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Day 1 of my #fivedayquest , thanks to +Elizabeth Hahn tagging me.
5 days / 5 photos / tag a new person each day to join
1 photo for 5 days of your daily life
This is one of the computer labs in the Business Department at the college where my day job is Associate Professor of Information Systems. Seven of the students here are taking a midterm exam for my class Fundamentals of Data Communication.
As part of my responsibilities here, I make sure that about 80 computers keep humming along, ready for student use in many different classes, with a wide variety of business software.
I've been babysitting/upgrading/reconfiguring the systems here for the past 24 years…my, oh my, how things have changed since those pre-Internet days!
Yes… that's me over by the door with my ever-present Coke Zero…tripping the shutter via WiFi…
Point to ponder…why is there always at least one section of fluorescent bulbs out?
For this first of the five day quest, I tag +Heather Webb. Heather, you are under absolutely no pressure to do the fivedayquest, but if you want to, you can! Just post a photo of daily life for five days. :-)
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keep up the good work Dave..!
😉
Eeeks I remember the computer labs at UCSC circa late '80s early '90s. They were dark dungeons and really resembled torture chambers. This looks far more civilized!
+Elizabeth Hahn, we are fortunate that they do provide enough funding to keep the systems up to date… The building, on the other hand, was built in 1912, and is sorely in need of a complete overhaul. This section does not have air conditioning… which is fine for most of the year, but the first couple weeks of fall quarter and last couple weeks of spring can take temperatures into the 90s in here.
Oh dear. I'd be asleep in 5 minutes.
What, no punch card reader? Line printer? Disk packs?
Hahaha, +John Balboni. I do have a room where I keep 'ancient' technology that I pull out for show-and-tell in various classes when relevant… None of these systems have anything spinning other than the cooling fans (SSD drives are the single best performance boosters you can install!).
That's good +Dave Bell, need show how it started! I remember taking COBOL and FORTRAN classes, way back when … Lol!
It's always puzzled me that IS faculty are expected to provide tech support (it happens at my institution, too). I mean, nobody expects the nuclear physics professors to repair their own reactors, do they? And I doubt they'd let the Literature faculty anywhere near a motherboard.
DOH! Lol! ;0)
Aye, aye captain! I will do my best to rise to the occasion! ;0)
+Pat Kight, actually I prefer our setup. A portion of my load is allocated to the labs, which gives me the time to get some hands-on time with server configuration, virtulization, and security management, and > insert new technology here< which gives me more examples for classes. Of course I do have student workers to assist with mundane tasks such as software installation and simple troubleshooting of systems, while I focus on bigger picture items…such as centralized operating system and application deployment.
There are also many unique software titles needed in various business and IS courses that need special care and feeding to work in a shared lab environment.
I also can get things fixed quickly that might take several days for centralized IT staff to get to…
I think see that this might be the appropriate title for this shot.. LOL This looks very intense… :-))
OK, I can see that, +Dave Bell – I imagine it keeps you on top of your teaching game. As long as the institution acknowledges it by assigning some of your time to it (as opposed to an "extra" responsibility atop an already full plate. Not that I have any personal experience with that or anything. 😉