part; the hard part was getting the laptops to buffer fast enough to actually view the CNN feed!  I racked my brain trying to think of quick fixes to get the computer to run faster.  I put firefox on them, removed unnecessary programs, deleted cookies, anything!  I was pretty proud that they went from showing the video one frame per 20 seconds to streaming nicely for a short time and breaking randomly.  Still, they weren't at a level where the video would be viewable for energetic kiddos that don't understand buffering...and frankly those of us that do understand patience don't appreciate buffering either.  So instead the kids sat on the floor in the computer room to watch it on the tv...why this was not the original plan, I will never understand.

The second day consisted of setting up a form for parents to sign up for a Parent Portal training session with Joe.  This took about two seconds, since we just used google forms.  However, Joe mentioned he would like a way to email the parents that sign up from a spreadsheet a couple days before the training automatically as a reminder.  It just so happens that I'm learning shell scripting in cs class!  So I took some time to cruise around trying to find a shell to put on a windows.  I know there is putty, but it was a lot of strange compared to the terminal I use on the linux computers at the reg.  And the file organization...I can barely make the leap to shells on a mac much less the organization on windows.  As my cs teacher wisely told us during first week, "windows is pain."  Sorry windows users, it's true.  Long story short, I'm sure I could get a timed shell script working for this on any other os, but windows ey yi yi...

Anyways, the third day was a mixture of setting up the new laptop the school got and helping out kids get logged in to play with ms paint.  I was very disheartened when I turned on the familiar, smiley little macbook only to see the windows os startup.  Life could have been made easy in so many ways!  I was told that the computer is running bootcamp on it, but this is the first I've seen a mac with bootcamp turn on without allowing you to select which os you would like to run.  Anywho, one of my tasks was to find free webcam software for a project Joe wants for one of his classes.  I learned that webcam software is 99% expensive...and then there is Debut.  After searching for a while, I happened upon this little dude tucked away discreetly within a list of webcam software.  It's free, records streaming video from a device or the screen (which is fun!), takes snapshots, everything you could want from something that costs money.  So remember...Debut for webcams, it's free!

(Optional) Thought for the week:  Friends don't let friends anguish in reg alone.

(Optional) What’s playing now?:  I think I'm the only person who wants to see the ultimate anti romance "He's Just Not That Into You."  All my friends say "Bloody Valentine" is dumb and not in an epically funny way.  I was so hopeful for a ridiculous, Evil Dead esque 3d bloodfest.  Maybe someday...I did see "Slumdog Millionaire," VERY good movie about an Indian boy growing up in the slums in love with a girl from his childhood.  Features the #1 fall quarter dance song at the U of C, "Paper Planes" by M.I.A.!

(Optional) What’s been good to read lately?:  Oh I miss reading fictional books...I never know what a good book is!  I did have the good fortune of getting text books that I think are good this quarter.  I'm taking a plagues class for bio whose only coursebook is a $35 text that is more historical then biological, it covers the impact and stories of plagues throughout time.  Stories include typhoid mary, Napolean's defeat by the lice vector disease typhus (different from typhoid fever!), Koch and Pasteur's wars against anthrax and the birth of the vaccine, and more!

(Optional) Personal secret:  I think Age of Empires was more entertaining and better set up then the Civilization series, shhhhh!