The Screaming Viking

It’s year end for the school, and with that comes the onslaught of ordering.  I like this time of year because I get a chance to play with a few new things.  It also gives me the opportunity to set things up the way I’d like them setup.  Like I’ve said before, there is nothing wrong with the way the previous guy configured things…I just have a different idea of how I want it to work.  I want to move towards a more “enterprisy” environment.  I want to be able to manage all the machines from one central point, and I want to do it as cheaply as possible.

So far we have received approval to build out 2 business computer labs.  I’m going to use iMacs for these labs running both lion and win7.  They are going to be setup to dual boot.  I think this gives us maximum flexibility.  For one of these labs they are looking at teaching multimedia applications and some web design.  We’re looking at dual monitor setups and all that.  I think it will be pretty decent by the time we are done.  The only real concern I have is getting enough data pipe to these machines.  I don’t think the network drops in that room was ever really designed to push as much traffic as these machines will potentially push/pull.  What I’m going to do is build out the room the way I want, then I’ll look at going back and attacking the networking situation later.  The way the building is segmented there is no real main switch closet.  There are a couple of locations that have auxiliary switches.  In the next few years I would like to run fiber…but I’m not sure how much that is going to cost.

Something else I want to do is replace all the ancient macs we have here.  There are 90 or more emacs, which at this point are long past their usefulness.  I wonder how much we’d save on power alone if these were replaced…  My thoughts are instead of replacing X amount each year, we finance it…replace them all at once and pay it off over a few years.  This is going to be quite a bit of work for me, but I think this would jump start us on to a regular replacement schedule.  Also, in five years maybe we would be looking at some kind of 1 to 1 initiative where we can downsize the desktop machines.  Right now I don’t know how that would work…but we’ll see.

If all this replacement action gets approved, it will keep me fairly busy over the summer.  Physically setting them up and moving things around will take a little bit of time, but the big time sink will be putting images on the machines.  With deep freeze it has to copy the size of the frozen disk with each image…that’s what takes all the time.

We’re also ordering a few iPads.  Not a whole bunch, I will probably have around 20 to mess with and get ready for the school year.  The management of the ipads is something that is a bit tricky.  I’ve decided to quite expecting that people won’t use them for personal stuff.  As long as they are ready for school and they have them for that…I don’t care what they are used for.

Gonna be a busy summer.

When I was in high school we didn’t have much exposure to computers.  There were some Mac (cutting edge…3 years before we got them…) machines setup in the business class room.  Actually I would bet it was more than any single computer lab has in this school (there are multiple labs here though).  Looking at the space the machines here take up and remembering back to how we had them setup I would guess there were 30 or so boxes.  That’s not bad for a really small school and what it’s budget must have been compared to the price of those machines.  I didn’t know the difference between a mac and a pc, and for the most part it didn’t really matter to me.  After I got older PC’s were the bomb due to price and the plethora of games..etc etc.  My next exposure to mac’s came at college.  They had us using iMac’s for a few different classes…talk about colossal failure on the part of apple.  Anyone else remember the hockey puck mouse?  That thing was so ungodly uncomfortable to use.  And I’m not sure if it was the machines at the time or the people maintaining them or us using that…but they sucked pretty bad.  There wouldn’t be a day go by that one wasn’t showing the confused little computer with the question mark bouncing up and down (I think that was the symbol anyway…no o/s found or something).  I had no use for them after that…

Enter the school gig.  Now suddenly I was forced to work with Mac on a daily basis.  I was a little bit concerned about coming in to this type of environment.  I suspected they had gotten better after building on top of a unix kernel…but I wasn’t really prepared for how much better.  Read the rest of this entry »

Well, not quite…it’s new to me!  “My” laptop for a couple years now has been a Thinkpad T21.  For the most part it’s alright for what I do with it…but for awhile now I have been looking for a more powerful option.  Ideally, I’d l.  ike to get one to replace the desktop machine…we need to downsize a little bit at the BDC.  The problem though is that I don’t really have a need to spend the money on a desktop replacement.  I expect something to “get by” would run around 600, while a true desktop replacement would run upwards of 1k.  I have a large monitor that I would like to keep, but there needs to be some way to connect up to it quickly (dock), and still take the laptop on the go.

My T21 is dying…a little more quickly than I’d like.  It’s my fault, I got pissed off about a tooth ache (shut up, it was pretty painful) and I slammed my fist down on the plastic in front of the keyboard.  This thing is tough and it’s handled this particular manuver before, but it was feeling old, or I hit it particularly hard…whatever the reason, things busted apart.  It still works, but it’s busted all to hell.  The keyboard is handing really loosely, the plastic is busted up around the edges, I don’t think the cdrom would open anymore…it’s not long for this world.

This particular situation has caused me to look more seriously at a cheap laptop.  I had found an asus on newegg, it had around 2gig of ram and the proc was 1ghz.  It’s a little slow, if I’m going to spend some money I might as well throw in a little more and get a bit better machine…

My mother has 2 laptops.  One is an “older” dell that she really likes.  It’s a good machine, quick and snappy, good battery life…just a little old.  It had a problem that’s pretty common with that model, the lid hinges busted up some of the plastic and warped.  Not being sure this could be fixed…she elected to buy a new laptop.  It is an HP, dual core 2.0ghz, 2gig, 16″ wide screen.  It’s a decent machine, but she doesn’t like how the keyboard sits.  A month or so later I fixed the dell and she’s been rockin’ that out.  In the mean time the HP has been just sitting.  The other day she wanted me to connect it up to the printer so she could get some paper work out of it.  While I was working through getting these forms printed, I offered to buy the machine off her…she jumped at it.

So, now I have a significantly better machine…and I can type up a blog from it because of the wide screen (referance my previous “I can’t post from my laptop” posts).  I’m going to load linux on it….that will make it by far the most powerful linux box I have built for personal use.  Generally, I used linux as a way to add some life to old hardware…but this machine is too good to fall in to that category.

The wife is rockin out a pretty crappy laptop right now too.  I’ve offered to buy her a modest new laptop several times.  I’m thinking in the 500 range.  She kinda fluctuates between not wanting a new one, and wanting to play with a couple to see what she likes.  This has been going on for a couple years.  Hers wouldn’t be bad if it wasn’t for it not running on battery power.  The battery is good, it has something to do with the mainboard.  I had to replace the one that was in there due to some bending and so forth that caused it to go to hell.  I bought a used one…and it works outside of the battery problem.  We can work around it…but it kinda sucks not being able to use it anywhere you want.

My plan is to get a laptop for the wife and kid.  A windows box for the wife, but I’m thinking either linux or mac for the kid.  She’ll be in a school system for the next 6 years that will be using macs….so it might be reasonable to get her one of those.  Get rid of the kid’s desktop completely.  Turn the current desktop machine we have into a firewall, then get rid of the old pc I have setup as the current firewall.  If I’m looking at getting rid of the desktop though, I’m going to have to get a decent laptop for the wife…like I mentioned earlier in this post, more of a desktop replacement type machine.  I’m not sure if she would be down with that.  It might end up being too bulky for her.  If that’s the case, I’ll turn the kid’s desktop into the new firewall and keep the desktop.

It’ll be a bit of a process.