Things are progressing albeit much more slowly than I had originally intended. I have been able to put some of the current problems that we have been experiencing over the past two weeks. I spent some time today at Arthur Rann and made sure that those that needed help at the beginning of the week were doing ok. Seems that everyone is up and running even the those connections that I thought had been damaged during the electrical wiring. It would appear that I had not remembered where the original wiring terminated for two of the drops that were causing us the most concern. At one time we must have not been able to add any additional wiring to the center of the building before it became the MDF for the building. The runs for both Guidance and the Nurse's office had been terminated at the Library IDF which we had about seven years ago reserved for the Library lookup stations and the two machines used by the Media Center personnel. Now that we have found the connections we have been able to solve the room by room connection problem we were experiencing. I had to spend some time in the Tech Center located at Rann today as well. From the moves and such this summer the room had become a bit of a dumping ground for machines awaiting a rebuild and re-assignment. There is also the rest of the summer gear that will need to be distributed to their eventual home. I have run into a bit of a problem with the utilization of the scan converters for GEM and the Media Centers. I have also decided to use the ATI 9000 cards in the teacher's workstation for as a replacement for the scan converters. I will only need a VGA amplifier for the eight stations that I am rebuilding for those rooms. I have been experimenting with the ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro cards but have run into a snag of sorts. The new 9800 cards require a power connection to properly drive them. The power connection itself needs to come from at least a 300Watt power supply. The Dell boxes that I have slated for use as the teacher workstations in both places are only 250 Watts. The small form factor Minuets that we have built are also under the 300 threshold so that leaves me with few choices. I am going to test a 9000 Pro to ensure that it will work without the power connection which is necessary for the newer cards. Getting the older model card will not be a problem. They are still very plentiful on the open market. I will have them within a week or so. They will provide the necessary connections for both the projectors and the document cameras. Also those cards will allow me to hook up many other devices the one I am focusing on right now is the VCR/DVD combination player. I guess some ideas do stand the test of time. This is the original design of the technology enriched classrooms and that have stayed strong for a full year. The only piece of the puzzle that has fallen short in those classrooms is the VCR. In an attempt to save money off the original estimate I went with the much cheaper VCR. Since I had put the DVD player in the machine I thought I could shortchange it and get away with it. No such luck. The teacher's have made the best of it and have not complained too much but I know different. They will have to live with these units at least until the end of the year, there are no extra funds available to replace them. The units have no trade value either. They will, however, work nicely in our 1st through 3rd grade units that will get the Middle School TVs this year.
I had wanted to get as much done on the projects that are awaiting electricity and also we have been building our inventory day by day with the my conducting an on-site at each school. I will start back on that at Arthur Rann on Monday. I can only put in about two hours in each building but so far that has proven sufficient enough to get the inventory done. No surprises so far except possible the multitude of deskjet printers that we are still using. I have found numbers as low as 550 in our current inventory. I am not sure that they actually make cartridges for that model any more.
So far we are not too far behind on the workload being one man down for the better part of two weeks but it does make it tough to get everything done. I would hope that we can bring Fred back slowly and we can start at the Tech Center reflashing the terminals for use in the Media Centers. I had hoped also to finish the labs at Roland and Smithville this week and that is within reach that is if I can fit it into the week with all the administrative work that will consume my time. Thats it for now, I have a couple of machines to build since I finally have all the parts necessary for the home video units that I had been working on a few months ago. Till next post.
7:06:02 PM 
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