<strong>Your Name:</strong> Ben Hyman
<strong>Today’s Date</strong>: 2008/2/8
Reporting on most recent week
<strong>Day(s) worked or described</strong>: T, F
<strong>Total hours for week</strong>: 5
<strong>The School</strong>: Canter Middle
<strong>Kind of Work</strong>: Tech General
<strong>Main Report or Narrative</strong>:

I stopped by CUIP offices on Monday to pick up a longer Ethernet cable, and successfully hooked that up on Tuesday. The student computer in room 205 is now working well, although this is really only a workaround and the wall raceway is still faulty. Anyway, I used the Ethernet cable that had been in room 205 to hook up the computer in the library to the network. As I recall, there may still be some problems with that computer, so I need to find out who's in charge of the library and have a chat with them.

Also on Tuesday, I got a request from Ms. Spector (the teacher in 205) to help her set up a blog for her latest Spanish project, compiling a cookbook. I sent Russ an email and am waiting to hear back from him about this. Mitch stopped by, and we caught up for a little bit; he said I should inform Russ about the possibilities of hooking up some of the printers lying around, and that Russ could work with Ms. Ahad on that. I spent a little more time on the various RAM issues, but didn't successfully resolve anything.

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Friday I moved the spare CPU from the teacher's lounge to the computer lab in hopes that I could salvage some RAM or use it to replace one of the whiny computers (not literally with regards to fan/air flow issues, but one that was complaining about not having much RAM). The RAM slots don't look standard, however, so I won't be able to add any more to this one, thus ruling it out for use in the computer lab (it only has 128 MB of memory, so it wouldn't be much better off). More on this RAM later.

So it turns out that we've got two working 64 MB chips of RAM and two working 128 MB chips of RAM for a total of two computers.

Unless I can remove the 128 MB of RAM from the computer in the teacher's lounge, I may just split the difference, or leave one with 128 MB and one with 256 MB.

In other news, Mr. Fishbein's teacher computer started having memory problems...and there's pretty much no memory to spare in the school! As a temporary fix, I switched the teacher CPU with the student CPU, so now the student computer has the memory problem. I'm not sure yet what I should do to remedy this -- any ideas, guys? The software solutions to these RAM issues never seem to work well, and the hard drives on some of these computers aren't too large.

I also checked on a few classrooms before the teachers had left, and it seems like their computers are generally working well. I encountered an interesting problem, though: a teacher told me that Yahoo Mail wouldn't work, and she was right...Internet Explorer refused to load the page, as well as several others. It turns out it was a secure-server type issue -- something was wrong with IE and it wouldn't connect to sites using SSL. Ultimately, a computer restart fixed this issue (it was also having some random INSTR permission issues).

One of the cases for a computer in the computer lab had a faulty power button, but there was actually a "shell" (the term I'll use to refer to the extra computers in the lab which have had all RAM removed, and are obviously not in use) of the same model, so I switched the cases between the two.

I need to find some more spare mouses to use -- certainly at least one. Does CUIP have any extra mouse balls? I have three working mice which are simply missing balls, and I know those are much cheaper than an entire mouse.

I took a look for the first time in a while at the Canter compliance website (on the Canter admin server), and it seems like a lot of things have fallen out of compliance. Teacher requests and other things I notice come first, though, in terms of priorities – I'll take a look next time I have a chance.

Lastly, I tried Remote-Desktoping into Canter's user server. Though one can access the server, the only window I see, which cannot be closed, is for filling out an improper shutdown report, or something like that. Since I'm not sure what caused the shutdown (or whether the data even gets sent to CPS or Microsoft), I didn't bother filling out the report. Russ, do you know anything about this? 

Basically, to sum up the week, RAM issues are a pain in the butt! Also, I'd like to work with Russ on implementing some more printers around the building.

Also, Mitch, did you intentionally expand people's user permissions on this WP site? I'm now able to edit other people's posts and comments.

After more stuff gets done, hopefully I can get working with Russ on planning projects for teachers!!!

<strong>Remaining Issues</strong>
<ul>
<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>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: "We live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand."
- Bill Bryson
-Ben Hyman