Tsky Blog
Demotivation and the subsequent Remotivation
2010-02-06 (13:39:15)
Having spent a lot of time this last year being actively demotivated by the surrounding masses I'm finding it difficult to offer constructive and innovative ways out of the chaos they've created. The hacker in me wants to tear at the heart of it all and develop some Heath-Robinson affair, but upon closer inspection it appears my predecessors have already patched everything together with duct tape and we're now out of that so the brown paper and vinegar is the only option.
Totalling up replacements for kit that's been stacked up for years in classrooms and labs in a half-running state it's going to take heavy investment to bring the place up to scratch which will be a waste ahead of BSF. The innovator in me wants to simplify the whole lot and develop specialised facility areas with low-cost word processing mobile labs, but the change in operational method I think would tip the already resistant staff over the edge.
So the whole virtualised cluster we have which works pretty nicely (even considering how little we spent on the damned thing) is about the only thing holding it all together and that's being choked by the 1Gbps network backbone. Trying to think up split-site processing methods in an attempt to reduce the cross-backbone traffic. Very difficult to come up with a solution given the state of the cabling and core control equipment.
What would MacGuiver do in my position I wonder.....?
Trying to get my own systems running properly to filter web content for my little lad now he's computer literate and also allow me to access files more efficiently from outside the house. The netbook is running quite nicely now I've optimised applications and suchlike, coding isn't too bad on the smaller keyboard but it does require some external pointing as the touchpad tends to be a little too awkward for the top-left of the screen down to bottom-right movements. Still looking at the new tablets for classroom technology, just not overly impressed with prices at the moment.