<strong>Your Name:</strong> Ben Hyman
<strong>Today’s Date</strong>: 2008/2/1
Reporting on most recent week
<strong>Day(s) worked or described</strong>: T, F
<strong>Total hours for week</strong>: 4.9
<strong>The School</strong>: Canter Middle
<strong>Kind of Work</strong>: Tech General
<strong>Main Report or Narrative</strong>:

Tuesday! The CUIP/CPS/Canter deities were smiling at me, as a number of my problems fixed themselves. The graphics card issue disappeared (although I had been swapping it out with another card...more on that later), and the problem I reported on E1 in last week's report disappeared. I got to the school and focused on setting up the new computer. The move from room 202 to 105 was quite successful, and the computer in that room is now up and running. I was informed of a nonfunctioning student computer by one of the teachers, and I went in and took a look. First diagnosis was some kind of local power issue with the outlet. I removed the computer up to the computer lab (also because it was an identical model to the computer having the graphics card issue, and it too had a PCI display card, so I wanted to run a test with it), and it booted up just fine there. This is also when I resolved the graphics card issue on the lounge computer. When I went back to tell the teacher about the power issue, her door was locked and I was unable to get the computer back into the room.
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I spent the rest of Tuesday setting up the now-fixed-graphics-card computer in the lounge again. I'm nearly satisfied with the lounge computers, finally!

Friday, I biked to work in the snow (after it was done snowing, but there was certainly plenty on the ground)! Talk about hardcore. I felt real proud about making it to Canter, hehe. I went to look at the lounge computers and found the Internet on one unacceptably slow, and the other one just slow in general (a memory issue). After I restarted the Internet-challenged one in Safe Mode and then out of it again, it seemed to be going just fine. I was also able to set up the student computer mentioned in Tuesday's report in its original room; I had a spare surge suppressor handy, so I plugged it into the original power line, and not the newer ones next to the Ethernet ports. The entire strip along that wall seems to be out, so the Internet on the computer doesn't work because the Ethernet is nonfunctional. Does CUIP have a 20-feet Ethernet cable handy, so that I can string it along the wall and to a functional port?

Today was mostly a day of consolidation. I've removed all spare RAM from the extra computers lying around, and have placed all keyboards, mice, monitors, and power cords up in the computer lab. There's one functional CPU not in use, and that's in the teacher's lounge on one of the couches.

One effect of that consolidation is that both computers in the teacher's lounge now have 256 MB of RAM and are quite happy! I'll take a final look on Tuesday, but I think I'm finally done with those. Also, the computer with 128 MB of RAM in the lab (the one that was complaining about it) now has ... more than 128 MB of RAM. However, I don't think it/Windows liked the combination of RAM I put in, or it was bad, so now it gets past the BIOS slowly, starts booting into Windows, and then restarts into the BIOS in a continuous cycle. I ran memtest using the Linux LiveCD I had handy, but had to leave before it could finish. This stems from the fact that it was less than 256 MB, some odd combination I've never seen before which I blame on the RAM I nabbed from the Compaq Presario that's now in that computer. I'll resolve this on Tuesday, and let you know what I do...hopefully I can redistribute everything so that everyone's happy. 

I think I'm ready to look in all the classrooms and make sure that every computer (I think there's about 1 per room) is working properly, though I imagine the teacher would tell me if not. Still, I know there are some extra computers in 207 (from work I did earlier in Fall Quarter) that I can remediate or play around with. I don't know how much use they get in there.

After that's done, hopefully I can get working with Russ on planning projects for teachers!!!

<strong>Remaining Issues</strong>
<ul>
<li>Network cables. If I can pick up a longer one from CUIP, I can circumvent that Ethernet port problem (should an electrician or someone come look at that?), and use the shorter one currently there to hook up the computer in the library, since it's missing a cable. (see next bullet).</li>
<li>I want to find out who's in charge of the library, and see what system they're using to handle book circulation. Maybe we can come up with something inventive!</li>
<li>RAM stuff is almost done!</li>
<li>I can start checking on all the computers in the classrooms now. I suspect most of them work well.</li>
<li>I need to remember to sit down and document the problems with this theme and Internet Explorer. Though it's not part of my Canter work, it's still CUIP related...who should I contact to work on that?</li>
<li>It would be really cool to resolve those DeepFreeze issues in the lab.</li>
<li>I should find out about implementing those spare printers lying around.</li>
<li>Eventually, I hope to start working with teachers/students, but I don't know how much flexibility and free time the teachers have in their lessons plans. Russ, what have you been doing at Canter with the teachers so far?</li>
</ul>
Quote of the Week: "What a shame if you should find it. Your quest would be over. And then what? As if a fortune could make up for the bother of gaining it. No, no, my lad: The journey is the treasure."
- Salamon, <em>The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio</em>

Note: I had to leave the building early because Ms. Ahad wanted to make sure everyone was out of the building as a result of the snow, so I had 35 minutes of work left to complete. I spent just about 30 minutes filing this report from home, so I'll make up the rest of that next week. Note that my time card will display 5 hours spent, since Ms. Ahad peremptorily signed it.

-Ben Hyman