Wednesday 6/10 from 10-3pm

OMG I forgot to tell you about the end of my interview yesterday... There was a large lightening strike and the power went off. We sat around the table in the dark just waiting for it to come back on. And it didn't... I left with my notebook shielding my head from the rain and ran to the car and left.

When I returned today, the lightening strike's damage was still being dealt with. It caused sporadic problems throughout the network, but the worst situation was that the back-up server failed for a short time. Or so we thought that was the worst issue....

While Nick has been here two hours already, the first "fix" I get in on is at "Hunt House". This is one of the two houses the district owns and currently is offline. Nick has already replaced the switch and we are back with the Fluke One Touch to run lines and continue to search out the problem. After running all the lines we found one cable with a "flakey" signal. It was not dead, but it's signal was inconsistent or "flakey". So off to the central office to see what's on the other end of this flakey cable… At the other end we find a huge switch with many, many cables. Thank goodness for color-coded cable. On this end we find a blown port. This is most likely another casualty of the lightening strike. Success we fixed the problem!! Well Nick fixed the problem....but I watched and learned.

Here is a great site for speed testing your connection that learned today: speakeasy.net/speedtest
I also learned a new MSDOS commands to get machine and network information: ipconfig/all
Additionally, I learned the uses for ipconfig/release and ipconfig/renew in a network setting.
Plus, I learned how to ping one, or a range of IP addresses. 0% loss indicates IP in use and 100% loss indicates IP open.

Now it was off to see the people. Nick gave me a Zip drive to take and install at central office. This was fairly easy since the lady it was for had left the cables for her last zip drive easily accessible and connected. The next step was new, but Nick had showed me how before I left the tech house. I had to change the drive letter assigned to tghe new zip drive from D: to B: Basically to do this I had to right-click on the My Computer Icon, select manage from the drop-down menu, then choose Disk Management on the left of the next window under storage. To the right of that window you see all your disk drives listed. There is a scroll bar to navigate through them. When you find the one you want to change, right-click and then choose Change Drive And Letter Paths. This was a breeze once I had done it. SWEET!

Next, I was off to the schools to check with summer school staff to see if tghey had any needs. Luckily I found the principal at one school who needed some assistance with Word. Margins were being difficult for her but we worked it out. I was also able to show he how to magnify her work and her browser text by clicking control and rolling up with the scroll bar on the mouse. Once she understood that it wasn't changing the font size, only her display she was happy as a clam! =)

I really enjoyed today and learned quite a lot. Until tomorrow...