So, IT classes started the other day. There's some renovations happening in the main building and thus some classes had to be moved out to a cluster of barracks residing in the back yard. Obviously, the IT crew is a natural fit to move out for the duration, because it's extremely easy to set up a computer lab in what's essentially a glorified shipping container separated from all conventional power cabling and plumbing.
The first day's work consisted mostly of digging through some boxes to obtain hidden treasures, namely mice, keyboards and a multitude of cables to connect to the relic towers standing atop the long desk rows waiting to be fed power. After organizing the emergent cable spaghetti into serviceable form, it was then time to wait for the barracks' power to be turned on, while trying to charm the ethernet cables of mismatching length into the splitters at each end of the workspace. As power was turned on, machines of different hardware configurations and operating systems from various years of manufacture started slowly waking up, while a few remained lifeless and were promptly ejected from service. Surprisingly most of the computers had seen use rather recently and, albeit their shaky hardware specifications, were running relatively up-to-date software. It was decided, however, that it was best to start off from a clean slate as opposed to scribbling over the shaky incantations of previous wizards.
When we returned this morning, everything was as we left it but as soon as the first few rows of machines were waking up, the power center of the barracks decided that this was too much for it and shut the fuse. This went on for a while, as an electrician was called to the scene and after a prompt conversation and brief confusion, things started looking brighter again as the lights turned back on. Today was time to reinstall operating systems on most of the machines, meaning most of the day would, in fact, be spent elsewhere while the old crones chugged along with their Windows installs. Thus, with the assistance of coffee, a blog was born.
