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A very full week [2014-02-23]

It’s one of those weeks when events that took place just last Monday seem like they happened a month ago.  Our work spanned three different schools this week, which contributed to that effect.  We were able to finish up the installations at Tayud National High School and Carmen National High School, and by the end of yesterday we had a huge amount done at Compostela Central Elementary School.  As is so common in our work, we were aided by some incredibly talented and dedicated people; Neal and I were marveling last night at how quickly the work got done…  and how long it would have taken if it had been just us.

On Monday, I returned to Tayud National High School to finish up the initial teacher training sessions.  They went well, and we look forward to returning there in a couple of weeks for follow-up discussions.  Meanwhile Neal and Jade headed off to Carmen National High School to get started with the installation there.  The IT teacher at Carmen graciously provided a ride so Neal and Jade didn’t have to wrestle the equipment on and off a bus.  However the computer lab is on the fourth floor of a classroom building at Carmen, so it was a bit of a haul to get everything up there.  The work on Tuesday and Wednesday morning went very well, and we were so happy again to have a great IT teacher to work with.  But lest the reader think that things always go smoothly, a few weird glitches showed up on the server Wednesday afternoon as Neal was trying to update the internet filter.  Since we intended to do teacher trainings on Thursday, this was not good news.  We ended up carting the server home again Wednesday and Neal worked far into the night to get everything working properly again.  The trainings went well on Thursday, and the system is ready for use now at Carmen.  As with Tayud, we will return in a couple of weeks to see what needs to be enhanced and fixed.

The Carmen NHS lab typifies some of the challenges here.  The school has about 25 computers in the main IT lab, but the most recent donation was 2007.  We all continue to gain experience in fiddling with these vintage machines – changing the BIOS, adding memory, replacing CMOS batteries, trying different boot options, and so forth – to get them to work with the server.  However once we do get them to run with the main server, the performance is surprisingly good.  It is truly a thrill to see these old machines come to life again and help to serve the students and teachers!

Many schools in the area (including our home school of Compostela National High School) have recently received NComputing systems with a Windows server.  Neal spent quite a bit of time at Carmen NHS experimenting with this system to see if we could boot it with Linux as well as Windows.  It’s looking very promising, so on our next trip to Carmen NHS there will hopefully be a more polished version that we can share with them.

The next school on our list was Compostela Central School, the main elementary school here in our community.  This is probably the most challenging school we will tackle this year.  There are two IT labs, one for the regular students and the other for the select Science and Technology (SciTech) students.  The IT lab for the regular students has six NComputing units in it already, and Reneal IEO is adding 15 donated laptops.  The SciTech lab has a mix of four fairly new computers and five older machines; one of the newer machines will act as a local server in that lab.  The two labs are fairly far apart, so Ethernet cable had to be strung between them.  In short, we had a daunting list of diverse tasks to complete when we showed up Friday morning to get started. 

I can happily report this Sunday morning that almost everything is already done!  On Friday we had the usual excellent assistance of our intern Jade, and he was joined by our close friend here in Compostela who is a master of many trades.  We also had the enthusiastic help and support of the two IT teachers.  On Saturday, our ranks were increased even further with another one of our good friends who is the municipal IT expert plus our valued friend from Aboitiz who came along with a team of three other IT experts from Cebu City to help.  What a fantastic and competent team!  It was a hive of activity in each lab, and honestly it seemed like time lapse photography of a week of working condensed down to one day as things magically appeared and went into place.  At 5 p.m., Jade made the final test on the cable between the labs and it was GOOD!  We still have some cabling to clip into place and some testing to do, plus Neal has some tweaks on the SciTech server to complete.  However the bulk of the installation is done and we are hoping that we can begin trainings on Wednesday.  There are almost certainly some issues that we will still need to work through, but it feels good to have four of our six new schools nearing completion.

Right now we have a tentative plan to join our colleague from Aboitiz on a visit to Northern Cebu in mid-March to explore the possibility of aiding a school damaged by Typhoon Haiyan.  This makes a full schedule even fuller, but we are excited about the opportunity to assist the victims of this terrible disaster.  We are thankful for the support of the Reneal IEO donors that help to make this work possible.